Having just sent in the contracts, I’m happy to report that my cyberpunk short story The Suffragette’s Election has sold to Crossed Genres, and will be appearing in their February 2013 issue.

This story has a long and tortuous history. Its first draft was written over four years ago, but I never sent it out because of obvious problems with the ending. Essentially, I knew how I wanted the story to end, but my first attempt at writing this ending was devoid of tension and drama, and the story sputtered out in a lame and unconvincing finish.

I put the story away for several months. Then I took it out again and rewrote the ending to see if I could make it work. It didn’t. So I repeated this process four more times.

Earlier this year I took the story out again and tried one more time—and finally got something good. (The key difference turned out to be not the ending itself, but the ordering of a few scenes before the ending.) However, by this time the beginning of the story had gotten shabby from so many partial rewrites, so I had to rewrite that, too. And then, finally, I had something that I was happy with from beginning to end, and just in time to submit to Crossed Genre’s “Cloak and Dagger” themed issue.

Evidently the muses smiled on me after all that effort, because the story was accepted on its first submission. Woo!