I Sold a Short Story to a Magazine… Seven Years After I Wrote It. Here’s How.

Don’t give up on your stories, and don’t despair if they get rejected.

I was nineteen years old, right in the middle of my English and History dual-honours bachelor’s degree.

I was sitting at the back of a large history lecture hall. We had lectures here once a week, a general overview of the course delivered by a boring speaker (and one by a raging atheist who used the opportunity to talk about why all religion is evil. It was totally irrelevant to the course and I remember being annoyed even then.)

The lecturer was droning on, and I was there with my notebook, furiously scribbling.

Note-taking? Ha. No.

I was rearranging scenes for a short story I’d written.

It was an ambitious structure at that time in my writing development — it flicked back and forth between the past and present, neatly tying up at the end when the main character, who in the present was fleeing from something across a radiated wasteland, was caught by his father, who in the flashbacks we learned he’d been having disputes with his entire life.

It took a long time, and a lot of ironing out, to get it to a point where I was happy with it. My…