Cirque has published my short story, The Devil. I’m very happy to see this story finally get put into print. It was a fun one to write and one of my personal favorites. However, it took a long damn time and many rejections to get it before you today. The Devil was first written in June of 2017 and first submitted for publication in October of that same year. It was rejected by everyone. Over the next five years it was rejected a total of 76 times. Now rejection is just part of writing, you never know what might tickle someone’s fancy at any given time, but when it’s one of your favorite stories, the rejection has an especially harsh sting to it. Not all of the rejections were bad. About a quarter of the time they included something about how the readers enjoyed the piece, but it just didn’t quite fit with the voice of the magazine or the specific issue they were working on. Rejections like this lessened the sting a bit, but were in their own way even more deeply frustrating. It’s one thing to have to accept that you might just have written a bad story, it’s another to know you’re getting held back by dumb luck. Anyways, that all came to an end when Cirque accepted The Devil for publication in February of 2021, some seven months after it was submitted. Now four months later, here it is for you to read.
The story is on page 59 of the magazine:
cirquejournal.com/
If you have trouble finding it you can also find it here:
www.shawnwcampbell.com/short-stories/the-devil