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Writers are perverse creatures, and gonnabe writers are even worseCase in point: I'm going to offer some free and useful advice for the soon-to-be-published. Advice that would greatly increase your chances of getting your short fiction published. And none of you will take it.
As it happens, I was having supper a while back with a table full of literary types and we were talking about things that you can't tell new writers, because they'd refuse to believe a word of it. Then we got onto the subject of happy endings.
"Readers love happy endings!" exclaimed the editor of a major science fiction magazine.
To which I replied, "But writers..."
And everybody laughed.
So there you have it. If you want to make your fiction more saleable, write stories with happy endings. Preferably with space ships and planets and aliens and such. Because readers love those too.
You won't take this advice, though. Because writers are perverse creatures.
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Ok, but what about endings that are happy to the narrator/protagonist, but disturbing to most readers? Was the ending to "A Boy and His Dog" happy? Maybe a better word is "palatable".
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