The Blogosphere

I have just swam the literary blogosphere (Jesus I hate that word) and am now surfacing, gasping for air. Holy. God.

Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, has a blog. Most are interesting. Some are helpful. And others are just full of pretentious dicks. Which is to be expected, considering the kind of blog it is. I'm not going to name names, because that's a form of dickery. But let's just say I would not want to get a beer with these people.

There are some that are helpful but also very... rude. Well, rude may be too strong of a word. Janet Reid's blog, the Query Shark, for example, is a wonderful resource for crafting a great query. She will often go to lengths to say 'this is what you're doing wrong with your query'. But her responses to other bloggers and questions and the like? If you get more than 'no' from her, you have just performed a miracle. But she's a busy woman, and its all from the goodness of her heart. Her icy, blackened heart. So I can understand it.

I think I'll send in a query to the shark and see what she says. If it even gets posted, that is. She says 99% of them don't get on the board.

I think I can make that other 1%.

Wordslinger-117 out.

In the running!

So a magazine sent me an email today. It looked something like this:

Dear Michael,

This letter is to inform you that your submission has passed first reading and will be read by the full editorial board in October. It is not an acceptance letter. You will be notified of our final decision in early November.

Important: Please respond to this notification confirming that this submission is not under consideration elsewhere.

All the best with your writing,

Editor

And my thoughts? Hell YES I will wait for another couple months if that mean's there's a chance it will be accepted!

And the terrible thing? I started reading through it again and, in about the sixth paragraph, slapped my forehead. There was one jumble of words that missed my editing. BUT that's okay, right? Because that's what editors are for, right?

Right. But that's good news, though. Once again, it's that feeling: somebody who I don't know read my work, and they liked it enough to push it forward.

Next step? SELL something. Sweet Jesus, getting paid for my writing? I'll feel like I've up and robbed somebody, as sure as I put a gun to their head, got twenty bucks, and shoved a manuscript into their hands.

-Wordslinger-117 out.

BOOM! Sphinx!

Rejection letter number... okay, so I don't keep track. But I open it up and BOOM! Yummy! Personalized. And not just personalized, my friends, but edited.

Edited. They went through my manuscript, wrote down notes, and sent it back. This is the first time my work has ever been edited by somebody in the profession, and it feels nice. Better than nice, I feel like a pro.

Most of it was getting away from the passive 'was' in my gerunds. There was a bit about cleaning up the F-bombs, but that's probably more the editor's taste, which I can appreciate. It makes publishing it in a magazine a lot easier. A couple things of motivation and continuity, but overall I get the feeling the story made it to the 'maybe' pile, and possibly even into the 'short list' pile for consideration.

What's more, this is the short story that is part of the larger universe. A short set before the novel. The one I always thought of as incomplete, probably never would do well. Seems I was mistaken! Oh ho HO!

So, possibly the best rejection letter I've had since I started. What I need to do now is edit according to the recommended changes, sit on it, re-edit, and send it off again. I've got a feeling that this one is a winner.

Wordslinger-117 out.

The Elements of Shit I Already Know

I picked up a copy of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. I don't want to sound like a know it all, or a pompous... something, but as I go through the little book that everyone rants is mandatory for all writers, I find myself saying "yeah, I knew that" over and over.

Don't get me wrong, I did find a few things that I was unaware of, and there are a couple good tips I've picked up. But at the same time, I know most of this shit already. I know to put an 's after a name that ends with an S such as Chris's. To be fair, I didn't know that the same does not apply to "ancient proper nouns" such as Jesus or Zeus.

Having gone through 3/4 of the book now and learning only a few new things, I wonder: did I just pay attention in English Comp. as compared to most other people? Am I just good at this? Like Neo and the Matrix, can I do better than everyone else, right from the get-go, while they work their asses off?

Probably not. But I can dream, right? Fuck yeah. I'm awesome.

Wordslinger-117 out.

Goodnight, Sweet Prince...

Borders is filing for Chapter 7. Everything must go, all assets liquidized.

As a former Borders employee, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand: BURN IT ALL! TO THE GROUND! Dance around the funeral pyres of the establishments, lifting your wailing voices to sing the ruin of their corporation! I remember working and Borders and absolutely despising upper management. I hated the corporate rules handed down by some unseen force to essentially make my life suck. $6.50 an hour to have your soul constantly eroded was the going rate.

On the other hand, I had fun. A lot of fun. I met some of the coolest people I ever have working there. Borders Books, Music and Cafe in Stony Brook, New York had great people working there (for the most part. I'm talking about YOU, Jillian! Hater! (actually I loved Jill, she was cool... for a hater)). I managed to get paid for putting books on shelves, screwing around with friends, and occasionally helping people who didn't know how to type things into the Info computer. The hours sucked, the pay was shit, and the boss was a soulless she-beast who would only lumber out of her office to yell at us, but I had a great time working there.

So it is an end of an era. Eric over at Pimp My Novel has said he expects this to hasten the transition into new media, to make print books secondary to electronic. Probably true, much to my chagrin. It's a little scary, trying to get into this world, this career, especially as everything is changing so radically.

But like those corny motivational posters say, ride the wave of change or be crushed under it.

R.I.P. Borders

1974-2011

Wordslinger-117 out.

I've read that one before.

Another day, another two rejection letters. FORM rejection letters. The worst was from Lightspeed Magazine, a magazine that seems to have some good shit. And I want my good shit in their shit.

Their notice was something like 'Thanks, but I'm going to have to pass. It just didn't work for me. Thanks and good luck'. This sounded familiar, so I look at my rejection letter from Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, and weeeelllll! Lookie here! Butter my butt and call me a biscuit, it is word for word the same letter!

