thick skin report

I received a rejection for my story “Travel Light” this week. I had seen a call for submissions at New Pages: Classifieds that sounded like it might be suitable, and I sent in the story.

Apparently it wasn’t a good fit; I got a form rejection in my email. But I’m not too broken up. As I recall, it was mostly a spontaneous submission, and the story is out at a couple of other places now too.

So I soldier on.

bad grammar at work

You may remember the post I did some time back about the percentage of sentence fragments in my recently published story “The Lonely Road.” I determined that nearly a quarter of that story was ungrammatical.

Of course I had to do it with “Open Country: an allegory” too. I made a rough count last night (whilst drinking a semi-sweet red wine, so don’t hold me to the numbers). My violations weren’t as serious as in the first story. I counted 108 sentences and 9 fragments in the latter story. Once again, I counted fragments that were dialog to be whole sentences, so once again, it could have been worse.

The editors didn’t blanch a moment over my many violations. Makes me wonder whose advice I should listen to and whose to ignore.

Okay, my rant is over.

“Open Country: an allegory” is now published

This is another of my stories that snuck into publication sooner than I expected. “Open Country: an allegory” popped up yesterday at About Place Journal. They had told me that they would send me an official email with all kinds of legalese in it before the story appeared. But they didn’t, and it did.

So take your fine self over there if you’re so inclined and give the story a read. Then let me know what you think.

runaway writing

Last summer, when I ran my first 5K, I knew (as I was plodding along, surprised at myself) that I would somehow incorporate running into one of my Fathers and Sons stories. I wasn’t sure just how at the time, but I realized that this sport was going to take up a large part of my life, and I figured I ought to put the experience to work.

Fast forward to April. I completed the Trolley Run in Kansas City last month, and I finally felt I was ready to begin that running story. Now, there are a couple of things you need to know. First, unless a plot bursts fully formed in my mind (and I’m not sure that has ever happened), I tend to “accumulate” a story in pieces. Images present themselves. Bits of dialog. A theme that seems worthy of developing. I collect these bits and copy them into a file that seems suitable until the story itself begins to gel. When I reach some intangible tipping point, I generally start writing the first draft of the story, knowing that it will evolve from there, sometimes in far different directions than I ever imagined.

The second point is that the Trolley Run was a watershed for me in many ways. When I first began trotting around the dog park with my Border Collie a year ago, I couldn’t conceive the notion that I could run a quarter mile, much less the 3.1 miles of an entire 5K. But I thought that if I stuck with it, pushed myself farther, and kept my eyes on a goal, maybe, just maybe, I could do it. I set the Trolley Run this year as my goal. (I didn’t know at the time that it was 4 miles long, longer than a regular 5K.)

The running story continued to accumulate, and the general outline of the plot revealed itself to me. Basically, a son it taking up running, which is an activity his father doesn’t share, and though this is a good thing in general, it becomes another thing that divides the two. (My working title right now is “Runaway” with multiple possible meanings, of course.) I thought that the Trolley Run, which is an annual event of some renown here in Kansas City, would be a good setting for my running story. Thus I had to wait until I had done the Trolley Run before I began the story in earnest.

Well, I completed the Trolley Run, and last weekend I started on the story. Even though I’ve done a half dozen 5Ks and three 10Ks, and even though my afternoon runs are generally far longer than 4 miles, the Trolley Run had become my psychological barrier. Because it was the goal I had set for myself a year ago, it was far more meaningful for me to complete than any of the other runs I’ve done. Well, I burst through that barrier (at a pretty decent pace for my ability, even setting a PR), and while I’m not sure that’s given me any insight to my story, it’s given me the raw, real-world material I needed.

I had reached the tipping point. As I said, I started on “Runaway” over the weekend, and I think I made pretty good progress on it. I’ve mentioned here before that I really need to devote some effort to working out the timeline of these stories. Three generations of men, spanning a lot of years, but so many of the stories are particular moments in their lives, not sweeping themes. How old is the central character in each story? When was he born? When does it have to take place so that subsequent (and prior) moments fall in line properly? Does it make sense that he is this or that age when this or that happens? And so on.

Right now, I can write most of these stories without obsessing too much over that. But someone needs to tell me to buckle down and work out the timeline.

(I’m training now to run a half marathon in October. It’s my new psychological barrier. Yikes!)

“Open Country: an allegory”

So I spent Sunday at my cabin in the Ozark woods. My wife and I planted forty trees (most will die, alas), I threw a lot of rocks in a hole that is threatening to wash out my spillway, I cleaned the flotsam from my dam overflow drain, I fed the birds, I discovered that a goose is now nesting on small island in my pond (nice!), I spent some precious time in a comfy chair on a shady porch overlooking a sparkling lake, and I liberated a few cedars from their earthly toil.

