Interzone rejection

I've just received a thoughtful rejection from Interzone for the short story I submitted to them in November. I made it down to the final 30 out of 404 stories (apparently adding up to some 1931100 words). The feedback was great - basically keep writing and try submitting it elsewhere, which is always nice to hear, but ran to 10 paragraphs, which I think is a good sign. I just want to say publicly thanks to Jetse de Vries to take the time out to provide such great feedback to an aspiring writer (as well as critically reading through nearly two million words in less than two months).

I've picked Strange Horizons next, over the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, simply because they have an electronic submission process. They also have stricter word limits, so I cut the story down to 8,024 words. Given that Paul J. McAuley's "Gene Wars" covers much of the same territory in a much smaller word count, I don't think I'm being too aggressive in the cuts.