If you scroll down a little...

You'll see a story I first published at Firefox News, which is not related either to Fox News or the Firefox browser.

The story had been rejected at a couple of places - most stories are - and one of them gave me what I thought was a pretty good rejection: personalized and with a bit of information that I thought I could use. One of the best rejections, I think. Anyway, the bit of information was something like "Though the story is well written, we just published a patient zero story a few months ago." I didn't, at the time, know what a "patient zero" story was. I looked it up. I hadn't known that was what I was writing, but it was. Seems like I fell into a cliche - a named one at that - So I went about changing the story, reworking the last couple of pages so that it was no longer a "patient zero" story.

Big mistake. Well, two of them actually. First, I didn't save a copy of the original. Then, it turned out that the change caused a ripple effect throughout the rest of the story. It still made sense, but it wasn't any fun now. So I reconstructed the last couple of pages (yet again) and produced the story you see below. I think it is fun again and I hope it provides a twist (however slight) on the cliche. You'll let me know.