Story that won the award now available online

Nothing has changed. I'm still too focused on other things to manage to blog these days, but since New Letters has put my story that won the big award last year available online, I thought I'd at least throw together a five-line post to point readers toward it. It's here. Other than the story I can't seem to get published right now and maybe the novel I can't get published, either, I think it's probably the best I've managed to do as a writer. Thanks for reading. 

The story I thought would never get published

Although I've been fond of this story since it came off my fingers two years ago, I really thought it would never get published. As a friend of mine I shared it with told me, even though it seems like I'm not making fun of #metoo, it's not so clear that an editor can be sure, so they're just going to be safe and reject it. I finally found one editor at the Maryland Literary Review crazy enough to take a chance on it. See what you think. Wonderfully fabulist tale of wrongs that can't be undone, or white guy spewing nonsense: 

I give you: Collision.  

A short story that's basically the same as just listening to me talk on any given day

The Under Review, a newish literary journal whose niche is that everything they publish has a sports nexus, just put out its third issue, and my story is one of the entries in it. I know I've written about Lebron James on this blog before, because there's literally no subject on the planet I can't somehow tie to Lebron. This story is about a father who is chagrined at how much joy his teenage son seems to be getting out of watching a video of one of the more humiliating moments of Lebron's life. This father reacted with a lot more chill than I would have. 

I'm still grinding through Best American Short Stories, and hope to have all twenty stories done in time for students assigned them in the coming semester to plagiarize my work. 

Apropos of America's football holiday, my latest story comes out in The Adirondack Review

I'm still trying to fit in my Best American Short Stories analysis between all that's going on this week, with the holiday and the end-of-semester home schooling work and my daughter suddenly needing surgery for an ankle she mangled on her birthday. I barely have time to enjoy the release of my latest story to get published, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy it. It's appropriate that it came out right on Thanksgiving, the day we all watch football, since it's about a model married to a famous quarterback. 

In the sense that anyone who knows anything about football will immediately think of Tom Brady and his wife Gisele Bundchen, I had the same challenge to face that Carolynn Ferrell did in her short story "Something Street," which I recently looked at: how to draw inspiration from real-world events, but still let the characters in the story have a life of their own. Feel free to let me know how you think I did. 

You may notice that this is the second story to come out in a short period of time. I was just commenting on social media about how crazily feast-or-famine writing is. I've gone over a year twice with nothing but rejections. In 2020, while the whole world has been on fire, I've had nine acceptances. That includes three in the last three weeks. This story actually got accepted and then published in the same day, something I've never seen happen before, but I guess that's just how the Adirondack Review works. I'm hoping I can store up the good feelings of all this acceptance for the lean times that are no doubt up ahead. In any event, enjoy the story and happy Thanksgiving.  

Quick post concerning my very distinguished story about sex dolls

While I'm grinding through a long week of work that's slowing down my assault on the Carolyn Ferrell story that's next up in my annual Best American Short Stories analysis, I thought I'd take a quick second to give everyone a link to my short story "The Cindies," which dropped today at Bull Magazine. I know 90% of my readers on this blog are students looking for help with BASS who are probably unaware I even write stories of my own, but for the ride-or-die Heretic fans out there, here's my latest. Thanks for reading. 

The story that was rejected fifty-two times, accepted four times and what I've learned about being a writer

We're often told as writers that getting published can be a question of luck as well as ability. You could write "The Cask of Amontillado," something centuries of readers and critics alike will treasure, but if you get a reader at a journal who isn't really up to snuff, or who has a thing about stories with violence or revenge in them, or who isn't having a great day, you'll strike out. I'm fully aware of how human readers for journals are, having done a year or it myself. You will, of course, make your odds better by writing something good, but that just gets you in the door with hundreds of others. Getting published sometimes comes down to giving one particular editor the story she was looking for on one particular day.

That said, as my 9th grade science teacher always said, "The harder I work, the luckier I get." When I first started submitting stories to journals a little over seven years ago, most ignored me. All of the higher-tier journals completely ignored me. (What do I mean by "higher-tier"? I don't want to get to much into it, but I guess the journals from tier five and above on this list, although the list is a bit dated now.) After nearly a year, I got an acceptance from a good, but not elite, journal. Another year went by, and then I got a second, then a third a month later. I've kept getting an acceptance or two a year from the non-elites since then. 

