Play It Again, Sam

I seem to recall writing a rather lengthy post in my last update, a good deal of which being dedicated to my thoughts on rejections, and how to take them. It's funny, you see, because just a few hours later, here I am, writing another one.

This one won't be as lengthy, however. I promise.

In the wee hours of the morning, I watched my submission to Lightspeed Magazine climb the reading queue (they have one of those fancy submission tracking systems) until it reached the Number One spot. About a half an hour later, I received an email from Mr. John Joseph Adams.

It was a rejection.

But, I must say, it was the best one I've ever received. Here it is:

Dear Joseph,

Thanks for submitting this story, but I'm going to pass on it. It's nicely written and I enjoyed reading it, but overall it didn't quite win me over, I'm afraid. Best of luck to you placing this one elsewhere, and thanks again for sending it my way. I hope you'll try us again with something else.

Not too shabby, eh?

I have to admit, I was all smiles after this one. Given the nature of the blog post I had written mere hours before, how could I be anything else? After all, rejection is a necessary evil in this subjective industry, so the worst thing you can do is let these things get to you. As I've said before, I've let rejections get to me, and it cost me weeks (sometimes months) of my life where I felt too defeated to write anything. Those are weeks and months I can never get back, time that I could have spent honing my craft, submitting stories, fielding rejections.

When you think about it, it's a pretty sweet business, isn't it? Most of the people running short story markets are writers themselves, and they understand what it means to suffer rejection. A select few of them are too busy to personally respond, and so was born the dreaded From Rejection Letter. But there are two sides to every coin, and because the form rejection is so dreaded and so common, the Personal Rejection Letter has become more than the sum of its parts; now it's something of an uplifting event, if viewed through the right prism.

The beauty of it is that the people running these markets know that the personal rejection isn't so much a  polite courtesy, but an uplifting event for a writer who hasn't sold yet (or hasn't sold much) and so they take time out of their busy days to send these letters--these brief, two- or three-sentence apologies--and give us the next-best thing to a sale.

Thanks, Mr. Adams. Your letter made my day.

As for the story...well, this is the third rejection for "The Machine," which makes me sad, because I think it's a great story that's well written and a lot of fun to read. Oh well. As always, the story barely had time to take its coat off before I handed it directions to its next market. Should hear back in a few weeks on that one.

That's all for today (hopefully).

Rejected!

I'm starting to get used to this.

I received another rejection today, this time from the fine folks at Clarkesworld magazine. It was a form rejection, so I don't even that to be happy about.

Oh well. It has already been submitted elsewhere.

Update

Remember my post a few days back about how I submitted the wrong draft of "The Machine" to a major professional market? Well, it got down to crunch time yesterday, to the point where the online submission tracker the magazine uses (which is a godsend, by the way) showed my story in the 24th position in the queue.

So I logged onto the magazine's forum and made a public plea, hoping that maybe the editor would see and save the day. It's a desperate move, I know, but I was, in fact, desperate. Finally got a response today that the editor found my email in his spam folder (??) but would gladly go ahead and delete the bad story immediately, clearing room for me to submit the correct version whenever I like.

Ready for this? Here it goes: SIGH.

There, all better. OK, so now "The Machine" in all of it's proper, correct, final-draft version glory is sitting in the queue in position 131. And now it's just a matter of waiting.

I can't tell you how relieved I am. If it's going to be rejected, let it be rejected at its best. Then I can have no complaints or regrets.

EDIT: I just checked my submission tracker on Duotrope (sign up and use it; it doesn't just help you, it helps others who want to know statistics for a market) and I realized that I suddenly have four stories out on the market. The Bright Walk, The Machine, Magic Words, and The Catina are all at different markets. It seems like just the other day I was complaining that I only had one out there...now there are four, and I have another one nearing the end of the first draft, and some really killer ideas marinating in my mindgrapes...hmm. Maybe I'll turn out to be a prolific writer after all!

D'oh

OK, I hate talking publicly about making stupid mistakes, because it's basically like tripping over your own feet when nobody saw, but then posting a video of it on Youtube. I could totally get away with this dumb mistake without telling you guys...but where's the fun in that?

So, I submitted a story to a pro market the other day, and then came to the nightmarish realization that I had sent them the wrong draft. It's a long, stupid story as to how this happened, but the gist of it is that the story, in its first draft, had one ending...and the second draft had an entirely different one. The problem is that the draft I sent them is sort of a transitional piece, with the new ending not making sense in context. This problem is obviously corrected in the REAL final draft...but that's not the one they have.

An email has been dispatched to the magazine, so fingers crossed that they get to it before they get to my flubbed manuscript. But hey, no matter what, at least now I have a story to tell in interviews when I'm a rich and famous author!

Finished!

Well, I didn't meet the Sunday night deadline for finishing "The Machine".

Where do I begin? Well, I re-read the story about four times on Saturday, and it felt fine, but I was concerned with the ending, which felt kind of flat. But I didn't revise anything, or write a single word of prose the whole day. Sunday comes, and I'm still not in the mood. And believe it or not, this is strange for me.

