Today sucked. I don't know what star went in retrograde, which God I forgot to appease, or that I didn't dance naked in my woods at the last New Moon, but something when sprong in the universe. Did my mass-market voodoo dolls go on sale today?
The day thing went wild. I like to work at a measured pace, not slow by any means, and I don't milk projects for time. And today the boss man made comments about me "letting things get backed up." Um, no, this is just the pace of work I had most of last year. It's been a nice lull since December.
The night gig also decided to reach out and swallow what little joy I had left in a morass of bureaucratic funnerie. I had about a week and a half of not having to fret about it, that's all gone now.
And then I come home to rejection-o-rama. Two rejections in one afternoon. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Still the bad news, Ann VanderMeer passed on Running of the Deer. She said it wasn't quite what she was looking for, fair cop (and what she said about the other stories I've sent).
And a rejection letter from Fantasy & Science Fiction about Daddy's Little Girl. Didn't quite grab him, alas. Okay, also fair cop. Didn't quite grab Gordon Van Gelder.
Which brings us to the Good Cop side. If you remember a few weeks back I was joyous about some news I got. Well, now I can spill. See, with paper submissions I send out a reply postcard that I designed myself. On it are a few checkboxes, my attempts at humor and maybe to get a little giggle out of the slush readers (check boxes that say things like, "We find this manuscript holds up well under the other 256 we received today, all manuscripts read in order received" or "perfectly fits the crack in the window sill, there was a breeze"). But this one came back with a personalized note that said, basically, I had made it out of the slush. I made it out of the slush at F&SF. Goal!
So I'm going to grab on to the fact that both my rejection letters were from the fiction editors at both markets (Ann VanderMeer and Gordon Van Gelder). Yeah, that's a good thing.
4 comments:
Glad you got out of the slush pile...and I'm thinking maybe the planets were out of whack today, because I've been struggling too. Just blue, I guess. But the kids cheered me up this evening and now I'm here, reading my internet buds' blogs, so I'm feeling better. Tomorrow is a new day!
Hey Matt, thanks for the good thoughts. Sorry some of my day spilled over in your direction. Didn't mean for that to happen (although I'm told that today was a bad day all around).
Here's hoping our tomorrows are better!
Say, that's actually great news (about getting to GVG). That's farther than my single effort to F&SF got.
Thanks, Camille. My writers group did mention that this story, "Daddy's Little Girl", would work very well at F&SF. They specifically named the magazine, so that's also validation they know what they're talking about. When I got my postcard back that the Slushgod had passed me on to Gordon, it was very elative. I was on a writer high for most of that week.
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