I'm happy when anyone likes what I've written. I really am. It's gratifying for even the humblest of journals to publish a story I wrote, because there's no journal so small my story didn't have to get picked over a lot of others, stories whose authors loved them as much as I love mine. 

Still, I've had a longing to see if I could make it into one of the higher tiers. There are two reasons. One is I'd just like to have a somewhat broader audience. Secondly, a friend of mine told me when she got a story in the high-tier New England Review, she got publishers asking her if she had a novel ready. Since I've had a hard time getting people to look at either novel I've written, I'd love a short cut.

A few years ago, I started getting more than just form rejections from some of the higher-tiered journals. There's actually a rejectionwiki someone keeps that helps you to know if your apparent "encouraging rejection" was actually meant to be encouraging. Most of mine were.

One of the most incredible string of encouraging rejections I got was from the now-defunct Glimmer Train. I somehow managed to make the finals of contests they ran three times in a row, without winning any of them. At the time, I was somewhere between excited and completely demoralized. I didn't feel like I could possibly write a better story than those, and even though I'd gotten closer, it seemed at the time like that was as close as I was ever going to get.

There's a reason I've written more about rejection on this blog than any other subject.

I decided I'd try to at least get over it enough to try to find a home for those three stories. Once I did that, I'd think about hanging it up for good. 

One of the stories, "Collision," I think I might never get published anywhere. A number of journals other than Glimmer Train have said they liked it, but I think they're all a little nervous about publishing it. One writer friend of mine who read it said immediately that it would never get published anywhere. Essentially, it's within the "#metoo" sphere of influence, and I think it's too hard for editors to tell where the story's allegiances lie. One editor said as much. I've tried rewrites to make it a little clearer, but I think it's too ambiguous a treatment of the subject for nearly any journal.

The second of that triumvirate of stories, called "Jajangmyeon," will be published this winter by The Chattahoochee Review. I'm really excited about this. The editors suggested a few changes that I think made it a lot better. I thought highly of the editors at this journal during my interaction with them. They were prompt to reply and insightful, and I couldn't like the journal any more if it had the clout of The New Yorker. 

Finally, my story "Love Hotel," I can now announce since the journal has, recently won the Robert Day Award for fiction at New Letters. If you believe in tiers, New Letters is the highest-rated journal that's accepted me yet. It may not get me Nate Silver asking me about novels in my desk drawer, but it's a big breakthrough for me. Mostly, I'm just happy someone saw in this story what I've seen all along. Some writers say they can't pick a favorite story they've written, that it's like asking them to pick a favorite child. I don't feel that way. "Love Hotel" is my favorite.

Even a strong story can have a twisted path to publication

Actually, New Letters wasn't the first to see something in it. It's the first story that ever earned me more than a form rejection from The New Yorker. The Georgia Review, and Hopkins Review each told me I'd made it to the final round of cuts before falling out. A number of other elite journals gave me my first non-form rejection: Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Granta, The Missouri Review, The Common, and and a few others. Each time I got one of these, again, I'd be stuck between elation and the most abject feelings of dejection.  

I decided to just start sending it out to whatever journal and resolved that anyone who wanted it could have it. About a week after I did that, I got an acceptance. It was from a brand-new journal. Part of me wanted to just let them have it, just so the story landed somewhere, but at the last second, something stopped me, told me that I'd already placed stories in okay places, but this story was worth believing in enough to keep trying for something bigger. 

So I told that journal it had just been snatched up right before they got to it, which, strictly speaking, isn't good writer behavior. A few weeks later, New Letters told me it was a finalist in their contest. While I was waiting for them to pick the winner, another journal said they'd publish it. I hadn't pulled it yet, because I wasn't sure it would be published in New Letters. This third journal agreed to wait to see if it won the contest. I pulled it from everywhere else then.

Or at least I thought I did. I forgot about one journal, because I'd submitted it so many places, I missed when I had to withdraw it. Also, because I was on the road and not working from my home computer when this all happened, it was hard for me to see where exactly I'd pulled the story from. This last journal happened to also accept the story, meaning I had to explain to them what had happened. All the editors I had to turn down were gracious about it, which was probably more kindness than I deserved.

