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DP FICTION #82B: “There Are Angels and They Are Utilitarians” by Jamie Wahls – Diabolical Plots

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Sign up for our monthly newsletter to get updates on our publishing projects and read the original fiction before it’s on the public site. You can Contact Us or follow us on Twitter! If you are thinking about starting a short fiction publication and would like to discuss with someone experienced how to get started, please do contact us! We believe short fiction publishing is not a zero sum game–one publication’s success helps the short fiction publishing community and we should help boost each other! We probably read more fiction/poetry guidelines than almost anyone to maintain Submission Grinder listings, we have been publishing original fiction since 2015 here on Diabolical Plots, and publishing annual Long List Anthology of reprint fiction with Kickstarter campaigns. A good place to start might be our “Guidelines For Short Fiction Guidelines” post. I loved her, to my shame. The language you use is imprecise. Hard for me. Not in the idioms or the metaphors—I have those well in hand—b

I loved her, to my shame. The language you use is imprecise. Hard for me. Not in the idioms or the metaphors—I have those well in hand —but so many of your words have unknowable secondary emotional charge. I cannot know how they will be received. I loved her. I did not lust after her, nor desire to pass time together. We were not friends and we did not speak. She only became aware of my presence once, when I committed a crime beyond measure. We were not enemies. And our relationship was not one of unilateral longing, in which I pined for her and she found me an irritant, like sometimes happens

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