My first acceptance from a paying market

Under normal circumstances, any reminder of a first sale to a paying market would be a happy moment.

I just had to withdraw my story though. The sale was well over a year ago. A few months after that (still slightly over a year ago) I followed up, and received e-mail that there would be a few months delay. Nothing has happened since then, so I faced reality, and wrote the editor an e-mail explaining that I was withdrawing the story but would like to hear if they began publishing again.

The birth of this story is still with me. I was browsing through Duotrope to see if any of the markets would inspire me, hoping to publish a few short stories and become an SFWA member before finishing my novel and sending query letters. I found Mansstory 2, a magazine which not only published stories reminiscent of the pulp era but illustrated them.

While I was born a little late for the pulp era, I still remember an old magazine I bought in college a couple of decades ago at a used bookstore. For some semi logical reason, the all female extraterrestrial crew that discovered earth was able to breed with humans - I forget why. Eventually it turned out they wanted to do something nasty to the sun, send the Earth into an ice age, not destroying humanity totally but turning Earth into a combination rest stop and male whore house.

The story took itself too seriously for something so silly, but there was something fun about it. I designed my own species, originally descended from humans but separated during a collapse of civilization. I came up with biological and cultural reasons why they had all female crews who were sexually interested in human males. My story is set on Treaty Station, a couple of decades after a war, and everyone involved has ftl.

My craft has grown in the interim, and I will rewrite the story before I begin sending it out again, when I need a break from the book I'm writing.

Anybody else have stories about the stories you have written, are writing, or plan to write?