There are worse things than rejections in the depths

First order of business, another bounce on King of Pine.  It has officially reached the point where I doubt it.  But that is by no means the worst of it.  The worst has nothing to do with that but with another story.

I submitted a story to Coffinmouth, the spider story. When I did so, I did it as my first and last and only submission to a non-paying market, just because. The story was, to the best of my knowledge, trunk-bound. It had a lot of flaws but it had some neat ideas and a voice I enjoyed. I had fun writing it. I had fun rewriting it so it made some sense. I submitted on a lark.

Come all ye young authors, and hear my sad tale.

The editor ran it through a cut-up engine. Added his own lines to it and made it unrecognizable as the story I wrote. Voice, without which the story isn't, was obliterated. What became of my story is on this Wordpress zine still, though I have asked to withdraw it (in all fairness, I was given 24 hours, possibly, given the gmail outages - the email was sent at 2 p.m. yesterday, but did not appear in my inbox until start of work this morning; granted, there was nothing in that email saying the site would go live 24 hours after the proofs came out, but what the hell).

Anyway, the moral of this story is in the subject line; avoid non-paying markets, even on a lark. Coffinmouth in particular.