From the moment earlier this week when I heard that The New Yorker was running a long article on Mormonism in its new issue, I had a sinking feeling this was going to happen. Last night I found the rejection letter in the mailbox:

Thank you for your letter and suggestion of a piece about your experience of a Mormon endowment ceremony. Unfortunately the editors passed on it, as we have only this week published a long piece about the Mormons in our issue dated January 21. Thank you for your interest and good luck in placing your story idea elsewhere.

More exquisitely bad timing. One of these days I'll be in the right place at the right time, but not today.

I'm sending a science fiction story, "An Extraterrestrial Perspective on the Temptations of Christ," to the British magazine Interzone today, and I'm going to try to get a mess of new query letters about excerpts out tomorrow.