First rejection of the year

Not the minotaur story, thank heavens, which duly went off to QueeredFiction for consideration for their Love & Fables anthology.

But the other day I submitted a short very dark story about a down-and-out to Neon Magazine, a literary British online zine which specialises in dark fiction. Their guidelines say they want stories which concentrate on "isolation, post-modernism, technology, dislocation, apathy, the apocalypse, memory, Kirk Cameron and urban decay". My story involved at least five of those themes and was gritty and, I felt, reasonably well-written. But the editor rejected it in a little over a day. Aaargh. Rejections are depressing enough at the best of times but somehow it always seems worse when you don't understand quite why the story has been sent back.