I’m pleased to announce that my short story, “The Pre-Med and the Frog Prince,” has been accepted for publication and will soon be appearing in A Twist of Fate: A Collection of 11 Twisted Fairy Tales.

Some of you may remember when I drafted the first version of this story a couple of years ago for a flash fiction contest. The story received an honorable mention back then in its very abreviated form.

Later on, I submitted it to an online magazine. The editors wrote back with one of the most encouraging rejections I’ve ever received. The basic gist of it was, “We love your story idea, but feel it could be more fully developed.”

So I went back to work, expanding what had been a 500-word flash fiction piece to a fully developed short story of about 7,000 words. Unfortunately, by the time I resubmitted it to the online magazine, they had undergone some major cutbacks.  They now only publish bi-annually, and so no longer had space for my story. It was time to look for another market.

I got a tip about the Twisted Fairy Tales Collection from a fellow writer in a Facebook Group. I kept working on it with critique partners and with Marylee MacDonald, the writing instructor who served as Writer in Residence at my local library. With their help, I was able to continue refining the story. At the start of October, it was ready to submit. By November 1, I received word that my story had been chosen for the anthology

On November 21, “The Pre-Med and the Frog Prince” will finally be published on Kindle in A Twist of Fate. The road to publication for this story has been long and winding, but that somehow seems only fitting for a twisted fairy tale.