What the Dog Saw

I just received word that my latest science fiction story, "What the Dog Saw," has been accepted by Bellow Literary Journal. It should be out early next year.

Warning: this is the story I mentioned a good long time ago (last year, I think, when I was first writing it) that possesses a very experimental voice. It can be off-putting--though interestingly, two or three journals that rejected it said they liked the voice but didn't like other aspects of the story! I personally think it's a pretty cool little piece, but consider yourself warned.

It's also interesting to note that the editor of Bellow spent some time working with me on this story to make it better. I say this is interesting because, in my personal experience, I've found editors of speculative fiction journals more willing than editors of straight-up literary journals to work with their writers. Several of my spec fic stories, including "Cats in the Backyard," "A Very Small Child Called Eugene," and "A Chimaera Story with Four Morals," were published only after some editorial changes, all of which made the stories better, in my opinion. Now, this might be a false comparison; it might be that my literary fiction just isn't good enough to get published in the journals that offer editorial assistance, so such stories of mine aren't even making it to that point. But it might also be that the editors of journals that specialize in genre fiction have a particularly keen sense of what their readers want, and thus they are particularly invested in crafting stories to meet those expectations.

Whatever, the story's coming out soon! I'd love to hear some reader reactions to it once you see it in print.