What I learned from all this

There are two lessons to this. One is that there are just some editors who are never going to like my work. I'm looking at you, Colorado Review. I'll never get so much as a "we liked your work and would like to see more" from some places, so matter how strong the story is. "Love Hotel," which moved the likes of The New Yorker and The Georgia Review, got form rejections from some journals that don't appear on the list of 500 I linked above at all. Finding the right audience is a little like finding a romantic partner. The fact that everyone isn't into you doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. 

The second lesson is a little harder for me to absorb. Of course, I edited "Love Hotel" a lot before I first sent it out to journals. But after a year of near rejections, I looked at it closely for the first time in a few months. I made one major change to it, one which shortened it by a thousand words and made the main character's motivation clearer. (In fact, I had edited it so many times, I had to name one version of it something different just to keep it separate from all the other versions. This one I called "Lobu Hoteru," after the Korean pronunciation of the loan words "love hotel." That's the one that won, so now I'm stuck with "Lobu Hoteru" for all time.)

I hate waiting. I like to write stories, edit them, and send them out. It takes long enough waiting for a response, I don't want to wait forever to put something out. But even though I've written a few stories in a short amount of time that worked and were published, I think the main thing I've learned as a writer is that there's no substitute for time on your work. Writing a story, re-writing it, putting it away, re-writing again, and then putting it away even longer before re-working it yet again, is the surest way to make sure your story's putting its best foot forward.

In my day job, I'm always pushing people to not let making a perfect product be a reason to never produce anything. And at work, that's the right attitude. I have to learn to separate my work from my writing, though, or I'm going to continue to get close-but-not-quites. 

I just re-learned this lesson last week, when The Missouri Review gave me such an encouraging rejection on a story I wrote post-"Love Hotel," I thought they were actually accepting the story for a paragraph. Ultimately, though, they let it go, because they felt it got a little too windy. I looked at it again, and sure enough, after being away from it a while, I found 500 words to cut pretty easily, words that the story was better without. The editor also suggested I give the reader a little more of the main character's internal struggle, which I think I did with two sentences.

So while I'm elated by the success of "Lobu Hoteru," I'm also kicking myself for not waiting to send out my latest story, which might challenge "Lobu Hoteru" for favorite child status, a little longer. I'm wishing I'd made it just a little harder for The Missouri Review to turn it down. I won't get that chance again. 

What I've learned about writing is that it's extremely unfair. You can write a story that's 98% gold, and that two percent you didn't quite iron out is somehow making the whole thing not come together. There are so many elements to keep track of and pay attention to and be sensitive to, it feels impossible. But it won't do any good to either be in denial about that two percent, or to complain about it. The only way to cope with crippling depression post-rejection is to act like you're not depressed and work harder.   

I keep saying I hate writing really short stories, but they seem to be what people want to publish

This is just a quick post to say I got another story published yesterday. This is in a newer journal called Bridge Eight. I hadn't heard of them until I saw they were accepting submissions, but looking at some of the other stuff they've published, I'm proud they picked one of mine. This one's a pretty quick little story. I keep saying I don't particularly like writing shorter ones, but that seems to be what a lot of journals are looking for, and I've had more of the really short ones published than the longer ones.

The story's here. Since people seemed to like my very short story, I'll make this a very short post, as well.

One of my stories about what life on Earth used to be like for some people gets published

It seems hard to believe now that I once wrote a short story that was a psychological profile of a husband cheating on his wife. Today, I wrote an email to someone that ended, more or less, with, "I really hope you aren't one of the people who dies." At some point, I more than half believe, normal life will continue, which means people will resume making the same hopeful, misguided, and doomed choices they hope will lead them to happiness they've always made. I look at this story as a reminder of the kinds of mistakes we'll hopefully one day be lucky enough to be making again.

This story is published in the Northern Virginia Review, making this the third local journal to publish my work: The Baltimore Review, The Potomac Review, and now this. I wonder if being local actually helped me get published in these journals. Do they look at my bio and weigh my home address in the balance when deciding what to publish?

In any event, NoVa Review does a really attractive hard copy that they put a lot of effort into. But they're not going to be able to do this one in hard copy, at least any time soon, since the journal is tied to a college and has university students who put it together. So all they've got now is the Adobe document for what would have been the spring 2020 edition. As online literary journals go, it's not the best, because you essentially have to just click all the way through it. I'm all the way on page 87. It looks like it would have been a really attractive magazine. The link is here:

https://indd.adobe.com/view/45d7be02-7abc-4c6a-b7f0-237aac053a78

Why don't the best literary fiction writers tell stories the way our best story-telling friends do?

