I had a pleasant surprise this afternoon when I received an email that my short story, "The World's Best Coffee," is slated for publication in The MacGuffin (Fall 2009 or Winter 2010).

The hard part was restraining myself from stripping down to my undies and running around the neighborhood like Homer Simpson.  (My brother did that one year when he got too drunk on his birthday.  Being the president of the home owner's association made him very recognizable in his undies, and he hid in the hallway closet when the police showed up.)  After the euphoria of having a short story accepted for publication wore off, I started looking details of this submission.

With two dozen short stories written during the last three years circulating in the slush piles, it's difficult to remember what's what and where's where.  After reviewing the story and checking the submission tracking spreadsheet, I realized something that I didn't know until today: I wrote a MacGuffin story that I submitted to a magazine that specializes in MacGuffin stories.

Well, d'oh!

A MacGuffin is an object in a mystery story that everyone wants but isn't what everything thinks it is.  The Maltese Falcon is a classic example.  My short story is about a cup of coffee that is stolen by a guy being chased by the woman that the coffee was made for through the shopping center, and, after he finish drinking the coffee, he discovers that the woman has his wallet that had fallen out at the coffee shop.  When the woman hands over the wallet to the police officer, she sees the man and points him out as the creep who stole her coffee.  In short, it was never ever about the coffee.  Not really.

This short story was like many of the short stories that I have written: a real life situation provoked a "what if" question that lead to an interesting conclusion.

I ordered a medium mocha with whip cream at Peet's Coffee in Santana Row one weekend morning when a guy stepped in front of me, picked up my mocha, and ran out the door.  There's nothing you can do when the store and shopping center is crowded with people, and who in their right mind would file a police report over a cup of coffee.  After the store made another mocha for me (mistakes and theft appears not to be that uncommon), I started thinking about the obvious question that came to a writer's mind: "What would happen if someone did follow the guy out the store in pursuit of the stolen coffee?"

The basic scenario came together when I went over to the bookstore to look around and drink my replacement mocha.  I wrote out the basic scenario on a notepad when I got back to the car.  The notepad later became a 1,000-word short story, and The Macguffin was the fifth magazine that I submitted the story to.  I ended up writing the perfect story for the perfect magazine without ever deliberately thinking about either one.