Golden Egg

July 24

A sale! My weird sort-of-quest-fantasy "Lachrymose and the Golden Egg" (which features a Dashing Rogue, a Plucky Damsel, a Ninja King, a Were-Ape, and a Pit of Electrified Robots) will be in issue #2 of The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives, due later this year! This is an amazingly stylish, beautifully made 'zine, one of my favorites on design values alone (I wish we could make Flytrap look so good!). They also published some, well, ripping good yarns in issue #1. I'm thrilled to be on board for the next issue!

Oh, and another little Parable of Persistence -- I first sent this story out in April of 1999. It took me 4 years' worth of rejections to find it a good home. Well, Leading Edge would've published it, if I'd agreed to cut out the illegal-drug-using, extramarital-sex bits, but I wasn't willing to do that, so...

This sale does remind me of a problem I'm rather hesitant to mention here, for fear that it will bring jeers and derision. Namely -- I'm almost out of stories. I've been steadily selling stuff for the past year and a half or so, and now I'm down to a mere five and a half stories in circulation (one is a collaboration). I used to have about 20 stories in circulation at all times, but the combination of selling most of my backlog and concentrating more on novels has led to an impending drought. I have a couple of stories that need to be revised (I'll just add that to the endless to-do list), but I don't expect to write many more stories this year, what with Rangergirl revisions and then the Frog novel. I mean, I know there are way worse problems for a writer to have, but I'm afraid I'm going to have all these publications, whoosh whoosh whoosh, and then more-or-less vanish from sight sometime next year, fall off everyone's radar, drift into dim obscurity...

Well, hell, I've got to worry about something, right? If I actually manage to publish a novel, I suspect this fear will be diminished, because the all-importance of short-story-writing will be somewhat mitigated.

I managed to write a few hundred words of Rangergirl revisions last night, and will attempt to do so again tonight, but who knows? I was feeling pretty lousy at work all afternoon, and I might just take it easy tonight. I haven't been getting enough sleep lately, and both Heather and I are getting sick. Can people catch colds from kittens? Or is it just coincidence?

Then Mike Jasper pointed to Sarah Totton's Odyssey journal (Sarah being one of the writers Wolfe singled out as writing publishable work in his letter, btw), and I was reminded that, yes, there are many sides to every story. Certainly I've had writing instructors that rankled me, too, whose ideas I disagreed with. According to Sarah it was one individual who wrote Wolfe the offending letter, apparently claiming to speak for the workshop, and that makes a big difference, too. I think Wolfe shows a lot of class in taking the blame, and I'm sure he's sincere, and that he believes he failed to communicate with his students. That's certainly true, though it's hard to say where that communication broke down, since I'm not privvy to any details of the workshop beyond those gleaned from Wolfe's and Sara's accounts.

There was one instructor I had at a workshop that I quickly realized I could learn nothing from. This individual's views on writing were essentially diametrically opposed to mine, and I didn't have much respect for their work, either. But I didn't write a nasty letter, you know? I gritted my teeth, worked on my writing, tried to take what value I could from the crits of my fellow participants, and waited for the week to be over. I mean, damn, y'all, the business of writing is hard, there are lots of rejections, people who don't get what you're trying to do, bad reviews, people who think your writing sucks and say so in public forums. The only way to combat that is to have faith in your own work, along with a willingness to recognize your faults and weaknesses. (I'm speaking generally now, not about what happened at Odyssey, though it certainly prompted these thoughts -- as I've said, I don't know enough about that situation to talk about it in particular). I will say that I didn't learn anything I didn't already know about my writing when people at Clarion or the Scott Card workshop or Rio Hondo or wherever praised me. I've always had a pretty good sense of what my strengths are as a writer. I learned when people told me the stuff I got wrong, the stuff that fell flat (granted, once you get beyond the basic competencies a lot of that stuff is subjective, and what works for one reader will fail for another, but anyway). If Gene Wolfe wrote "Oh, come on!" in the margin of my manuscript, I'd take a good hard look at whatever he was commenting on, and see if I could improve it. I certainly wouldn't stop going to class. But then, I have a lot of respect for Wolfe as a writer and a craftsman, which, perhaps, the participants of Odyssey who chose to absent themselves from class didn't share -- or, at least, not enough to overcome their other problems with him. Ah, well. It's a shame, no matter what -- seems like hurt feelings and lost opportunities all around.

Words written since February 1, 2003: 76,300

Words written since last entry:
300

Flytrap hungers for you. Submission guidelines and reading period for Flytrap 2 will be announced soon. Watch this and other similar spaces.