Sunday night, I get the radical idea to change the tense of my story. It was written in first-person past....but in the original writing, I unconsciously slipped into first-person present, and I really liked it, but the forty-five hundred words before it were all first-person past, so instead of changing the whole thing, I just changed the ending.

But on Sunday I say "Why not?" and go back and change the entire story's tense.

I think it reads better this way, actually, but I still need an ending. I sat in front of my laptop all day today (quite literally) and got nothing done. I even had my brother come over (he's a writer, too) and we brainstorm, but come up empty.

Out of the blue, it hits me. I have my ending. I have my ending, and I have my story.

And now that story in the slush pile at a certain magazine. I will not break my personal code (the one I broke last time) and say where. But don't worry: this market is among the fastest in the land, and if I'm rejected, I'll hear back in a day or two, so you'll all know before the end of the week, most likely, what the outcome is. Of course, if they want to publish it...it could take a little longer.

ANYWAY. I'm just very relieved to be done. I have literally looked at this story every day for the last two weeks, and I'm about as sick of it as a person can be. It got to the point tonight where I couldn't look at it and be happy about it, and I think that's when I've held a story too long. I would have just started making changes for change's sake (God I hope I didn't do that last night...). Is the story perfect? No, but I think it's good, and I think it can stand with any other story in any professional market.

Let's just hope our friends at the magazine agree.

Cleaning out the Trunk, and Other Musings

"Trunk" is probably the wrong word here, because the stories I uncovered today aren't really trunk stories--they're just unfinished stories that were left unfinished (and subsequently forgotten) when I let the rejections get to me earlier this year.

Looking at them now, I see a ton of what I call Bits 'n' Pieces, or a bunch of individual documents that include plot summaries, scene snippets, or entire chapters of various different projects I was working on at the time. This folder reminds me of Prypiat twenty years after Chernobyl. Some things are abandoned mid-sentence, as if my email box chimed as I was writing, and I paused to open what would be the rejection that finally sent me over the edge.

Man, what was I thinking? How did I let a few stupid rejections stop me from writing this stuff? The wonderful fantasy story that had me so excited last year is here, ripe, waiting to be plucked; the wizarding school story I wrote (not like Harry Potter, don't worry) is sitting here, almost finished, and quite slickly-written. I even stumbled across the first draft of a dragon story that's actually complete, just awaiting revisions. Oh, and there's a story called "Magic Words" that is complete, ready, done. It's even been rejected once.

What the hell happened to me? I was churning out stories and ideas like a madman. Why the hell did I stop?

This is good. This is good stuff. I'm going to start tearing into these stories, see what's worth keeping, and get the ball rolling. I was worried that I only had one (soon to be two) stories on the market--this should take care of that in rather short order.

Oh, and I finished the second draft of "The Machine" today. I'm eager to start a third draft, but it's after 5pm on a Friday, so I have all weekend to get it polished up proper before anybody would ever see it anyway, so I might as well take my time with it. But the goal DEFINITELY is to have it ready for submission come Sunday night. That's a promise I'm making to me right now.

Or not. We'll see. haha.

A Second Revision Runs Through It (It's Puntastic!)

Have I mentioned how puns are the guerrilla warfare of comedy? If you've got nothing else going, just hide a few in a sentence or two, and BAM! your unsuspecting victim never knew what hit 'em.

Anyway, we're not here to talk about my comedy chops. We're here to talk about the revisions on my story "The Machine", which have gone fairly well so far, if a bit slow. I started the process with a word count of just under 5,000 words at the start of the day yesterday, and after the addition of a major passage that I believe needed to be added, the count actually climbed to 5,200.

But, I got my head on straight after that, killing awkward phrases and clunky sentences like a viking gone a-raiding, and brought the count down to about 4,900. This revision, however, isn't finished, so one of my goals today is to at least finish the second draft.

I should note that I'm excited about this story. As I tighten up the prose, my voice is strong and clear, and I think kind of poetic in places. I'm sure this story, when it's ready to go, will suffer rejections just like any other, but this is another one that, at least for now, feels like it's good enough to find a home in a professional market. I don't say that about everything I write, but I mean it about this one.

Smooth Sailing

I've been a productive little Joey this morning! After totally screwing up my sleep schedule lately, I thought I had it all turned around as of yesterday, but there I was, awake at three in the morning again. So instead of pouting, I turned on the laptop and got crackin'. }

Well, OK, "crackin'" isn't the right word. I didn't really get started on my writing until five or so (maybe sooner...it's hard to say. But that's a good thing!), but it's almost 9:20 now, and I've got nearly 1800 more words in my story! Yay!

And, surprisingly, I don't think I'm done for the day. Usually when I approach the vicinity of 2000 words in one sitting, that's about it, and all else produced from that point is likely to end up deleted the next day. But I feel good. Maybe I'll take some of that good energy and put it into the first revisions of the last story I finished, "The Machine". We'll see.