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Little Chef
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Story: Little Chef
Mag: flashquake
Editorial comment:
Thank you for your interest in flashquake. Our decisions were difficult, but we have decided not to use your submission(s). We have included below our editors' comments on your work; we hope you find them useful. Please note that we are closed to submissions until December 1, when our Spring issue reading period opens.
Alan Beard
fiction
Little Chef
Editor 5 Vote: No
Ed. 5 Comments: I couldn't sympathize with any of the
characters and the final line seemed a little too pat for the story, as if the whole story had been written just to deliver that one line.
Editor 6 Vote: No
Ed. 6 Comments We've seen a thousand variations on this
theme, and while this one is well written, it's not far different.
My comment:
bollocks. I don't normally get depressed but this week the three rejections seem to have really hurt. I want to go and lie down somewhere and emerge a new shiny person, or better still for one or two stories to be accepted. That would cheer me up.
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5 Comments
Elizabeth Westmark says...
My rejection from Flashquake in 2009 went something like this: Not one of us could figure out what on earth this was about.
Hey Elizabeth - good one! - what was it about?
This piece was a little like that: totally understandable to me, but I can see that Tamarian editors would have a tough time with "Pay Phones."
It was about a time when my husband (of 26 years) and I were de-coupling from other marriages and communicating with each other from separate cities via pay phones. It was the pre-cellular age. My God.
A paragraph. . . "We communed at the altar of pay telephones from separate cities: me outside a seven-eleven convenience store; you outside a beat-up gas station/beer joint. Those calls were a lifeline as we conjured our future, as we pondered the grand tour in destiny's Yellow Cab."
Well, maybe not publishable in it's current state, but I still like it. Of course, it's written in the arcane language of my own ancient culture. . .
Thanks for asking!
Elizabeth Westmark says...
It was called "Pay Phones." Just went back to take a look at this 200 word little piece. Did you ever see Startrek The Next Generation's "Darmok" episode, where the Tamarian people spoke in metaphors that were so deeply rooted in local culture that Starfleet's universal translators couldn't figure out how to translate?
This piece was a little like that: totally understandable to me, but I can see that Tamarian editors would have a tough time with "Pay Phones."
It was about a time when my husband (of 26 years) and I were de-coupling from other marriages and communicating with each other from separate cities via pay phones. It was the pre-cellular age. My God.
A paragraph. . . "We communed at the altar of pay telephones from separate cities: me outside a seven-eleven convenience store; you outside a beat-up gas station/beer joint. Those calls were a lifeline as we conjured our future, as we pondered the grand tour in destiny's Yellow Cab."
Well, maybe not publishable in it's current state, but I still like it. Of course, it's written in the arcane language of my own ancient culture. . .
Thanks for asking!
Send it somewhere else.
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