The Daily Submission

Strangely, the daily ~~rejection~~ submission gives me more hope than might be expected.

To those who haven’t been following my log, I have started submitting flash fiction/poetry and short stories I’ve written on a daily basis, one per day, using Submittable. This means that, given the odds of being published with all the submissions coming in, I have been receiving a rejection a day.

I don’t focus on the rejections, strangely. I focus on the fact that I, at the moment, have six submissions (counting Prodigies at DAW, a manuscript for a novel) out.

I don’t know how much longer I can continue this exercise, because there are little readers fees nickeling and diming me — four dollars here, six dollars elsewhere. But so far, it’s given me hope.

Updates June 28, 2019

I’ve been raising the stakes on the final battle in Apocalypse, and there’s a body count. I could be done with the big revisions by end of Saturday, and then there’s a big read-through for flow, continuity, and things I forgot to tweak.

The book has become quite dark, but that’s to be expected given that it’s the freaking Apocalypse. I’m hoping it’s improved. I’m hoping it turns out really good.

I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to maintain the daily entry but I wrote my first piece of flash fiction yesterday.

Not much else to say — I have five submissions out (including Prodigies) and didn’t get any rejections yesterday.

Talk to you later!

No Excuses Today

I can’t avoid writing any more.

I had excuses the past couple days — “I’m tired from writing my final”; “I’m tired from driving down to Kansas City and back to visit my intern” — good excuses, both of them, But, honestly, I need to get back into the scheme of things.

Another excuse I’ve made to myself is that I’m used to working at the cafe, because it’s out of the house, it’s novel yet familiar, and there’s coffee (admittedly there’s coffee at home, but it takes work). I haven’t been able to work at the cafe lately because of the need for two screens at this point in editing. I need one screen to look at the marked-up Word copy of Prodigies and the other to make changes to the Scrivener copy (I keep my work on Scrivener because I can print out manuscripts and the like as needed.) We have an office, a claustrophobic affair with two big screens, but it’s easier to avoid working there because I can quit right after I’ve started without having to pack up, pay my tab, and drive home. (Those items are disincentives to leaving, believe me.)

Richard got the idea to utilize my old (and unused) iPad as a second screen for mobile editing. It’s a great idea, as it turns out — even though the screen is small, it will show enough information for me to work with. The software to do this, which must be installed on both the iPad and the PC, is called Duet Display and the details are here: Duet Display.

So I have no excuses today. I only have a meeting in the morning, and then I’m free. I have a system to work with to help with the dual display need, and I have a place to go.

Now to steel myself to the fact that I need to stack all chances against the poor residents of Barn Swallows’ Dance and kill a few.

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Note: I have gotten a couple of rejections since yesterday, but I’m okay with it. They weren’t big things, and one of them was hastily written to meet a theme. I’m still waiting on big stuff.

A Rejection a Day

I think I’m becoming more sanguine about rejection.

I’ll never like rejection, although one woman I met at Gateway Con said that she loved rejection because it meant another person read her stuff and knew her name.

I’ve been practicing my rejections. I’ve got Submittable (a submissions software) bookmarked on my computer and I try every day to submit a little something — a short story, flash fiction, a poem — to see if anything gets accepted. I’m hoping for acceptance. So far, I’ve been getting tiny rejections, and that’s not bad.

Of course, I know myself — I’ll be good about rejections till I get a major rejection. Like the one I’ll ~~probably~~ possibly get for Prodigies.

But even then, I know that a rejection doesn’t mean that my writing is bad, but could mean that my writing was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means that it’s time to examine the piece and try, try again.

About Waiting

Sometimes, all you can do is wait for something to happen.

You’ve put out resumes, or queries, or submissions to a literary magazine. You put yourself out there, and then you wait.

While waiting the interminable wait, how do you look at your venture? Do you assume the worst hoping that you’ll be pleasantly surprised? Do you bask in a glow of possibility, entertaining the fantasy of success? Are you one of the few who can go on as if you haven’t handed your heart and soul out to strangers?

I myself wait impatiently to hear results, giddily checking Submittable and Query Tracker and email too many times. This is how I know that it was exactly 113 days (or 9763200 seconds) since I submitted Prodigies to DAW.

I have three other submissions out (two short stories and a poem) and one query out (Prodigies again). I know from the conference that rejections may not mean one’s work is not good, but that it doesn’t match current consumer demands. The odds are high given the number of competitors that I will get rejected all the way around. But I remain optimistic, because I need that vision of a change, of the possibility of bursting out of a cocoon having remade myself into an author, to season my days with sweet cinnamon and success.

I feel like a murderer.

This edit of Apocalypse is a bit harder than I thought. I need to make our unlikely heroes more unlikely, and by that I mean they need to struggle more. They need to be less successful.

More of them, in other words, need to die.

I don’t like killing characters. Not because of sentiment; I would kill major characters if I didn’t need them for the plot. I’m just bad at writing death.

