Right Story, Wrong Time
Can a story really be too topical or contemporary?
I’ve been shopping around a cyberpunk short story called “Brain Bombs” to various markets. I wrote the first draft about a year and a half ago, inspired by people I knew years ago who were involved with the ELF. I wanted to know how such individuals would operate in a scenario that genre readers are more familiar with.
I put the story away for a while, then revised and prepped it for critique on the Codex forums. A day before I planned to give it to Codex members, the Boston Marathon bombing happened.