DENVER - To his surprise and disappointment, Todd Glaski’s first professional fiction publication has failed to produced any discernable level of groupie activity, sources reported Monday. The story, “Which is Sour”, a play upon the term “Witch’s Hour”, appeared in this month’s issue of the Unusual Skylines website. It has generated excitement from immediate friends and family members, but the expected arrival of impressed young women eager to get a published writer into the sack has, as of press time, failed to materialize.

“I actually sold ‘Which Is/Witch’s’ back in February,” Glaski reported from his writing room, carefully spelling both titular possibilities. “It didn’t really net me the chicks, though. This one girl at a bar just off campus seemed kind of interested, but it was really loud, and I had trouble explaining how the magical sweet-and-sour pork that the half-Celtic, half-Chinese protagonist learns to prepare really ties into the title and displays the overall theme of the work. I’m pretty sure she was getting impressed enough from what I did explain that I might have gotten a little ‘Authorial Intrusion’ out of it,” Glaski added, waggling his eyebrows and making little quote-signs while uttering the pun in question, “but then her pager vibrated and she had to go off and see who it was, and I never ran back into her.”

Undaunted by his early failure, Glaski decided to try again in May, when his story was actually published. “Looking back on it,” he added, “it was possible that the girl at the bar thought I was making it up – you know, bluffing about having a sale that’s considered pro for purposes of joining the Science Fiction Writers of America. But when it came out, I could carry around a printed-out copy of the story with the Unusual Skylines banner on it, along with some business cards I printed out that have the permanent URL to the story right on them. I figured I’d be fighting the author-loving babes off with a stick.”

Glaski also elected to target his groupie-attracting efforts to a more focused group, attempting to strike up conversations with students at the University of Denver’s Creative Writing department, where Glaski takes classes. The women of Denver’s Creative Writing department, however, appeared unimpressed with the publication. Most of the women, who, according to Glaski, prefer writing about “bad sex and dead relatives and other non-genre stuff like that”, had not heard of the magazine. The one woman who did display some recognition of the magazine immediately lambasted it for its “typical genre-driven insistence on plot” rather than “stripping away all feeling and emotion to pierce the heart of the narrative extant”. The co-ed in question also declared that Glaski’s mixed-race protagonist sounded objectified, and after hearing the particulars of the story, asked if Glaski had seen Like Water for Chocolate, which apparently worked with similar themes.

Glaski, however, remains undeterred. “It’s obvious that the mainstream artistes here don’t have any real appreciation for groundbreaking fiction that isn’t afraid to expand the boundaries of traditional narrative – especially if it happens to deal with a neo-pagan witch whose emotions get transferred into her food. When I head out to WorldCon this summer, though, I’ll have my pick of the SF-loving ladies. It’s gonna be one gigantic Female Fan Lollipop with a Crunchy Me center.”

Jay Harmon, one of the fiction editors at Unusual Skylines, seemed surprised at Glaski’s preconceptions about the science fiction field. “He thinks he’s gonna get what? Really? Hunh. Um, our magazine strives to develop new writers and promote an open and imaginative experience. We pay pro rates, and for a 4,500-word short story, that’s enough for a nice dinner, good wine, and dessert, with a bit left over to get some CDs. I don’t recall ever suggesting that getting published in our webzine would get you any action. If he can get sexual favors as a result of having been published here, I’d certainly like to hear about it.”

For now, however, it appears that, sexually speaking, Glaski is on his own.