A rejection email this time. The hard part is that it was for I believe is my best story yet. Not to fear, it's already off to another journal.
The ideas are popping inside my head. I'm starting to believe in this novel thing. Unfortunately I'm swampped at work with stuff that uses the same part of my brain as writing. So I've not written much these days. Soon the arc will swing the other way. I see the energy ready to leave limbo.
The inkarting section of this website has been taking up all my time and energy. The updates themselves aren't too bad, but tracking down all the info is time-consuming. To fix that I built a program to monitor a list of URLs. The program was easy, but it took several days to create the URL baselines. That's done now. This should free up time and energy for writing.
Another email. Another rejection. This story wasn't as important to me as the last one, but it hurts just the same.
Another email. Another rejection. No I didn't screw up. I really did get another rejection email today. This story is half-way in importance between the last two stories that were rejected. This one hit me hard though. I was getting excited to get back to my writing and this side-tracked me. I'm feeling better now, but it's too late to start writing tonight. I'm too tired. Tomorrow.
YES, ANOTHER ONE! It's strange how these things effect me. This one was for my favorite story so far, but I was less upset about this one than the last few. Weird.
AAARRRGGGHHH!!! Yet another rejection for what I thought was a pretty good story. This one however came with a reason. Most rejections are form letters. The journals just don't have the time to write a critique of every story they get. The editor added a note to this one saying that he didn't like stories told in the present tense. That's helpful in a couple ways. First, it shows the arbitrary nature of the decision process. Second, it lets me know that my story was given enough attention to come to such a decision. This sounds like faint praise, but with all the rejection form letters lately even negative attention is welcome.
I submitted a couple of the recently rejected stories to new journals today, and have what I think will be a great story forming in my head. It's amazing how quickly I go from thinking that I'll never get anything published to thinking that these journals will thank me for sending them such great stories.
I attended a league race at gokartracer and got my butt kicked. See the Racing Section for the horrible details.
I worked on the new story today. This is fun. This story is so much more "me" than my previous stories. It's by far the funniest story I've written. It has a sort of elegant goofiness, or perhaps gothic slapstick is a better description.
This is a bit scary. The story that started out so much me has turned mighty ugly. First the character that I identified as "the bad guy" turned out to be the most evil son-of-a-bitch I've ever written. Evil to the point of I am uncomfortable putting down on paper the things he does and thinks. The "the good guy" turns out to be not so nice himself. For a couple days I tried to steer both of them back to the land of light-hearted fun but they refuse to go. I considered giving up on this story, but now I'm thinking that the only way to get rid of this stuff is to write it down. Sort of a literary exorcism.