My First Story - One Day in the Future

The first short story I wrote and officially published was called One Day in the Future. It's a fun story (I think) and it can be found here. I submitted it to a 'flash' science fiction competition called Quantum Shorts. The submissions were judged for their quality, etc. and the stories had to involve something related to, or derived from, quantum mechanics. It was an open-voting competition so everyone's stories were published online for all to see. I didn't win but I considered resubmitting the story elsewhere for publication because I like it.

This was when I decided to actually read the rules in fine print for the Quantum Shorts competition.and stumbled upon this:

" and (e) by providing a Submission, entrant consents to give Organizer a non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, create derivative works from, and display such Submission under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"  Source.

My story is now shared under a broad licensing agreement, which the host's of the competition own. Unfortunately, this means submitting the story elsewhere to be published has strings attached to it and is hardly likely to be purchased. Thus, my story is now published in my opinion...at least in spirit. So I hope you enjoy it! And as a side note, I've now come to learn from reading the fine print of many other competitions and magazines that most won't take a submission that is already freely found on the web, or that is currently under consideration with another publisher. So in retrospect I wouldn't have been able to publish this story anyway (assuming the story had been accepted elsewhere).
 
I consider that a penny saved, if not necessarily earned.