I knew a guy in the Marine Corps who'd been an honest-to-god cowboy before joining the military. He'd also spent a few years at Colgate, but by far, the more fascinating part of his past was that he'd once ridden a horse, carried a rifle to protect against bears, and herded animals. His first name was Michael, but he always went by his middle name, Bevan. Bevan! Have you ever known a Bevan? He's the only one I've ever come across, and his stories were as unique as his name.

His companion on many of his cowboy adventures had been a dog named Dog, who once--as Bevan told it--saved him from a giant rat that was leaping toward his throat out in the barn by catching the rat mid-leap and ripping him into two pieces with one shake of his head.

Bevan was a natural storyteller. He had a sonorous voice, and he knew how to draw out a story, build suspense, and get a laugh. People loved to listen to him.

It occurs to me from time to time, while reading the best literary fiction, that stories in, say, The New Yorker don't read like the kinds of stories Bevan would tell. All that metaphorical language that must have taken days of fasting and psychedelic drugs to come up with. All that tightness of language. When a scene is described, it's never in the language a normal person uses when telling a story. I can't imagine Bevan saying this, for example: "He was wearing a tattered coat and a faded black shirt, which gave him a penurious appearance. He ordered a coffee. I ordered a mint tea." (From "Sevastopol" by Emilio Fraia.) Or this: "There were six of us in the house. We were all about the same age, and at some point during the summer—I had moved in at the beginning of March, when the mornings were still cold, veins of ice glittering over the front steps—this became claustrophobic, unbearable. The house smelled of sweat and bike tires and something at the back of the oven being charred over and over again." (From "Old Hope" by Clare Sestanovich.)

What gives? Why don't the best story writers write stories that sound like the people we think of as the best storytellers? 

Part of it is obviously the difference between the spoken medium and the written. Bevan can use his voice or his body language as a tool to convey feeling, emotion, or humor. The writer can't. All the writer has is the word on the page, so she has to sometimes use her tools in ways we don't normally think of in order to get the same effect. We're all familiar with the concept of having different vocabularies for speaking, listening, writing, and reading, with reading being the one where we know the most words and can handle the most complexity. So it's only natural that writers would push language to limits it isn't build to handle in the spoken word.

Nonetheless, I wonder sometimes if we aren't missing out by how seldom the tone of the spoken story influences the written one. It wasn't always that way. American literary history is full of writers whose voice could easily transfer to the stage or the barroom, from Twain to O.Henry to Vonnegut. 

The distance between modern American fiction and the spoken story is nearly as great as the distance between modern American written poetry and music. I don't really want every poem I read to be as easily understandable on first listen as a typical song lyric. Most of the poems I encounter, I'm going to encounter in written form, and if it's a written story, then it needs to use the full set of tools the written word has at its disposal in order to be engaging. But every time I go to a poetry reading and have absolutely no idea what a poet is talking about when I hear a poem I've never seen before read out loud, I wonder if the propagation of the printed word hasn't robbed poetry of some of its organic pleasure. Poetry, more than any other genre, ought to be pleasant--dare I say fun??--to hear out loud. A modern poem that delights in upsetting expectations and resisting meaning provides one kind of enjoyment, but it's a different one from words that make music that conveys a feeling we've all had but couldn't find words for. A poem that requires hours to dissect, one that literally nobody can make much sense of hearing it read aloud without studying it beforehand, is providing a very different experience to the reader from what poetry offered for thousands of years of human history. 

Storytelling has followed a similar, albeit less extreme, path. I'm not suggesting we all start telling stories the way Ira Glass does. The truth is, I'm not a great oral storyteller. In fact, I'm kind of bad at it. When I tell a story at work, I tend to get more "cool story, bro" type responses than fascination. So naturally, I'm going to lean toward the page-centric, written literary story when I've got something to say. But I think it's worth considering, when writing those dense stories, whether what we're writing has the potential to captivate a non-literary specialist, and if it doesn't, whether maybe it should. It doesn't necessarily have to be "fun." I don't think writing about child soldiers or rape or abuse is going to lead to a story that's fun to read. But it can still be captivating. It can still cast a spell on a reader that makes the reader feel he must keep reading, as opposed to a story a reader only gets through out of a sense of duty. 

