I was reading one of the blogs hereabouts, and noticed that someone had a short story accepted for publication by a print anthology called Triangulations. The theme was "The End Of Time," and the poster stated that his was a time travel story, and wasn't sure if it fit the theme, but he'd submitted it anyway and it got accepted.

I decided to give it a whack. I have a story I wrote about 10 years ago that deals with time travel. I've always felt that it was less about the trappings than about the situation. The deadline was March 15th, and I didn't read the blog till March 14th or something like that. I didn't have long to submit it, so I didn't spend any time, really, doing rewriting. I just formatted it, converted it to RTF, and sent it off.

Over the weekend I got an email rejecting it. That's okay, I really didn't expect much of it. His comments were that it was slow getting started, and seemed to be a mixture of time travel and detective story tropes. (Which I found odd, because I didn't see it as a detective story at all...) And as far as it starting slow, well, to me, that was the story - the meeting between woman from the future and the man from the present...I didn't want to gloss over it to get to the action.

I tried to make some modifications to it yesterday, and I thought I might send it off to a second market, though I'm expecting the same result. I don't know. Maybe it is too cliche'ed, but how do you write a time travel story without the trappings of time travel?

If it gets rejected again, maybe I'll just post it here, though it's over 5000 words. Probably too long for this forum...we'll see...