Wednesday, February 3, 2010

How embarrassing!

At the end of December, I shared my excitement about my short story People Need to Know moving from the Slush Pile to In Process at Every Day Fiction.

Well, today I got my long awaited reply. They like the piece, and want me to make some minor rewrites. Their comments were very positive, and I think the changes they suggested are spot-on. I fell over myself sending them an e-mail that they could expect my rewrite in a day or two.

For reasons that must have seemed good at the time, I edited the original version of this story in my computer's temporary directory before sending it off. I remember now that I thought I'd just make a change here and there; but I actually re-wrote, re-shuffled and revised the entire story. Time away from a piece really helps you look objectively at it during the editing process.

Every Day Fiction has an online submission system, so I just copied and pasted the text in there, and that was it. Except of course that I'm very dillegent in cleaning out my temporary directories.

I don't have a copy of what I sent them.

What to do? Well, I ate humble pie and sent this little "PS" e-mail to them:

PS:
Is it possible for you to e-mail me a copy of the submission that I made? It appears that I stored the file in a temporary directory, and it has been deleted. I'm sorry to ask this; however, I know that I made a lot of changes since the last version of this story I still have. It wouldn't be appropriate for me to work again from that version.

Again, I'm really sorry about his mistake - I've broken one of the golden rules of submitting works for publication.
I'm hoping to get an e-mail with my story soon, and a note that says, "No worries, mate, these things happen."

Has anything like this every happened to you? Do you think I did the (w)rite thing?