After making the rounds for a while, collecting rejections, my story Engineering—kind of a torture porn* episode of The Twilight Zone—ended up with Dark Discoveries. Editor Paul Dudley rejected it, but in the subsequent correspondence gave some good thoughts on what the story needed to stand a better chance, even with DD. By that time, the story was waiting for its next rejection at Horror Library 5, but Paul invited me to work his suggestions into the story and resubmit.

His ideas were straightforward enough. Early in the story, give the reader an idea of what is going on. Later in the story, flesh out the conflict between the protagonist and his torturer; give some depth to the torturer’s character. Plot and character development 101, you might say.

But what to do if the character to deepen is a disembodied, whispering voice in the dark, repeating a single question over and over?

And worse: how to do even a minimum of infodump to help the reader along, if the entire story is written in very tight first person perspective, and the protagonist doesn’t remember anything at all?

After weeks of brooding and worrying, I ended up changing the story as little as I possibly could, adding a mere 173 words all told, and keeping practically all the words that were already in there.

Turns out I did just enough. Within a day, Dudley let me know that Engineering made the jump from the slush to the maybe pile; a privilige, he added, granted only 4% of their submission. The DD publishing editor gets to read the story next, meaning that the worst that could happen now is a higher-level rejection.

* Don’t know what the torture porn horror subgenre is? If you saw Saw, you know enough. If you didn’t, just imagine The Marathon Man with Dustin Hoffman spending the entire movie in that dentist’s chair.