“Even at such a short length (originally "Wrong Passenger" was 250 words long), I felt like this story's ending landed with a thud. I sent it out anyway, but after it got rejected by a couple of flash fiction journals, I decided to shelve it for a while. Recently I reopened the doc, read it over, and felt the story was actually pretty good. The language was precise, and the action was clear despite the short length. By a chance of formatting, the last 14 words of the story didn't show up on page 1 — and suddenly I realized cutting those last 14 words altogether gave the ending a lot more punch. The classic rule of editing: usually, shorter is better!”

“I think I initially was worried that this piece of writing wouldn't find a good home to be published, I was a bit nervous about hitting send so it was trashed for a little while, and then I thought about it for a while and felt like I had nothing to lose with submitting it, so I did.”

“I didn’t think this micro-fiction piece would ever find a home because it’s not in a traditional style, but it isn’t experimental enough either. It is a finished unfinished story: It’s about being stuck in a situation that never ends—a loop, a cycle (which is a horror story in itself). It was a hard sell, so I tucked it inside my folders and kept an eye out for its rightful home.”

“I decided to trash this piece as it was based on an incident that happened many years ago in a city in India. I wasn't sure if people would relate to it. Though it's a global phenomenon.”

TW* self harm, suicide

“I've submitted ‘Chartreuse’ several times. It's the one work that's been rejected the most, but it's also the first triplet I finished. Triplets (I named them after musical triplets) are a fiction form where a story is told from three different perspectives or ways. So, they could also be considered literary triptychs.”

“These are three separate pieces that I wrote for a micro-fiction contest earlier this year. I didn't submit any of them because the category I got for the second round was comedy which is a genre with which I'm not comfortable. After the contest I just felt like they were too short or incomplete to send anywhere. The prompt was to include the action of ice fishing in the comedy genre and contain the word ‘excuse.’”