The last story I had published, "The Lifesaver on Board the Jamaica Mon," was me re-discovering what I myself find captivating. I actually had fun writing it, which I don't think has happened since I got serious about writing six years ago. After years of trying to learn how I'm supposed to write, I feel like how I'm supposed to write and how I want to write are finally re-converging a little bit. (Yes, I'm annoyed by an editorial insertion in the first sentence that put a questionable hyphen where a comma should go, but I'm trying not to let that spoil my fun.) 

This is what I want to do from now on. I feel like I'm sort of figuring out style and voice. I know what a Jacob R. Weber story is, at least sort of. It's kind of a big step for me. And maybe the strongest evidence that it's really happening isn't so much the stories I'm writing, but my ability to quit chasing false leads and spend hours and hours writing stories that aren't really the kind of story I want to write. 

Just in time for Christmas, Another Chicago Magazine drops my story about how cruise ships are from Satan

I don't want to take up your valuable time on Christmas Eve. (Who are those of you visiting this site today? Go be with your family!) But when you get around to it, and if you're so inclined, please visit Another Chicago Magazine, who just dropped my story about cruise ships, social inequity, and the end of the world. It's kind of long, so sorry to those of you who don't like reading digital versions of long text. 

Here's the Randy Stonehill song I heard back when I was sixteen-year-old Bible thumper that probably first put the seed of this story in my head thirty years ago. This song plus maybe Johnny Cash's "When the Man Comes Around" are a good soundtrack for this story. 

Thanks for reading! And thanks to ACM for believing in this story! 

Yes, it's normal for a literary journal to ghost on you after they accept your work

Long ago, this used to be a blog about writing fiction and the travails thereof. It's been more of a blog dedicated to analyzing and reviewing short stories for about the last year. In part, that's because it's been good for me as a writer. Forcing myself to pay close enough attention to what some of the year's mostly highly regarded short fiction is doing, enough that I can write about it without making a fool of myself, has really helped me develop as a writer of fiction myself.

Proof of this came about a month ago, when I got notice that a journal I really like wanted to publish a story of mine. It's not the New Yorker, but it's a solid journal. I was actually surprised they picked me, because I kind of thought they were too cool for me. The great thing about it was that they wanted to publish a longer story of mine. It's very hard to get longer fiction published, so the fact they were willing to publish my story must have meant they really found it appealing.

The acceptance letter mentioned that I should sign the contract attached. That's pretty normal stuff, except there was no contract attached. I sent an email profusely thanking them for believing in my story and explaining that there had not been any contract attached, so could they please send one. I got no response for a week, so I emailed again. Two days later, I got an email that said, "Here you go," along with the attachment.

That was a little curt, but it was what I wanted, so I signed it and sent it back, along with the other things they asked for, like a photo and a bio. I later realized that one of the attachments I'd sent them was the wrong one, so I sent another email explaining everything and including the right one.

I didn't get any response on that. Two weeks later, someone responded in Submittable, the online website where a lot of journals handle the business of accepting submissions for stories. That person said "Sorry!" and attached the contract again, seemingly unaware that I'd already gotten it and responded through email. Whoever answered the email for the journal obviously hadn't seen my response, or hadn't forwarded it to the person who answered in Submittable.

So I attached everything again in Submittable, then sent an email just asking to be sure they'd gotten everything, explaining what seemed to be redundancies in replies I'd gotten from them. I asked to get a reply just so I knew they had what they needed. I've not heard anything in another two weeks since.

If you are a new writer who just got accepted for the first time or is hoping to get accepted for the first time soon, I want you to know how normal this is. I've now had eight stories accepted for publication. Six of them were like this. So if you struggle and struggle to get that first acceptance, and as soon as you acknowledge their acceptance you stop hearing from them, that's normal. If you end up freaking out and worrying that they forgot about you, or came to their senses and decided they don't want to publish you, that's normal, too. If you don't hear from them for seven months and then finally find out your story was published three weeks ago, that is also normal.

