A story bounced back, about one hour before dinner. Polite, cold, standard editor’s mail: good story, not our genre, worth keeping on the lookout for a publisher, good luck.
Oh, well, it happens.

As we dined it started raining again – there’s storms passing across the skies of Astigianistan – so no after-dinner walk tonight.
I sat down and started tweaking that story – it’s been so long I had forgotten a lot of things. I revised it. Cleaned it up.
Cut about 150 words. Nothing major, on an 8000-words number.
Tightened the dialogue a little, made some minor adjustments.
Checked for American vs English spelling.

It’s a good story.
OK, so I say so myself, sue me.
A crime story. A story of the Corsair.
A little noir, a little John D. MacDonald.

And I said to myself, why not try Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine?
What can they do, bounce it back?

And so I got myself their guidelines, and then I got a hold of the classic Shunn’s manuscript formatting standards as per instructions, and spent some time reformatting my manuscript, and tweaking LibreOffice’s settings to do what was needed.
Then I polished a cover letter, and now I’ll sleep on it and tomorrow morning I’ll mail it.

Let’s see what happens.
Wish me luck.