Then I came home and found an email waiting for me from About Place Journal. They said that they love my submission of “Open Country: an allegory” and intend to publish it in their next issue. Nice way to end a weekend, but I immediately re-read my story because I’m always surprised when someone actually likes my stuff.

A lot of people worry that a writer will use them as a character in their stories. In this case, I worry that people will think the character in my story is me. True, there are many parallels. My character has a small cabin in the Ozark forest, and I have a small cabin in the Ozark forest. My character likes to drink too much beer around a campfire and get talkative. I like to drink too much beer around a campfire and get talkative. My character worries about forest fires burning down his precious cabin. I worry about forest fires burning down my precious cabin. My character cuts down cedar trees to help prevent fires from spreading. I cut down cedar trees to prevent fires from spreading.

But the subtitle of my story is “an allegory” and it’s pretty blatantly the case. I think from the opening line even the dullest reader can figure out what I’m doing. I had fun writing this in part because I had very clear direction from my theme and in part because I could draw so much experience from my own life. But I am not this man. What the allegory is standing in place of is not a value I hold. Yet I found it so perfect for my nefarious purpose and so tangible in my experience that I had to go with it. (When the piece goes online I’ll post a link and you can see if this paragraph makes any sense at all.)

I’ve flirted with this idea for a long time, and I had even considered it as background for one of the characters in my Fathers and Sons stories, but I dropped that idea early on. I wouldn’t want to write a sustained character who is like this guy. The story itself, once I started the actual work on it, came together quickly (unlike many of my stories that can take years to “finish”). It relies a great deal on dialog, which I don’t consider to be one of my strengths (assuming I have any strengths, of course). But I must have done something right because the editors liked it.

I had submitted my story to this magazine because they had made a call for stories about trees, (thank you Duotrope’s Digest) and as the allegory, cedar trees are central to the story. I figured my nefarious purpose would quickly disqualify the story, and I was already looking around for other possible markets for it (dealing in social justice). In fact, I was about ready to start resubmitting it around, but my busy weekend got in the way. And then the email arrived.

So I’m doing cartwheels down the hallways of my mind right now. Thanks for your understanding.

The Here Within There

“To me, a road map is the printed lyrics to a siren’s song where highways and rivers are like stanzas, and the little circles indicating towns are notes — some flat, some sharp, a few off-key.”

from Here, There, Elsewhere

by William Least Heat-Moon

I used to think I was peculiar for my love of maps and the desire they spur in me, but I’ve come to see enough references like this in my reading to understand that there is a certain mindset that loves to sit before them and plan imaginary trips, guessing what the road will be like and what might be seen along the way.

Is it the same for you?

favoring fragments

Just for fun, and possibly to indulge the impatient iconoclast in me, I did a count of the sentence fragments in my recently published story “The Lonely Road.” As you probably know, I’m not a great adherent to the so-called “rules” of grammar (and usage and punctuation and even spelling sometimes) in creative writing. I believe that we creative writers have a free pass on these rules and that, in fact, we are the vanguards of the evolution of our language. It’s our task to break the rules and create the new forms.

Now, I don’t set out to deliberately break the rules when I write. (Take, for example, that last sentence, in which I blithely split an infinitive. It sounded right, and I wrote it, and then realized that it was “wrong” afterward.) I simply write to tell the story in my head, casting my sentences in whatever way I think is most effective. And I seem to favor sentence fragments.

So I sat down with the published version of “The Lonely Road” and did the count. (Published and thus “official.”) There are approximately 259 sentences in the story. (I was interrupted several times in my count, so these are rough numbers.) Of those, 195 are whole, grammatical sentences, leaving 64 that are sentence fragments. Nearly a quarter of that story is grammatical error!

And I counted one-word sentences in dialog as whole sentences, which I think is okay, but it could have been worse, people!

I’ve had past arguments online (primarily at Poets and Writers but also on random blogs) in which my advocacy of “creative construction” was thoroughly and authoritatively denounced. A writer must know the rules of grammar before he (or even she) may break them! I am told. I happen to think that’s hogwash. Even balderdash. But I’ve made that argument on this blog several times before, and I’ll spare you my fulminations now. You’re welcome.

Anyway, back to my point. When the editor returned my story for review, she had proposed adding one hyphen and two commas. They were not required, she pointed out, and not even necessarily “correct,” but she thought their addition made the story more clear in those places. I agreed, and we added them, and that’s how it appeared in print. And that’s all we did. She never said anything about the preponderance of sentence fragments in the story. Not a word. Not one. At all.

This, of course, makes me think that the acolytes of the rules are the ones who are mistaken. In fact, not one of my handful of published stories ever received a grammar-based objection from an editor. And when I read fiction (both of the masters and the emergents) I see the rules of grammar broken regularly.

So am I thumbing my nose at those acolytes. Probably. May I do that? Certainly. Do I enjoy it? Immensely.