Tears were shed.
Summer 2024. My mother-in-law hands me a copy of the Saturday Evening Post. She has a subscription and knows that I’m sending out manuscripts.
She’s one of the most thoughtful people I’ve ever known, and she’s thought of me while reading that month’s fiction selection.
I’m touched and tell her that I’ll read it and see whether I might be able to come up with something to submit. That month’s story, of course, is fantastic.
It’s also grounded in reality, with no genre elements to be seen.
I go to the Saturday Evening Post website and read more. I see the names Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. Reality hasn’t sunk in yet. I see their names all the time when I’m trying to tailor a story to a magazine or anthology.
It’s 2025 when I have a draft. The story digs deep into grief. It’s about family lost to what feels like a slow, steady, outgoing tide. It’s about family who leaves, stabbing no smaller a hole in the lives of those left behind. It’s about being a kid and being a parent, about seeing loved ones lose their dementia struggle and the reality that someday I may be the one struggling against it. It’s an emotional, complicated mess. I rewrite, revise, edit until it’s polished as bright as I can get it.
A web form carries it away.
A fraction of a second after it’s too late, reality hits. This is the Saturday Evening Post. It’s almost as old as the United States of America. They don’t publish stories “in the style of” Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. The Saturday Evening Post published Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe, among so many others. What have I done?
Who was I kidding?
I feel nauseous. I tell myself that I kept a promise, and that means something. I try not to picture the editor’s reaction when they see my simple words. Then I find the date when results should be available and mark my calendar anyway. Hope springs eternal, right? At least I’ll know when it’s safe to stop cringing.
September comes. I receive the news:
Friends, I am still in shock, four months later.
“Dad’s Three Laws” will appear on the Saturday Evening Post website later this month, and I will absolutely share the link when that happens.
After that, it will appear in the anthology, Best Stories from the Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2026.
If you need me, I’ll be over there in the corner, hoping this isn’t a dream and that I never, ever wake up from this moment.
R.E. Dyer 
What are you thinking?