On re-reading your Nebula story, I was super impressed with the economy with which you covered everything. I don’t know that there was a single wasted word.

I think any story that makes itself accessible to a wide audience can be a success. A problem with some ‘Mormon’ fiction is the writers lack the perspective to make their tale accessible. You give some very good pointers on addressing that problem.

As for the question of whether any Mormon readers felt it was too Mormon for a national market: Not to my knowledge. I ran it through two writing groups populated with Mormons, and nobody raised that concern about the story as a whole, although they might have pointed out some things I could clarify.

Based on my experience, I have to wonder whether any *Mormon* readers have thought your stories were “too Mormon” for a national market. My experience is that Mormons often think non-Mormons won’t “get it” when in fact they get it pretty well.

A side note: It looks like your point 4 was truncated at the end. Was there something you intended to add after “wanted to show”?

As luck would have it, I’m right in the middle of writing an essay on including Mormons in one’s fiction (the don’t dos as well as the how tos) for a project I have going on and will now undoubtedly be pulling tasty, tasty quotes from this article. I’d already been planning using your excellent story as a how to example, but this really helps.