The people who run these journals are not getting paid. They're squeezing in time between life and work and their own writing to put your work out. They don't usually find time to hold your hand and make sure you know everything is going to be alright. But if they said they'll publish your story, they'll publish it eventually.

It was hard getting this far, I know. That doesn't mean the next steps are really any easier. But hopefully, if you at least know that it's normal for the next steps not to be any easier, that'll make it easier to deal with how it's not any easier?

New story up: "Haulers" is now on Crack the Spine

Just a short post here to announce my latest story to get published. It's called "Haulers," and it's here on Crack the Spine. Basic premise: guy who hauls trash for a living is having a hard time getting over his 15 minutes of infamy that happened when he ended up in a viral video he'd rather forget.

More to say later about this story and how it came to be, but for now, I'll just let the story do the talking. Have a great weekend.

What is this strange feeling? Is this the humility people have always talked about?

One of the recurring themes I've tried to capture in this blog over the years is the internal struggle between believing in yourself as a writer enough to stay the course and being wise enough to realize when you need to change. It's the most difficult part of developing. Without heeding advice and changing here and there, you'll never improve. But without believing in your vision as you see it to such an extent you're willing to ignore all the advice, you're unlikely to write anything worth reading.

Be it bad advice or just too much good advice, sometimes, listening too much to various flavors of focus groups just produces crap. 

I've bounced around between the two poles, trying to find the right mix that works for me. I tend not to find a settled place in between, but more to swing back and forth between the two. One day I'm an island, the other I'm desperate for someone, anyone to tell me what I'm doing wrong.

The other day, though, I experienced something that wasn't quite either. I got a notice that someone was publishing a story I'd submitted. That now makes eight total acceptances (including the book) against maybe 250 rejections. Until now, when I've managed to snag an acceptance, I feel about two seconds of gratitude to the universe for allowing me some small measure of success, followed by the inevitable greed: it's great that I got it accepted, but maybe I should have held out for a bigger name journal? Last week, however, I didn't feel that at all. I didn't feel justified or relief or any of the expected feelings. I felt unworthy. Not fake unworthy, like in an Oscars acceptance speech, but really unworthy.

I think it has something to do with how I view artists as secular prophets. It's an extension of my former evangelicalism, which even though I now completely reject, continues to pervade my view of the world. If artists are prophets, then they should be wiser and holier than I am.

If that's not true, though--if prophet-artists are just screwed up, utterly lost people like me, then that invokes another old ideas from my Bible-toting days: grace and election. Artists aren't artists because they are better people than others. It seems like they should be, since part of art is to show us a better way to live, hopefully. But that's not how it works. Stories go where they choose to go. It's easy for anyone who's ever written to understand where the idea of muses came from. You work and work and work at a story, and the story eludes you, until one day you wake up and something totally different from what you were working on just shows up in your brain and you write it in three days and it's just right and it's exhilarating but also utterly humbling.

So I guess that's what I felt last week: another holdover from my days at Faith Bible Church, humility. I don't know what that means for how I write. Maybe it means I should try to exert less control over my stories, because they aren't really "my" stories. But I usually hate that kind of talk. It sounds like a writer being pretentious and trying to sound like an author. I think for me, it serves more to contextualize the failure I have such a hard time with. If I am "chosen" to write stories (by whom I do not know--I'm still as agnostic as ever), then I am also chosen to go through the failure.

Because when you think of me, you think rock ' roll rebel

It's been a while since I've posted about my own writing. After the book came out last year, I hit a dry spell of getting things published. But this Thursday, Jenny Magazine, the literary journal associated with Youngstown State University, is publishing one of my stories.

Jenny isn't the New Yorker, but I'm really happy about this publication. Youngstown's not far from where I grew up. The college and the magazine both have a focus on working class issues. I read a few of their past editions, and they put out some good stuff. I'm proud to be part of it.

I'm also pleased this particular story found a home. It's about a teacher and her husband who take one of the teacher's students into their home when her foster care situation goes sour. The father has a hard time figuring out how to connect with the girl and be the father he needs to become. Some of that is from my real life, the part of my real life I unironically love and treasure. This is one of those stories I felt I had to find a way to tell somehow, and now others will read it. That's pretty much the best you can hope for when writing fiction.

