thick skin report – Mason’s Road

Have any of you ever received a rejection from Mason’s Road? I got one this morning for my Fathers and Sons story “The Most Natural Thing in the World,” and I can’t decide if it was personalized and honestly encouraging or if it was just a gently worded but automated rejection. The email said that while my story wasn’t the right fit for them, they were impressed by the writing and encouraged me to send them something else. (Alas, their submission period is now closed.)

That sounds almost sincere and almost automated. It was signed by “the Editors” rather than by an individual. The email did specify the title of the story, but I’m leaning toward an automated rejection.

Well . . . onward!

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.

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.

a chance to chat

Okay, I’m really no good at this self promotion stuff, but I’m going to participate in an online chat as part of the promotion for the Temporal Elements anthology that recently published my story “Time Heals All.” You’re welcome to join if you’re interested.

All of the authors collected in the anthology have been invited to join, and I can’t say how many readers and others might log in as well. It might be a lively event, but given that it’s on Saturday night, it may be a ghost town, too.

Anyway, the fun begins at 7:00 p.m. Central time, and here is the link if you want to join. I understand that it won’t go live until fifteen minutes before it is to start. If you go there now it calls for a log in name and a password, but I’m told that the password will not be required for the actual chat.

So come along and toss me some softballs. I’ve never done this kind of thing before and could use some friends. (You are my friend, aren’t you?)

oops!

Over the weekend, being pretty much snowed in, I devoted some time to finding likely markets for some of my stories and submitting them. Among them was what sounded like a good publication for my Fathers and Sons story “When we were young and life was full in us.” The publication had a themed issued coming up dealing with “Milestones” and my story certainly deals with one of those. So I made the submission, hopeful and even a bit confident.

Then I went to Duotrope’s Digest to record the submission. And I learned that I had already submitted that same story to that same magazine about two weeks ago. Oops. I don’t know if that’s going to annoy the editors or not.

thick skin report

I received a rejection for a submission last week. This one was a little different in my experience. It was for my story “Velvet Elvis” which you know was already published in Bartleby Snopes more than a year ago. I had come across a listing calling for submissions of stories related to art and the creation of art, and it welcomed previously published works.

I figured I had nothing to lose, so I submitted. I suppose my snarky attitude toward the “art” in my story didn’t sit right with the editor; she declined it in a form letter. That’s fine. It’s her call. I would have been glad to see it get a little more visibility and some fresh readers, but that wasn’t to be, as they say.

I think my attitude about reprints is that they are perfectly fine. If I can get my stories in front of a new set of readers, that seems like a worthy thing to do. The only drawback, as far as I can see, is that resubmitting already-published work could replace writing and submitting new work. That ain’t gonna happen to me. My “passion” for my Fathers and Sons stories is as hot as ever lately, and I even came up with an idea for a new story to add to the list. (The relationships between fathers and sons, you see, can be quite complex, and it can even involve mothers sometimes.)

I have two other of my previously published stories out for consideration at other mags. Perhaps they will see publication again.

always refining

My wife, who is discerning and who is my initial reader, had commented the other day that my Fathers and Sons story “The Lonely Road” isn’t so much about the relationship between a father and a son as it is between a husband and a wife. This is not a bad thing, of course. That is certainly worthy and fruitful subject matter. And while I do think the father son relationship is explored a bit there, between David feeling he has disappointed his father and David fearing he will disappoint his son, I can see that these are only tangential to the bigger plot. David is struggling with himself, and he, too, is lucky to have a discerning wife.

I think I mentioned here in a recent post that I’ve come to realize that my Fathers and Sons stories are pretty much actually chapters from what could be considered a slightly non-standard novel. They certainly all operate within the same fictional universe, and as I write them, I see the implications of them to each other. So I’m often going back to another of the stories to refine it now that I have a better picture of the universe they all exist in.

So these stories, which are intended to be able to stand alone, are also part of a bigger whole. And, for good or ill, that is how I comprehend them. I know what’s coming. I know what leads to any given point in each story. I know things the general reader does not, and so a general reader (even a certain discerning one who has read all of the stories in their clumsy draft form) can miss the overarching father and son relationship theme.

For example, in “The Lonely Road” I have David chastising himself for the “stupid thing” he has done. I think it’s pretty clear that this stupid thing is getting his girlfriend pregnant at 17 (and so David starts down the fatherhood road), but I have a whole story that recounts that incident: two healthy and excited teenagers at a quiet cabin in the Ozark forest. So I had that background in my mind as I wrote the later story. The reader, at this point, wouldn’t. (Though when the inevitable collection is published . . . ) And as much as I tried to hint at David’s relationship with his father in “The Lonely Road”, I did as well in that other story. (And it wasn’t easy fitting a father into a story about first-time sex between two kids, trust me.)

