Only one today:
Thank you for sending us "After Making Landfall." We appreciate the chance to read it. Unfortunately, this piece isn't the right fit for us. If you wish to submit again, please wait until one month has passed.
Thanks again for submitting, Samuel, and we wish you the best in finding a home for this elsewhere.
Sincerely,
The Editors
SCH 5/2
[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.]
“Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1836-1984” was sent to Epiphany Magazine and Short Story Substack. I did some more revising on “Pieces” following a criticism that I read as my diluting the Bridges family story. It is part of a longer story - what I think of as a novella derived from a collection of interconnected short stories - about the decline and struggles of a small Indiana factory town. It was not meant to be my version of Buddenbooks, although I cannot say Thomas Mann was not in my mind.
That novella is titled “Scenes From An Indiana Factory Town.” That I sent to Sunspot Literary Journal. The revisions made to “Pieces” went into this submission.
“After Making Landfall” went to Pinch (Tahoma Literary Review).
Meetinghouse rejected “Going For the Kid.”
Thank you for your submission to Meetinghouse Magazine. Although we must decline your submission this time, we appreciated the chance to consider it and hope to read your work in the future. We will open for submissions to our next issue in October.
Thanks again.
Sincerely,
Meetinghouse Magazine
SCH 5/2
Yesterday, I did the most walking I have done since the surgery. There was a baptism at 8:30. I made it almost to St. Barnabas on my own power. Then it was down and back to White River.
I napped for maybe two hours when I got back.
I spent the rest of the daydoing some revising “The Dead and Dying” novella. I made some changes - small ones - after the writing group on Wednesday. Those I did yesterday then added sections for a newer character that feature John B. Harvey and Albert Hyatt. I added one for Hyatt that involves Mike Devlin pulling him into politics. I found a publisher that will take novellas but has a 100 page bottom requirement. I hit 101 tonight.
No appetite. Not sure what that means.
One rejection received:
Dear Samuel,
Thank you for thinking of NewMyths. Unfortunately “The Unintended Consequences of Art” is not quite what we are looking for at this time. We wish you good luck placing it elsewhere.
Susan Shell Winston, editor
I already began procrastinating this morning:
Two thoughts: I left my phone at churcfh and I am up way too early.
[Items for the next few days will be from my abandoned WordPress Blog]
Monday brought my first rejection of my novel One Dead Blonde. This was the rejection letter from American Buffalo Books:
One of the best parts so far of 2026 has been reading and discussing the novels submitted to the Buffalo Books Fiction Prize. I'm sorry to report that your manuscript was not selected as a finalist for the award, but we are grateful that you shared your work with us, and we read your book with interest and enthusiasm. One of our readers said:
“The small-town political drama was handled well, but other aspects need some work. Focusing more on the small-town politics, a-la Fargo or True Detective, would make this piece much stronger. Too many characters are introduced too early, to the point the audience is lost, especially because of the lack of characterization throughout the work.”
Thank you,
Southern Indiana Review continues to reject my stuff. This it is “Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 - 1984”.
Thank you for your submission for an upcoming issue of the Southern Indiana Review. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept your work for publication at this time.
Sincerely,
SIR
I submitted “No Ordinary Word” to ellipsis on 8/25/2025; it was the first entry on my spreadsheet of submissions.
Thank you for sending your work to ellipsis, and sorry about the delayed response.
Though it was not a right fit for the journal this time, we appreciate the chance to read it. We hope you will consider submitting again.
Best wishes to you.
Sincerely,
The Editors
SCH 4/29
[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.]
Not all rejections are the same, some are even encouraging like this:
Thank you for sending us your work. While we will not be publishing this one, we wanted to let you know that your work was elevated by an editor for further consideration and discussion. We appreciate your patience while we closely considered it.
Thanks again for thinking of us.
Sincerely,
Danny Judge | Editor
SCH 4/26
[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.]
I went through Submission Grinder to find berths for “After Making Landfall” and found the following: Black Fox Literary Magazine, Gavagai, and Story Unlikely.
I use Submittable to follow some outlets, and since these were open, I proceeded with a submission: Driftwood Press, and The Clarissa Dalloway Prize for Short Prose (L'Esprit Literary Review).
Having access to Chill Subs' free database (which I find rather clumsy), I settled on the following: CRAFT Literary, and TriQuarterly.
From where I found Subnivean, it was a long time ago, but I sent them the story, too.
I ended the morning, starting the afternoon, with two magazines that I have been trying to interest for some time: Broad Ripple Review and The Saturday Evening Post.
The rejection for the day came from Gordon Square Review for Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory, 1976 - 1984”.
Yesterday, I received a notice that The Sun rejected “Agnes”.
