Wednesday, April 25, 2012

All my life's a rejection

That mantra seems to be the life of a writer, or at least of this writer. My most recent addition to this remarkable collection of rejections is for a humourous little story I wrote, ostensibly for Tesseracts 16: Parnassus Unbound, called Occupational Hazards, a tale about drinking inappropriate quantities of tea at inappropriate times while trying to meet deadlines.

Mark Leslie Lefebvre, good egg and hugely knowledgeable fellow, wrote, among other things:
While, traditionally, this is a "rejection" you should know that your story stood above hundreds of others that were sent in and is something you should be proud of. I am honoured to have been able to seriously consider it and look forward to seeing where it ends up being published.
So, taking that encouragement to heart, I've sent it out to a large American magazine, submitted through their online form, and will wait the few days it's allegedly going to take to hear that 'no, sorry, not quite right for us.'

Positive attitude, eh?

Well, one thing good about having written a pack of short stories this past few months is that, if nothing else, I'll have another bunch to put together into a collection. And then I can have reviewers on Goodreads make comments like they did for And the Angels Sang:
  • needlessly densely written.
  • Stephens’ creations pool into a cooling diversion while being highly meromictic. (What the blazes does that mean?)
  • The short, sci-fi stories contained in this book shuffled between really interesting and engrossing to boring and difficult to follow.
  • dealt with some potentially controversial religious themes.
Yeah, definitely not feeling the love. My daughter says I need to dumb down my writing. I shake my head and think that sounds dumb.

Whatever. I keep writing in the closet and stuffing the pages out under the door.

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