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Posted 6 months, 5 days ago., on Sunday, June 1st, 2008, at 9:06 pm

I just got notification that my short story "The Bride Price" has been accepted for publication. I’m especially pleased with this, since the prompt for the story came from my good friend RM Solberg and my local writers’ group had a good chuckle over it as well.

I think that this acceptance is particularly instructive for me (and perhaps for other writers as well). A good deal of the humor in this piece comes from the character names; I gave them names from various characters and actors from the old Frankenstein movies. The story was rejected by one market mostly because they thought that this particular bit of humor was "reaching for low-hanging fruit"; yet the editor who bought the story hinted that she found this naming scheme pretty clever. So I think that the process of rejections and acceptances is in large part a matter of an individual editor’s tastes and mood in addition to the quality of the piece itself. I don’t know if this will help my fragile self esteem the next time a story of mine is rejected, but it’s still good to know.

On another note, I should mention that the editor did request one minor revision to "The Bride Price". It was to the last paragraph which, honestly, I’d always had a problem with. Her suggested revision resolved the major problem I had with the story, and made it, in my own opinion, at least 100% better. Further proof that editors do, sometimes, know what they’re doing.

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