Submitting Stories While Blindfolded

So I wonder if I should include a little disclaimer on my cover note when I send out my next batch of story submissions:
If you’ve already seen a version of this story—or, worse, have it in your slush pile and haven’t gotten around to rejecting it yet—please forgive me. My hard-drive died and I lost [...]

Bug in Your Eye

I was walking east toward Broadway—a light wind, a rising sun, just minding both my own business and the occasional garden hose washing the beer off the sidewalks—when I turned the corner and had this uplifting moment of clarity. It was about writing, and not. About life, and more. A perfect moment, really, in which [...]

Reject

It’s hard not to feel like a top-notch reject on a muggy Monday after a day at work when you got only a third of the things done you wanted to get done and you want chocolate ice cream but refrain and get healthier (?) fruit sorbet instead and you part the soupy air to [...]

Awkward Elevator Moments: Literary Agent Edition

It’s an especially auspicious start to your day at your office job when you run into a literary agent who rejected you on the elevator.
When introduced, hope he does not recognize your name, smile, and say simply, “It’s nice to meet you.” Do not say, “Why didn’t you give my [...]

Writers Helping Writers, Assumed Rejections, and Cake!

Good things first: e got me a “Happy Book Deal” cake this weekend and even as I type this I want another slice. (No, really, where is it? I want another slice.) I asked him if I would get a cake for every book deal and he said yes. Isn’t he wonderful? I hope this [...]

Things That Have Not Happened

I did not get a residency to the writers colony in the old haunted mansion where I would have most likely been unable to sleep for fear of seeing/hearing/feeling the fingers on my face of ghosts, and, besides, I don’t have the vacation time at work to do something like that, and, not to mention, [...]

Why Not?

Early this morning, when I stumbled out of the bedroom all bleary-eyed second-guessing my idea of getting up before the sun has come up, I sat myself down at the table to check my email. It’s a little maneuver I do to keep from going back to sleep on the couch. This morning my email [...]

Good Morning, Rejection

I woke up far earlier in the morning and blearily checked my email only to find a rejection from one of my favorite literary magazines. I promptly went back to sleep.
But I forced myself up again. I have the best of intentions to write—and write hard—today. So far so good. I try to trick myself [...]

This Year’s Recycled Wisdom: Writing Is Hard

It’s so close to the end of the year, I can reach out and touch it. I feel like I should update my About Me—there’s something a little giddy about that list, blasé, that doesn’t feel like me any longer as I peer ahead into 2008. Also it’s out-of-date. A decision to rewrite a certain [...]

Vent

vent /vɛnt/ (noun)
1. an opening, as in a wall, serving as an outlet for air, smoke, fumes, or the like. 2. an opening at the earth’s surface from which volcanic material, as lava, steam, or gas, is emitted. 3. Zoology. the anal or [...]

About My Lack of People Skills and My Propensity to Lose Gloves

I lost my gloves Friday. They were a mismatched pair, gone from my pockets somewhere near Rockefeller Center. One was from this pair, one from another pair entirely. I think it was while at lunch with two people I used to work with—I felt uncomfortable with myself, and this was before I lost the gloves. [...]

PSA from My Mother

This blog, in a desperate attempt to be more positive, should feature more voicemails from my mother. She has an extremely important job of helping people in trouble and in desperate situations fix their lives; I won’t go into detail except to say I am in awe of what she does each day, at how [...]

Outcome? Foggy

I did try. I got the answer yesterday. Though technically I think it’s a no, it is a no that leaves some options open. It’s a no that could turn into something, if I kept my head up and kept working at it.
Of course, initially, all I heard was no. And, of course, the news [...]

To Try, or Not Try

Lately I’m afraid of opportunities. Reluctant, really, to put myself out there—again.
Pros:

“You never know unless you try.”
“Third (fourth? fifth?) time’s a charm.”
What could it hurt? (See Cons.)

Cons:

It could really, really hurt.

My problem is I get my hopes up. Sometimes I think I’m better off without thinking so much. I need to relax.
The thing about me, [...]

Birthday Letters

Dear Oral Surgeon About to Extract My Mother’s Teeth This Morning:
You will have your drill in her mouth at the very minute I was born. She called to warn me last night. She is in such pain, and this is the only time her appointment could be scheduled—though she felt bad that it would occur [...]

Keep At It (The Yearly Smack on the Head)

This past year has been a long, slow stall for me. I like to brush off the rejections—I tell myself I’m brushing them off—but I wonder if instead I’m hanging on so I can mull over them later when no one’s looking. Truth is, for a year I’ve written things of no real consequence. Ghostwriting [...]

The One Paragraph I’d Save from a Burning Building

Yesterday, I happened upon a paragraph from my graduate thesis, which had been a 500-page novel about my family. The paragraph was in a document from November of 2002. The last time I thought consciously about this project may well have been in November of 2002. I had forgotten that this paragraph existed. How could [...]

Someday

I live for somedays, for promises kept, for dreams come true, for the resignation letter and the U-Haul truck. I believe in the windfall, the leap like a bungee jump, the how-could-it-hurt, and then after, when I fall and hit my head and it does hurt, the how-could-it-keep-hurting if I try again?
My pictures of the [...]

No (No. 968)

The spec sample I wrote over the weekend wasn’t chosen.
I don’t have much else to say beyond that except that I’m disappointed, though not horribly so, though two days have passed and I’m still trying to shrug it off. Any kind of rejection tends to sting me, even if it’s for a project I didn’t [...]

Dreamy

We were talking about struggling for a dream last night. Maybe it came from watching The Black Dahlia and immediately after the Hollywood auditions for American Idol. Actors and other performers have it bad. I don’t envy them, being rejected to their faces, sometimes, oftentimes, with a cruelty that makes those unsigned query rejections [...]