I wanted to take you through one of my two recent acceptances at Last Girls Club, released today.

Total rejections for “Three Obediences: Father, Husband, Son” before acceptance: 20

How it started: I had toyed with the idea of an obedience curse and played it out in a novella 14 years ago.

The novella isn’t any good when I reread it in Dec 2024. A writing forum’s informal contest has a testing-the-tires week in early 2025. I decided to try to make a flash version of this story.

It took a few versions of the flash before I distilled it down to the Three Obediences from Confucianism. For women, it’s obedience to your father, husband, son. (These old customs / traditions clashed with everything that makes me a person.)

Thanks to writing cohort for their great feedback. I revised.

I submitted the story first as a flash (under 1,000 words). I gathered about 10 rejections before I sent it to my critique group for help more. What was I missing?

Spoiler alert: at the end, the main character kills a baby, because she can’t have that son threatening her freedom. My group is full of very bright people who have read so much of my horrors that when they asked ‘do you really need a dead baby for the story?’ I realized that’s probably too far.

Another 10 rejections. I wrote a note to myself that after this rejection, I’ll trunk it.

Then someone in that same writer’s community posted that Last Girls’ Club was open to submissions for “Die by Your Words”. Perfect call. Even the magazine’s mission statement felt like it was the perfect place for my writing.

Last Girls’ Club is from the feminine gaze and voice, because I want to broaden the spectrum of fiction and poetry and have both the readers and authors empathize with genre/gender bending powerful women facing terrors using their abilities to overcome them or succumb to them. Here we are willing to try the new, the unthinkable, flipping the classics, and taking delight in the dark feminine energy that is rising in the world. Here we are fucked up, funny, and a little bit bloody. Just like you…

Eda Easter, the owner and editor in Chief, accepted two of my stories. The other story had very limited submissions because I knew it was just too angry, but I thought it would have a good shot at Last Girls Club and I was right!? I’m all about that feminine rage.

TL;DR inspiration can come from your old writing. Gather feedback from trusted readers/writers. The right editor will vibe with your work.

A different crit group’s member read a different story and said “A Wen Wen story, there’s going to be a murder, it’s going to be justified.” And that story was sold. Guess I’ll have to do a write up for that one…