The first story I sold to a slick magazine was "Instant Labor." The magazine was Amazing Stories and the year was 1999. Nearly a decade after I sold my first fiction to The Fiction Primer, and a full five years after my second fiction sale to Next Phase, I was finally hitting the big time.

And it was terrific. Amazing came out with a beautiful illustration by John Jude Palencar and the story was reviewed in Locus and Tangent Online, and I'd made it.

I'd made it!

And then Amazing rejected the story that later became "Shopping at the End of the World". And then everyone else rejected "Shopping at the End of the World". And then Amazing rejected "Music Lessons." And then everyone else rejected "Music Lessons."

And then I gave up. I didn't care anymore. I wasn't going to stop writing, but I wasn't going to even try to write something marketable. I was going to write something distinctly unmarketable. Something that nobody would like except me.

And it sold. I submitted it to the now defunct journal Winedark Sea and it sold right away.

Here's the blurb for this story from my other website:


I wrote a story about a mental patient named Philip Hoffman. I made him the only one who knew the truth about the coming alien invasion. I made it so that he could see into the future. I gave Philip Hoffman psychic powers so that he could spot the flying saucers, so that he would know I was coming.

I flew toward Earth at 100,000 light years per second, from the other side of the galaxy. And I wrote it all down as I went, making it happen.

And here's a review from Forrest Aguirre:


The hints of Philip K. Dick present in "A Perfect Day for Babyfish," however, cannot compare with the decidedly Dickian tale "The Suburbs of the Citadel of Thought." Here Douglas Lain presents the longest and one of the strongest stories of the issue. Lain directly acknowledges his debt to the old master by noting that his main character, Philip Hoffman, is named after Philip K. Dick and Abbie Hoffman. Lain laces the story with anecdotes of this sort—many of them dealing directly with Lain's own family history and experiences. The wonderful autobiographical inserts leave the reader wondering whether Lain has written the story or the story has written Lain. The overall premise involves Philip's psychic abilities (or is it madness?) and the impending arrival (paranoid delusion?) of aliens as they affect his adulterous relationship with a pop-kitsch minister's wife. One is never quite sure if the main character is sane or not, nor is the reader ever clear about what is real and what is illusion. A fitting tribute to Philip K. Dick.


The lesson here? Clearly the message is that the best thing a writer can do is GIVE UP!