Have I  mentioned how great the WotF forum is? It’s pretty great. This whole story does not have this ending were it not for the WotF forum. K.D. Julicher (Published Finalist from Vol. 32… read her story, it rocks) was a Finalist in Q3 for Vol. 34. She noted on the forum:

Yeah, so, that Q3 finalist I just had? Trunk story. Well, not quite, but “story I haven’t touched in a year, pulled out and polished up” counts, right?

I read that and a light bulb went off. I could meet my goal of submitting every quarter without submitting the broken thing I was stuck in banging-head-against -wall zone. All I had to do was polish up the story (that I loved) that was just rejected from a different anthology.

Here’s what I posted on the forum about what was thinking in the moment:

With what I was working on for Q4 being (not-quite-but-close-to) hopelessly broken. I took this inspiration and rather than skip this quarter, got something in that feels not too shabby. And that gives me enough time to fix what’s wrong with the other one.

I submitted sometime near the end of September.

Joni Labaqui called to tell me I was a Finalist on November 6.