But I also have a whole story just discussing the importance of that cabin in the woods to the family. And a reader of “The Lonely Road” won’t know that at this point, but I do. This story does delve more deeply into the relationships between the two fathers and the two sons. But my point is (and I do have a point) that I need to be careful that I don’t assume that the reader knows as much as I do about the story, the characters, and their backgrounds.

“The Lonely Road”

And then, out of the blue, the acceptance came!

Over the weekend an email popped up in my box from Penduline Press. They’ve accepted my story “The Lonely Road” and it will be coming up on their site later this month!

I’m proud of this story. I think it may be the best realized of my Fathers and Sons stories. It’s one of those that I read through and can’t think of a single word I would change. Penduline Press had put out a call for stories with a theme of “Bound.” While I think themes can be helpful for targeting submissions, they are also generally vague enough to let anything or nothing apply. My story features a character who is struggling with some of the bonds in his life — at least that’s how I pitched it. And I guess the editors saw it that way too. This is the first of my Fathers and Sons stories to see print.

The stories in this cycle, however, have all been evolving as I’ve come to understand the universe they’re set in, so occasionally I will tinker with this or that detail in one of them to make it comply with the back story or some future event or character development or whatever. In a way, I imagine that whatever I’ve had to say about that universe in “The Lonely Road” is now carved in stone since it’s (going to be) in print. So it becomes the stillpoint in that universe, and however I tell the stories going forward will have to comply with whatever I’ve said in this story. Or not. I suppose I’m over stressing this.

I spent a good deal of time withdrawing the story from simultaneous submissions elsewhere. I hadn’t realized how many places I’d sent it.

Once the story is up, I’ll post a link.

deadlines and derring-do

Back in the days when I was guilty of “committing journalism” I had an editor first tell me the old truism that deadlines are a great way to foster creativity. I felt vaguely insulted by this notion at the time. It implied that creative people can be, essentially, lazy and that by having a deadline they are forced to overcome their inherent nature and produce in haste what they should have been producing in the leisure of their free weeks before.

Part of my affront to this observation was, I’m pretty sure, that deep down I knew it to be true, at least about me. (Probably not about you though.) I could dither and avoid the hard work of being creative with Olympic-level skill, and when faced with a looming and fast-approaching deadline, I could somehow muster the drive and call on the Muse and spew something that might pass for acceptable. (This particular editor would either rewrite everything I gave her or, if she also ran out of time, at least point out how she would have rewritten what I had given her if she’d had the chance. Our relationship did not last long.)

I recall these dark and troubling memories because I am currently writing to a deadline. For a long time (years, my friends, years) I had this idea for a story that could work double duty as an allegory for the sorry state of the nation. And then, sometime many, many months ago, I found a listing in the Calendar section of Duotrope’s Digest calling for stories on the very subject of my envisioned story. (Actually, on the metaphor I would employ in the story, not on the subject behind it.) In my imaginings of this story, I always saw it as suitable for a different magazine, one that had rejected one of my submissions but that had said kind things about it and encouraged future submissions. And some day I was going to write my allegory and submit it to this different magazine. And so my story existed in that awful state of a “sure thing” I would “get around to.” And there it remained for those years spoken of above.

Then came that Duotrope listing months and months ago. I realized it was time for me to write my allegory. Now, to be honest, I’m not sure how well my story will fit the theme of this other magazine. Sure, the overt subject matter is correct, but I think most readers, and certainly most editors, will quickly see past that and nod knowingly at the profound story behind the story. And that may be my undoing. I don’t get the sense that this other magazine is interested in social commentary, unless it were commentary about the overt subject matter, which it ain’t.

Yet here I am, working frantically on my story, trying to get it done in time for the submission deadline. (And, yes, I had let the story “simmer” for most of those months and months ahead of the deadline.) The bulk got written, somehow, but my problem had been that I didn’t know how to end it. The story is mostly a semi-drunken conversation between two friends around a campfire. (I seem to be writing a lot of gather-round-the-campfire stories lately.) The subtext of their words touches upon a lot of the rhetoric of the particular societal issue that troubles me enough to get creative about it. But that issue is not resolved in society, so I was not sure how it would be resolved in my story. (Is all of this coyness just too vague?)

But the deadline seems to have forced my creativity. The story is told, up to the end, and over the weekend a suitable ending revealed itself to me. (And I don’t suppose it is mere coincidence that this happened shortly after I finished re-reading Melville’s The Confidence Man, which employs a similar ending. Or non-ending, you might agree.)

So, gentle reader, I seem to have nearly completed a story (one that is not part of my Fathers and Sons cycle) with a couple of reasonable prospects of publication. All thanks to a vaguely insulting truism. I suppose I should be grateful for that.