Most of the plot is pure fiction, even if the overall concept was real to me. The father and daughter form a musical act together, which is something I've never done. It's this musical act that made the story qualify for Jenny's 15th edition, which was a themed edition: "Rock 'n Roll and Rebellion." I hardly qualify as a rebel. When I watch Les Miserables, I identify a lot more with Jean Valjean than the young revolutionaries. Since most revolutions fail, I think the best course of action for most people if they want to make the world a better place is to try to prosper in the system that's there, then show kindness to those who need it. Valjean didn't overthrow the French government, but he did make life better for Cozette and Marius, and maybe, at least until Javert messed everything up, for the people who worked in his factory.

I'm probably going to go read at the launch for this edition, where, presumably, I'll be surrounded by young people who still dream of revolution. The musical gives the revolutionaries the last word, with the final song of the score being the dream of a world when we walk in the Garden of the Lord, when "the chain will be broken and all men will have their reward."

I wish the next batch of revolutionaries well. I hope they're the ones who give us the world as it should be. For me, I've had enough trouble just figuring my way out in the world that is. This story that will come out is really only important to me because it reminds me of the person who inspired it, who is the best work I've had a hand in making and one of the few things in the world that makes sense to me.

Just arrived review of my book

All the advice I got when my book came out last year told me that if my book didn't make a big splash in the first 45 days of being on the market, it would never move. But mine has actually done much better after the first few months. Here's a review from local writer Jenny Yacovissi that just arrived. She's actually part of the Washington Independent Review of Books that also reviewed Don't Wait to Be Called last year. She invited me to be part of a panel in May of new authors, and she read my book to prepare for her role as moderator of that discussion.

Here's her review. 

I'm especially gratified that she saw the end of "Dawn Doesn't Disappoint" as a false epiphany. It was the first time I'd ever written one of those, and I was afraid I didn't leave the reader enough hints to piece together what happened. 

First published story of 2018 out now and a quick movie review

This is my first published story of the year and also my first published story since the book came out last year. It's on Drunk Monkeys, which is a fun e-zine. I particularly like their 100-word movie reviews.

This is the story that came to me as I was driving to a friend's on a Friday night. I got up early on Saturday morning and wrote it. I edited it on Sunday and submitted it. On Tuesday, Drunk Monkeys told me they wanted to publish it. Meanwhile, I've got stories that took me months to write that I've been trying to publish for over a year. Writing is a funny business.

The link to the story is here:


In the spirit of the site's 100-word movie reviews, I hereby offer my own:

Thor: Ragnarok--a touching allegory about dealing with erectile dysfunction

Ragnarok begins with Thor crushing stuff like an awesome bro, but then this ball-busting woman comes along and breaks his hammer. He can't nail stuff anymore. He ends up in an abusive relationship with a woman who controls him. By luck, though, he reconnects with an old bro, and they smash stuff together and that helps Thor find his old masculine mojo again. He shaves his head and gets ripped. In the end, he finds out it wasn't his hammer that made him a man, and he bangs everyone with thunder while he rocks out to Zeppelin.

Gallimaufry of observations

Nothing big enough for a full post here, but a few half-thoughts.

1. Amazon apparently enforces its terms of service for comments on books

I had never really thought Amazon had tough rules for its comments. Based on past history like the three-wolf shirt comments thread, I kind of thought the comments could be a place to throw some absurdist commentary. I left a comment on my own book that gave it five stars, but also said the book was terrible. I was kind of proud of it. After over two months, Amazon I guess noticed that it was me, and removed it. They also did not allow a post from my mother, although I'm not sure how they knew it was her. It's not really a big deal to me. It's apparent that barring something unforeseen, this isn't going to become a huge seller, and a few comments one way or the other aren't going to change that. But it does seem like an unlikely to be really followed policy. The FAQ tells us that Amazon doesn't "allow individuals who share a household with the author or close friends to write Customer Reviews for that author’s book." I'd guess that the vast majority of people who actually write reviews on Amazon of smaller press books have some kind of relationship with the author.

2. I had a reading the other day, and I had a wonderful time

The publishing company, Washington Writers' Publishing House, is just fantastic. It's made up entirely of past winners, and many of them came out, got a book, heard me read, asked questions, listened to me talk about writing the book, and generally made it a great day. A few friends actually gave up football just to come hear me read a story they've already been hounded into buying. Made me feel like a real author. I could do that every day.