But my dev editor is very, very correct. This battle is going to have to be stacked against my protagonists and people are going to have to die.

Funk and an old white lady

I didn’t know it was called funk when I grooved to it as a child. I didn’t know that I, a white child, wasn’t supposed to groove. I just felt the thumping play and the sense of play, and I wanted to shake my booty, which the adults around me considered slightly scandalous. I listened to that top 40 Chicago AM station and got caught up in its infectious rhythms; I didn’t know their names as well as I knew the Beatles’ catalog, but they became part of the background music of my childhood. I know their names now: “Flashlight” by Parliament, “Fire” by Ohio Players, “Mr. Big Stuff” by Jean Knight, “Tell Me Something Good” by Rufus and Chaka Khan (which gave me goosebumps as a child).

Years later, in college, I followed a community radio show that dealt in blues and funk, mostly funk. The first time I heard Parliament’s Aquaboogie, I sat there with this goofy grin on my face wondering “What the hell is this?” and called the DJ to ask. That was my introduction to Parliament/Funkadelic/P-Funk.

As I studied the genre (as an adult, I study everything) I discovered that funk, in addition to being playful, was sexy. And political. And inspirational. For example, P-Funk melds aspirations of political dominance (“Chocolate City”) with tales of survival (“Cosmic Slop”) and perseverance (“Aquaboogie”). The politically incorrect “Superfreak” rubs elbows with the motivating “Yes We Can” from the Pointer Sisters.

I’m very aware as I listen to the music that I am, as P-Funk would have it, devoid of funk. I do not have the shared experience of slavery and discrimination that funk seeks to rise above; I don’t even have the ice cool of David Bowie, whose “Fame” fits the genre. (I detest the song “Play that Funky Music White Boy” because it seems to be blatant co-opting.) I think about this because I’m going to see George Clinton and his P-Funk All-Stars tonight on his closing tour, knowing that I was not the audience funk was written for. I hope funk will accept me as a respectful tourist.

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This is for Steve Emmerman, who was the DJ for that long ago funk radio show on WEFT.

What I’m up to

What I’ve been up to lately:

Yesterday I wasn’t feeling it — at least not feeling like revising Gaia’s Hands or trying to figure out if another old book, Gaia’s Eyes, was worth resurrecting (as a short story, novel, birdcage liner, who knows what.)

So I entered a couple short story contests and a flash essay contest. I always feel more optimistic when I have things in the pipeline, whether they be queries or submissions. I still don’t know about DAW. I keep hoping.

I got the dev edit back for Apocalypse, and my work is cut out for me there. But it’s so promising now, and I want to get it in the hands of an agent. I’ll be proofing that starting today after I give platelets (or instead of platelets if my hemoglobin is low).
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I have a problem with this blog right now. I keep getting visits from some Eastern European porn site blog. The one time I thought I’d isolated it, it was from Ukraine. The sad thing is, I get random hits now from other Eastern European countries like Moldova and Asian countries like Azerbaijan (sp?). I’m afraid these addresses aren’t real and are being spoofed by the porn vendor. Sigh, time for that marketing plan. (Although I’m likely to wait till I have product.)

Wait for it.

So what happens when you come out of an affirming moment into ordinary life?

If you’re me, you feel like someone launched you out of a cannon into … a field. A muddy field. In the middle of nowhere. With cows placidly munching on grass.

“What should I be doing in this field?” I ask, realizing that a chair and my laptop have materialized in the field beside me. I sit down; the chair sinks into the mud about an inch or so, and I realize these shoes will never be the same.

I set myself to writing on a story, but I don’t know which one to write on — the serious rewrite of Gaia’s Hands? The attempt to write a short story out of the long lost Gaia’s Eyes? Some other short story? A new novel?

I ruminate: Will I ever get an agent? Will I ever get published? Is there a reason for all this? Is this God’s will? Is there really a God, and if so, doesn’t She have something better to do than land me a writing career? A placid bovine eyes me with sympathy.

Restless, I stand, setting the laptop on the chair. The cows low about me. Disgruntled, I take a deep breath and remind myself:

I am out standing in my field.

Slush Pile

Prodigies is still sitting at DAW, probably in a slush pile somewhere, as the status hasn’t changed since I sent it in.

DAW publishes science fiction and fantasy. They’re one of the big publishers for fantasy and science fiction; the others being Baen and Ace. The interesting thing is that these publishers will take submissions without an agent, and ask for the whole book instead of a query.

But submissions begin in a slush pile, or a pile where unsorted books get a first read, and most people don’t make it out of the slush pile. What gets the book out of the slush pile and into another set of hands is less how good the book is (though that helps) but how ~~sellable~~ salable the book is.

I admit I fantasize that my book is on someone’s desk, a someone who has influence in making decisions. Or in a meeting. Or on the “Congratulations!” pile. Realistically, however, it’s probably still on the slush pile, waiting.

At least it hasn’t been rejected yet. There’s always hope.