rejection as a writer

Updates and T-shirts are Friday’s Offerings


Sadly, my short story lost the Dazzle contest. I didn’t bother to go and check for the winner yesterday because I knew I was out of the running after TenMile entered and the gushing began so I lost interest. However he did not win either. A late entry took the prize.

I am used to losing contests, but I still find it a bit annoying. I am still polishing up my own story and hope to send it off to Apex although it needs to be a shade darker. The last story I read in Apex was about a refugee scrounger on a displaced persons ship in the overcrowded future where the hopeless sell themselves to the ultra wealthy who get their kicks stuffing them with chestnut dressing, cooking them alive and then eating them. When I said “dark” I meant “ever so”.

Grade one is going well.

Reno is proceeding. Rob’s new plan is to break down tasks into small components and do a bit of as many as he can between supper and dark (which is coming far too early now).

MidKid claims to be moving out this coming weekend. We’ll keep you posted.

And as for T-shirt Friday…..

Nurse Myra claims no ownership, so I think I will adopt it into my rotation stable along with the Monday Meme and the Thursday Song Lyric.

Remembering what Silverstar had to say on the subject, t-shirts must have histories. Not just stains either. Although stains can have histories.

Today’s t-shirt comes to us via the beginning of the LDR days that made up the bulk of my pre-marriage relationship with Rob. He developed a habit of bringing a t-shirt along with him to leave behind for me. He would wear it until it smelled just like him and after he left, I would wear it until it just stunk too much for me not to wash.

MidKid gave Rob the shirt. She worked in a liquor store and was always acquiring tee’s from different label promotions. Canadian is Molson’s flagship and most popular brand. It’s probably one of the better beers up here, but any Canadian will tell you that the worst Canadian beer is kilometers better than the best American one. Americans, in the opinion of most non-Americans, drink swill for beer.

Anyway, one day Rob inquired after the shirt and I told him I wore it to bed. Then I whipped open my little Macbook, took this photo and sent it to him. Since this is kind of like a love letter, I had Rob crop out the disheveled come hitherness.

So there is my t-shirt and its story. Feel free to join in. Link or track back if you do.

this is low res and tiny but it's the best I got

I Got my Work Permit


My Canadian work permit arrived on Friday. It’s somewhat of an anti-climatically thing however since the move to Texas appears to be back on – in theory anyway. We will know more next week after Rob chats with the man in charge of bringing all the project elements together. 

The first thing I did upon opening the envelope from the CIC was to glance through the Fort Record to see if there were any jobs of interest. A pointless activity as I have no intention of getting a job until my daughter is in school full time and even then there are more things that don’t interest me than do. Teaching for example is only of slight interest and drops to negative interest levels when I ponder the prospect of teaching in Texas. I turned down an offer from the Houston Independent School District long ago. In Iowa we are taught to believe that any school south of our own border is teaches Genesis in place of Darwin and a twangy version of English grammar. Besides when I was offered the position back in the late 1980’s it was well-known that Texas schools were just looking for new hire straight out of college fodder to plunk down in the worst schools. Socially and economically disadvantaged kids grew on trees in Iowa then too and I didn’t see the point of being underpaid in an expensive place to live when I could do the same thing in Iowa within my meager means. Anyway, I have a very negative view of the American education system right now. It stifles good teaching in favor of bad policy. And it’s not fun. Why would I want a job that is joyless to perform? Even if I am good at it. 

I sent out emails back in January, when I thought Texas was a surer thing, soliciting letters of recommendation. I got four positive replies and assurances I would have the letters by March at the latest but now we are into the second week of April – no letters. Hmmm. Whenever I have been asked for a letter and committed to writing it, I have them to the requester within days. But that is just me. And I wrote letters for anyone who asked really regardless of their work for me. The way I saw it was even if the person (a student usually) didn’t do much for me wasn’t any indication of how they would fare somewhere else. A lot of what we call “underachievement” is really just due to bad fits. Of course some people never find the right fit and that is another matter all together. Anyway I don’t have the interest in tracking any of these letters down, so I will just let it go but for this blog piece. C’est la vie.

So I have no letters, but I have one published writing credit to my name and about three rejection letters. I think that makes me a writer in most people’s eyes, but I don’t think you are allowed to include the rejections on your resume. I had a Technorati authority of 15 but it dropped a bit of late. Someone unlinked me I guess or the link expired. They do that. I don’t really understand the whole blog ranking thing. It’s a bit of a puzzlement and probably doesn’t mean much unless you are actually engaged in advertising on your space. In terms of writing resumes, blogging doesn’t count for jack even with that curious prohibition many literary outlets – paper or virtual – have on self-publishing.

Dilemmas. Dilemmas. I have a work permit. Now what do I do with it?

Rejection Letter from Our Stories


Finally heard back from the online magazine, Our Stories, today. It was a rejection, and I am not that surprised. Like most magazines, they see themselves, and their authors, as being “unique” but what I read was pretty run of the mill stuff. Nothing that pushed artistic envelopes and a lot of the authors were very young people, and it shows in the choices of topic and themes. However they offer to do a personal critique of all submissions and that made it worth the effort to submit. So I submitted a piece called “The White Boots” which I wrote from an anecdote that Rob told me about Shelley. It is a very short piece, but the editor at Our Stories felt it didn’t get to the point fast enough within the first two pages (not “tense” enough is how it was phrased) although he/she (Alex is kind of a gender neutral name) granted that I am good with dialogue and a good sense of language. He/she was confused by the reference I made to my main character wearing “runners” which is the Canadian term for running shoes. I make this reference early on and I guess the editor was so distracted by it, he/she never was able to get back into the story. Still it was a good exercise for me and I will go back through the story to see if I can tighten it as he/she suggested but my gut feeling is that the story is done and this person was just not the right person to read it. I have that problem myself. It was my downfall in workshopping classes because I had a hard time reading and critiquing other people’s work if I wasn’t able to connect to it (that and a lot of people fancy themselves writers and they clearly are not.)

I was issued the standard invitation to submit for a contest they are running (Matrix – my last rejection asked me to submit for their next issue. Something macabre – the sicker the better. Yeah. I’ll get right on that.) It was good to finally hear back. Now I can stop obsessing and find another possible home for this story. It’s one of my better ones, so there is a tiny bit of annoyance here, but Our Stories is really looking for angsty stuff, I think, based on what I read and is not the best home for me. C’est la vie.