I rock a pencil and pen in my shirt pocket nearly all the time. It's kind of my thing.

It was also kind of encouraging to be at a book store that looks like it's going to stay open for a while. I'm thinking I'm going to start buying my books from here, if I can. They support the local writing scene and they provide some sort of alternative to Amazon, so if it's a few dollars more, it's worth it.

3. It's fall, so that means the rejections are coming in

I shot for the moon with nearly all my submissions this fall. I feel like after the book, I'm writing better work, but I also feel like I need to move forward in terms of the level of respect of the journals I'm appearing in. That means the job of getting published--which is hard enough in any journal--got a lot tougher. I've already had seven rejection of the work I turned in last month. Two seemed encouraging, which I guess ought to make me feel good.

I have to say, a lot of the fancy journals are really on point with handling submissions. They are making decisions quickly, much quicker than my journal is usually able to do. I think that's because many of them are either tied to schools or can otherwise command large numbers of slaves intern readers interested in getting in on the ground floor of publishing.

4. I paid $45 to have an agent proof read my query letter for my novel. 

I'm not sure yet if the final product is great, but I can't complain about the level of effort from the agent. For $45, I got three rounds of edits, which were not in any way half-assed. I'll start sending out more query letters next week after the last round of edits is done, and I'll report back on whether the next 25 letters got any better response than the first 25.

Two posts, one day: my book is on Amazon! (pre-order)

I didn't even realize this when I posted an hour or so ago, but my book of short stories is now available for pre-order on Amazon. Here ya go:

Me reading...me...beneath a tree on a summer day

I got my preview copies a few days ago, and I gotta say, even though I was really over the whole experience of having a book published and thought it was lame to get emotional about it, I got kind of emotional. My stories seem so much more grown-up in a book than on my hard drive next to my son's plagiarized homework.

Word to the wise, if you're thinking of ordering it to be nice to me or whatever: there will be an e-book version, so you can save yourself $8 or something by waiting for that to come out. Not sure I'd pay $17 for a paperback. But then, I don't love anyone like you all love me, right?

Finally, some actual literature from me

A few months ago, I wrote about getting a story accepted where the editor actually asked for a few changes. The biggest change, which I now think of as a really good one, was the name. This Christmasy story was originally called "City of Dawit." It's now called "Silver Spring," after the city in Maryland where a lot of Ethiopian/Eritrean folks live.

There's not much to say about it, other than it's not short (about 7,000 words), so if you plan to read, get comfortable.

I wrote this back when I still thought Trump becoming President was the most laughable idea in politics. I didn't know then how important immigrant stories would become.

Here's the story, courtesy of The Green Hills Literary Lantern.

This story will be one of the twelve in my upcoming book, due out in about two months, so you can consider this a sneak-peak. 

Spamming the A button FTW

My son tells me that "FTW" is old and lame now, but I don't know another way to user gamer lingo to refer back to my "spamming the A button" technique of literary submissions I recently decided to follow. Basically, I decided to submit a lot more.

I kind of needed a win. 2017 started off pretty good, with a story getting accepted in January and then I got the call about the book in February. Since then, it's been a shut-out, even though I feel like what I'm putting out now is the best work I've done.

But two weeks into my submit-your-ass-off technique, Drunk Monkeys just accepted a story, so I'm off the schneid.

Actually, this is a story that wasn't even in my head until Friday night. I was driving to a friend's house for a reading discussion of The Enchiridion, when the story just sort of came to me. Parts of it fell into place while I was stuck in traffic, and I was actually tempted to skip my quaff of Lyon's Rum and an evening of camaraderie to hurry home and write before I lost it. Instead, I wrote down what I knew of the story on a receipt lying on the floor of my car, spent the evening with friends, made it home by 1 AM and wrote the beginning of the rough draft until 2. The next day, I went into work to catch up on some work I was behind on, then came home and finished the rough draft.

I showed Mrs. Heretic the rough draft, talked it over, fixed it up, and then sent it to Drunk Monkeys' 24-hour response on Sunday. Today, I got an acceptance. So a story I had never thought of 76 hours ago will now have a home soon.

Let me here just put in a plug for that 24-hour response. It's three bucks, which is what a lot of journals are now charging as a reading fee in order to wait for six months.