In case you haven’t heard by now, Realms of Fantasy has folded. Again. I’m sorry to see it go; though I was often frustrated by its long response times, I was always happy to be published there because of the excellent full-color illustrations they commissioned for each story (the illustration for “The Ecology of Faerie” was particularly fine). I’d be really surprised if Realms were to rise from the ashes a second time, though stranger things have happened.

In the writing biz, if you have sold a story to a market that goes out of business before the story appears, we say that you have “killed” the market. (The fact that there’s a word for this tells you something about the writing biz.) This is, I think, the second market I’ve killed, the first being Aeon (though I still hold out some faint hope that the story I sold them will appear in the long-promised collection End of an Aeon). In this case, Shawna had accepted a story of mine but not yet sent a contract, so I didn’t even get any money for the hit. Maybe I just maimed it.

So, anyway, now I’m looking once again for a home for the magical lesbian plumber story. I’m really fond of this one and I was thrilled to have it accepted at Realms, because it was rejected by F&SF, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Subterranean, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Interzone/Black Static, Glimmer Train, and Clockwork Phoenix 3. Any suggestions as to where else I can send it? It’s 7200 words long, which is too long for a lot of markets.