Last night I got the excellent news that the Autumn issue (Halloween special) of Siren’s Call was out, which means that I can share links to my latest published work. My short horror story ‘Father’ was a story I originally wrote for a competition prompt. It was unsuccessful in that competition, and I filed it away for a while. Earlier in the year, I found another possible venue for it, and edited the piece before sending it off. It was still not selected for any kind of list, and I put it away yet again.
Finally, I took another look, polished it, and sent it off to Siren’s Call who have accepted my work in the past, albeit flash fiction. Happily, they accepted and so this story found its home (third time lucky!).
I admit that the first time I sent the piece off, it was fairly rushed; I was limited to 1000 words and started with an opening sentence that had come to me during a free-writing session. When I set out to write, I had no real plan other than a genre of ‘thriller’ and a theme of ‘abduction’. The second attempt was less constrained – the submission had a larger word limit so I was able to develop parts of the story which had felt abrupt, and add more sensory detail.
In its third iteration, I had the story I wanted to tell, but wanted to ramp up the suspense and clarify some points that had been raised with me.
Obviously, having read it in print I can see grammatical edits I would make – I think that is pretty much the rule with publishing work – but I am trying not to see these as glaring errors!
Here is a link to my story, and that of many other contributors for the Halloween issue (though mine is pg 122 if you’re short on time): http://www.sirenscallpublications.com/
Enjoy!