I just completed and submitted my 17th story of the year, a 5,300-word love story that I began working on back on September 2, a week before my bypass surgery. I wrote the first three pages and then the partial ms. sat untouched until earlier this week when I picked it up again.
It's the story of a soldier who returns home from Iraq to discover that her husband has drained their savings account, emptied their apartment, and disappeared. And, yes, it really is a love story. Of a sort.
3 comments:
Hope you have better luck selling this story than I had with several that involved returning soldiers.
All made it to a positive resolution but involved some negative "challenges" along the way. All were rejected.
Only war related story I've successfully sold to this market was a keep the home fires burning story of a single mother who wound up taking care of her friend's children when his ex-wife got a job that involved travel at the same time he was deployed.
As long as our military has been in Iraq and Afgahnistan, you'd think the editors would be seeing more and more stories involving various aspects of family life and relationships involving soldiers. I wonder why your stories haven't sold and if mine (I have another story under submission involving the impact of a soldier's death on the pregnant girlfriend he left behind) will suffer the same fate simply because of the military connections or if I've handled the subject matter in such a way as to avoid the same fate.
I think it is precisely becuase they are getting inundated with war stories that now they aren't selling. Not to mention the number of books being published on the idea--both from traditional publishers as well as the subsidy crowd. I get about ten picthes a week now asking for me to review such things.
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