Jesus H. Christ, come on. At least put a 'man' or 'bro' or something in there. Throw me a bone!

But like the man said, you gotta keep on keepin' on. Life's a garden, dig it? They haven't heard the last from me.

Wordslinger-117 out.

This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine...

I'm not going to do the whole credo about my rifle/blog. But I need to respect this bad boy some more. I may also have to invest in a the Twitter. See, I used that 'the' ironically, because it's what older people call it sometimes.

I should also not blog late at night. I get stupid.

So, on the writing front: another day, another submission, another reading. I went back and read 'There Will Come Soft Rains' by Ray Bradbury again. It is the pinnacle of what post-apocalyptic fiction can be, I think. Well crafted, with just enough visualization (some of it very stark, carries a lot of impact). You should read it, because it's awesome.

The more I go through the market for short stories, the more I find publications that don't publish profanity or violence. While I respect that it's their publication, they can do whatever the hell they want with it, I can't understand how you can rule out a good story because of these things. Profanity, when done correctly, makes dialogue real. Unless you're a seventy year old lady baking a cake for the church's bake sale, when you stub your toe you don't say 'Oh darn!'. You shout! 'FUCK!' or 'FUCK ME!' or 'MOTHERFUCKER!'. You can be the nicest person, try to live the cleanest, keep your language inoffensive, interjections care not one bit about these things.

Violence is perhaps even more bizarre to me. Any story must have conflict, otherwise its boring and nobody wants to read it. Conflict and resolution drive plot. Sure, there's the court room conflict, the lover's conflict, all kinds of conflict. But there is no baser form of conflict than violence.

That's just me bitching, though. While I have my reasons for thinking that, I'm sure the editors have their reasons for thinking otherwise, and their reasons are just as valid.

Probably.

But maybe not...

Wordslinger-117 out.

I can get published, but its a sonofabitch

No news really. I figured I should post to keep the cobwebs from building up again. Really been doing my best not to let this blog just become a random outpouring of crap from my life and focus more on me as a writer. Since that's the goddamned title of it.

Got a good rejection letter the other day (after submitting the story 10 months prior!). The gist was: good story, I would do this but it's good... BUT... not what we're looking for.

YOU'RE NOT LOOKING FOR GOOD STORIES?! Bullshit! Actually I do understand that it just doesn't fit with what they're looking to publish. Immediately after I got that letter I made my adjustments and sent it off somewhere else.

I also wrote my first 'lit' short story, and it was different. With sci-fi and genre, there's so much explanation. There's setting and history and blah blah blah to get out there so people have a sense of context, but with basic literary form, there's nothing to get out of the way. People know the world, they know the setting. All the stuff they see every day, I just get to put down the characters and what happens to them.

I also made a pitch to write an article on cracked.com - oh how the mighty have fallen! But I really enjoy that site, and I said to myself 'Hey, Michael, you're a funny guy, you can write, and you can tell decent dick jokes, maybe YOU should write something for them!'. I immediately responded 'You're damn right I'm funny and I can write' so... here we are. It is in no sense of the word being an author, but it is writing.

And I think that would suit me just fine for the time being.

Star Wars quotes can get you in trouble...

Nothing to do with writing today. But a case of not paying attention.

The town had a parade today. It was the usual affair: floats, people from the community, et cetera. I stood outside of work with some of the guys and watched it. The Star Wars fans were in attendance, people from the 501st Legion, of the Galactic Empire that is. Pretty cool, bunch of guys in storm trooper uniforms. And a Boba Fett. Always need the Fett man.

I said to one of them: "These are not the droids you're looking for. Move along."

"That only works on the weak minded!" He said through the storm trooper helmet. It was funny. The parade moves up a bit. They're near the end of the line.

The guy in the back of the formation was pretty tall. As Princess Leia says to Luke when she first meets him, I said in the general direction of the guy: "Aren't you a little short to be a storm trooper?"

The tall guy slowly looks over at me like I just said "Hey, ugly, I had sexual relations with your wife." I could tell he was not happy, even with the storm trooper helmet on.

One of the guys I work with, Frankie, says "Dude, that's not cool."

"What?"

"He only has one leg, bro."

The clone trooper in front of the tall one did indeed only have one leg. The other one was a prosthetic.

...fuuuuuuuuuck.

"I didn't... I mean, that wasn't..."

Frankie doesn't know many lines from Star Wars. So by the time I'm trying to explain that no, I wasn't picking on a guy for missing a leg from the knee down by calling him short, it's become one of those "whatever you say" moments.

So this is what George Kastanza felt like. So if anyone is reading this that's in Tallahassee's 501st Storm Trooper legion, Vader's Fist, please tell the clone trooper Lieutenant (the man had blue on his armor, he was a goddamn officer) that it was a complete misunderstanding.

Dear God, I will never quote Star Wars again.

At least not for another week.

Formatting be damned...

...it feels good to see my stuff in print. Well, in pixels.

My story went up today (http://www.necrologyshorts.com/2011/03/11/castle-heldeur/) and good God does it look good. There was some formatting that didn't transfer over from the way I wrote it, in basic manuscript format, but it doesn't really matter. Internal thoughts just aren't in italics. It gives them a Chuck Pala... Pahla... the guy who wrote Fight Club feel. (Chuck Palahniuk, by the way, very talented).

Now we get back to the hard stuff. Writing. Editing. That pain in the ass process of getting the story from my brain to the page. But for now; lets have a drink!