Things done quickly

Well, I worked up one of my short-shorts and sent it off to Every Day Fiction. It took them all of about five hours to send it back, with comments. Let's just say ... not favorable. I have this thing about cliches ... I like them - I guess I like to try to find new angles at them, but the problem with that is that if you miss, you have nothing new at all, just the cliche itself. Note to self. Things done quickly have the dependable tendency to fail. Oh well. It was interesting to get comments back, and with the reviewers' names on them, no less. Always worth knowing who says what - helps to know who's worth listening to. Editing's a hard job, and sending the comments is extra work, so I'm impressed that they do it.

Me: 55 words; Them: 1 ... No

So, another day, another rejection letter. This one stung a bit more than the average, since it was a piece written specifically for the place I sent it. There's a cool little online litmag called "55 Words" that publishes, you guessed it, 55-word flash fiction. I hear people talk about novels and how impossible it can seem to write that much, but I think the opposite is true. It's relatively easy to tell a full and rich story in 10,000 words. Try it in 55 - now, that's a challenge. Anyway, regardless of their lack of interest in my particular story (or perhaps more so because of it), you should definitely check them out. Flash fiction is an interesting medium, and I'm looking forward to trying more of it.

A New Used Car, and Thanks, but No Thanks

Well, it's been a pretty full week here in the Valley of Corn, which has been blessed with remarkably good weather. I haven't seen a cloud in three days, meaning two things - first, I've become much more interested in my garden, and second, I've gotten nearly no real work done. However, I did manage to buy a car. The joy and rapture that is Craig's List came through for me once again, leading me to the car I now address as "Alice", a 1988 Chevy Corsica. I've always named any car I own after a woman's name with which I have no personal history, and I've always liked the name Alice for fairly obvious literary reasons, so it was an easy choice. This week, I also got a rejection letter in its most polite form, the "Thank you for your submission. It's a great piece but just not for us" letter. It was for an Earth Day related story, or at least one that I thought would tie in, and I kind of figured it had been rejected when Earth Day had come and gone, so it was no great disappointment. There is an art unto itself in deciding exactly where to send a story once you finish it, and I guess that's an art form in which I still need improvement. It was very nice to get personalized comments, though. That is rarer than most non-authors suppose. The vast, vast majority of manuscripts sent to editors are rejected, and almost all of those are thrown away or sent back with no comments at all, due to the time constraints of explaining why one piece is right and another is not. Editors are not English professors, and need all the time in their day just to read all the entries from crackpots like myself who think they can write for a living, so I do very much appreciate it when I get editorial comments, and make sure to take those comments very seriously.

I started work on a new short story today for the Susurrus Press anthology "I Am This Meat". The title is a Vonnegut reference, which in itself makes it something I want to be associated with, and I really like the idea. It's in a pretty early stage, so I'll be curious to see where the story goes and whether it becomes something or not. Hard to say when they're young, what they'll grow up to be.