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Post by johnVC on Sept 29, 2020 19:40:26 GMT
Hi! On June 1st, I submitted a short story ("The Wand of Amosutho") to your magazine. Could you let me know if you received it, and if so, if you'd like to publish it? Thanks.
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Post by rorschalk on Sept 29, 2020 19:43:38 GMT
Dear Mr. VC
I must plead guilty in this case. I did not alert you at the time that it was adjudicated by Rockerfeller on the floor, June 4th shortly after you had submitted it. I am terribly sorry to have made you wait an extra 4 months for this outcome. May I send you a copy of our most recent anthology TOUCHING THE MONKEY 2 as compensation for my negligence? It would be my pleasure.
Here is the frame that is in wk 14 of the Floor archive that concerns your venture:
***
Must be because I had the kung-flu for Christmas,
I'm not feeling up to par.
It increases my paranoia,
like looking in the mirror and seeing a po-lice car.
[Rocks pumps up the volume on his favorite Crosby track while another inmate generously slathers alcohol gel on her hands. "Are you trying to fuck up your skin and breed new sanitizer-resistant microbes?" He wishes to be helpful, but then remembers mocking this Indian Facebook guru's koan: Unsolicited advice is violence. "You know it's a hoax, right?" Rocks is impervious to koans.]
I have examined, even actually read, Levenson's novelette about a magic wand. Found it pretty engaging at first. The MC's a Christian soldier whose faith prevents his performing magic, paying tribute to non-Christian deities or enjoying premarital sex. But he can and does kick ass. Tight, easy to parse prose that's well paced. But after being reminded for maybe the fifth or sixth time of his Christianity's preventing his doing this or that, which in some cases (though not sex) he does nonetheless, I began to wonder, as I do about a great many submissions that pass across my little lift-top desk, if it wasn't originally crafted to some other venue's theme, preference or bias. Christian fiction is a very tough sell for me, but even so, had it not dragged on (or perhaps dragged on longer?) I might have swallowed it. It feels like it might have been excerpted from some greater word count. If not, it should be expanded into a novel, a trilogy, whatever the market will bear. Christians, as evidenced by The Holy Bible, suffer from a dearth of readable fiction. This could really go places. Just not here.
[Hands trembling, expression conflicted, slowly, Rocks feeds 61 pages into the Porthole's gaping maw whence, one by one, they are swallowed into the deluge. Then he sits and holds his malformed face in hands unscathed by labor.]
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