14

I received my 14th acceptance of the year this morning, this time for a 4,800-word crime/noir story I wrote during early January of last year.

These days most of the fiction I write is on assignment, on request, or to meet the requirements of a specific anthology or periodical. This story isn't one of them. This story is one of the rare stories I wrote with no specific market in mind. I wrote it because I thought the idea too good to let languish in my idea file.

Alas, it languished in my to-submit file for six months before I stumbled across an anthology looking for exactly this kind of story. Though it took nine months from submission to acceptance--I submitted long before the deadline, and then the deadline was extended--the story sold to the first editor to see it.

So, a gamble followed by a long wait ended with a good result.