SCH 4/25/26
Rejections:
8/7
Thank you for submitting to Exposition Review Vol. XI: “PARA/SOCIAL.” This year we received a record-breaking number of submissions, and we appreciate your patience while we gave each piece the time and attention it deserved. We truly value your submission and consider it an honor to read your work. Unfortunately, “Agnes” is not a fit for this issue. Since you indicated that you would like feedback on your submission, we will send comments from our editorial board along shortly.
We wish you the best of luck in your future writing endeavors and hope you will submit again!
Take care,
Submissions
8/8
Cream City Review, Gordon Square Review, Southern Humanities Review: After Making Landfall
Thriller Magazine Press - One Dead Blonde.
Readings
Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds (Indiana Authors Awards), a review (and one that has piqued my interest).
While never rising to the comic heights of Vonnegut, and without his more overtly obvious moral lessons, these stories nonetheless have elements that will be recognizable to his fans, and the straight faced delivery of preposterous circumstances Moody presents will certainly be appreciated by those who enjoy Charlie Kaufman or even Terry Gilliam. Like Kaufman, Moody can verge on the allegorical and the surreal, and like Gilliam, the visuals are often of our reality but with the volume turned up on some of their more unsettling attributes.
Across all five pieces included in the collection, Moody’s writing is serviceable. He never quite swings for the fences when it comes to the prose, but that’s probably a good thing in that he is already stretching the imagination with the content he presents and doesn’t distract from the heart of his stories with cumbersome or showy sentences. Readers who need mimetic recreations of real life in order to find themselves drawn into a story might struggle here, but those who can set aside their nagging questions about how such things could be (or readers who prefer to!) will enjoy playing in the melancholy, symbol laden worlds of Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds.
The Lie the Character Believes: A Deeper Look at Consciousness and Character Arc (Helping Writers Become Authors ).
Being perverse, some of my characters do not transform positively.
But as I’ve come to recognize over the years, the Lie is not just a Lie. I’ve come to emphasize it specifically as a comparatively limited belief that exists in a continuum with a comparatively expansive Truth. Because here’s the thing: at the beginning of a story, the Lie starts out as the character’s Truth. To some degree, it was a Truth that worked for them up until the story begins.
***
And so, I would posit that the Lie a character overcomes really isn’t so much a wrong belief they must correct (or at least not always and not at its deeper levels). Rather, it is a fissure in consciousness—a place where the conscious self is inhabiting an ego identity that has created separation between its surface-level understanding and the deeper Truth of our being.
I have been more interested in people making choices based on incomplete or incorrect information and then having to live with those choices. Well, that has been the subject of some of my short stories.
This may be why my stories keep getting rejected, and I should shift from wrong assumptions to lies.
First, we have the Lie as simply a mistaken belief or even an outright deception that must be seen through.
Second, we have the Lie as a point within a continuum from a comparatively limited perspective to a comparatively expanded perspective. Both “Lie” and “Truth” are qualified here; they are not black and white, good or bad. They are just reference points for where characters may find themselves along the continuum at any point.
And third, we have this deeper understanding of the Lie as an ego identity or a comparatively limited consciousness. It is ultimately a separation between the conscious self and the unconscious self. When we zoom back from the minutiae of any specific character arc to look at the movement of human growth, what we are really tracking is the larger expansion that becomes possible as we release the limitations of our ego identities, allowing us to embrace our capacity for deep alignment with the truths of life.
Or stick to my guns and live with characters who do not transform into better selves but live and die by their choices. After all, Ahab does not transform into anything apart from fish food.
Other lies addressed in the article: The Lie the Character Believes as Separation and The Lie the Character Believes as Social Reality. Some additional notes for me, if not for you.
Although I dearly love the idea of character arc as being about transformation, I think this expanded model reveals it might be more accurate to instead think of character arc as being about coming into alignment. It’s less about a change to the character’s fundamental self and more about the removal of the false self. It’s not the addition of a new perspective, but the stripping away of what isn’t true so the character may see more clearly.
***
Ego identities are not simply personal. They are reinforced through collective social consensus. Society itself can be seen as an ego identity. In their seminal book, sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann posited that reality, as we think of it, is a social construction. Customs and traditions are dictated by varying societies. That America or Columbia or Italy are countries at all is a social convention. Indeed, the conventions of language are a social construction, with (mostly) agreed-upon rules.
Although we each, in our own small way, influence society, society bears a tremendous influence upon our own ego identities—not just in how we operate socially but also in how we understand ourselves internally. Arguably, the vast majority of our ego identities are inherited. We all entertain outer Lies (aka, limiting beliefs) about what we believe reality to be and inner Lies about what we believe our identities within that reality to be.
I wonder what my father would have made of A Dying Art by John Semley. He was an embalmer, he held himself to a high standard, and I expect he would be appalled.
I spent somewhere around 2 hours writing a query letter and synopsis for One Dead Blonde. I do not have much hope for it.
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