My experience scouting out places to submit an SF story

This story, from the latest Clarkesworld, is set in a grim dystopian future where recent Asian immigrant parents tolerate this kind of thing. Oh and they remember this while living underwater after the climate apocalypse. The story isn't actually bad but hitting picrel was like biting a bit of extremely funny eggshell.

Today's fiction is often accused of avoiding sincerity, but this isn't strictly true. In order to bypass the fear of cringe or mockery, you must graft your topic to some vaguely currentyear theme. For example, take childhood nostalgia. It's okay to be serious and sentimental about your grandma's ethnic cooking that the other kids in school said smelled bad, while the same kind of treatment of your mayo mom's PB+Js would be considered cheese. If we peel away the vague racecruft connection for this kind of thing, we're left with a very conventional sentimentality (not that this is inherently bad).

This story has a very traditional emotional core, about the protagonist mourning a romantic partner, with a kind of non-literal sci-fi element used to explore those feelings. However, the dead partner is a they-them (different from the character in picrel). I find it hard to believe that this story would have been published without the (completely irrelevant) pronouns of the dead partner, or little throwaways like Shirley's queerplatonic orangutan fricker, because then we would be left with the simple age-old narrative of a widow mourning her husband.

Maybe I should just challenge myself to write the straggiest thing I can think of and see if I get accepted.

!writecel