. To make my story distinctive from the one in that book, I decided not to set it on any earthly desert, but on the Moon.But as I'm writing my story of my astronaut hero's desperate trek across the lunar regolith, heading toward his encounter with the ancient and menacing colossus, I realize that this story is reading more and more like hard science fiction rather than cosmic horror. But I really don't see any way around having the technical details of the problem at the mining outpost, the operation of the hopper he's supposed to be taking to get help from a larger settlement, or how he jerry-rigs parts of it with an old Apollo lunar rover -- it's essential to the growing sense of menace to understand why he's in deeper and deeper trouble, and I don't know how many horror readers are familiar enough with issues of astronautics to intuit how dangerous the lunar surface is, even for someone with equipment half a century more advanced than what the Apollo astronauts took to them, without it being explicitly laid out for them.
At the same time, I'm constantly aware that if it doesn't read like horror, a lot of the gatekeepers are apt to assume that someone sent a straight-up hard-sf story to them by mistake, or without bothering to read the guidelines, and never even get to the point where the protagonist encounters the terrible faceless colossus and all its existence implies, or the terrible effect it has upon his mind.
Of course at least part of this problem could be the problem of being a beginner. When one has established a reputation in the business, there's an implicit trust that one knows what one is doing, that just isn't there for a beginner. The established figure is assumed to know what he or she is about, and is trusted until it becomes clear the story is simply not suitable. By contrast, the beginner, or relative beginner, has to prove up front that yes, he or she is worth being given the time of day.
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