First proper rejection, and more

I took a short, unexpected vacation from a lot of the Internet, and an actual, scheduled vacation to Edinboro this past week, and both of those things proved tremendously helpful.  The latter more so than the former, of course, but that’s because it involved good times with friends (and, of course, shitty fast food and some alcohol consumption).

The week also involved a good deal of editing on “Death at Teatime” because it received its first proper letter of rejection.  I sent it to a magazine titled Bartleby Snopes (absolutely, definitely check out their page and read some of the stories they’ve published, because it’s really enjoyable), and within twenty-four hours I received a detailed, polite, and very nice rejection.  Despite my anxiety over the whole affair, this ended up really giving me a boost to get this story fixed up more and sent out again.  The only major issue I could fix without a total rewrite involved a few odd point of view shifts.  A couple other little tweaks were made, thanks to the very helpful editorial eyes of a handful of people, and I looked around on Duotrope again on Thursday night.  Sent it out for its second go at getting published, and I’m hopeful so far.

Regardless, I’m going to keep at this until I get published, or die of old age; whichever one happens first.

Speaking of Thursday, or Thor’s Day perhaps, I did get accosted by a drunk man who I only know as Thor.  That’s a story I won’t be sharing, mind you, but it’s worth mentioning because it’s one of a few things that helped make this past weekend a memorable one.

Writing and whatnot will resume tomorrow, once I feel less dead from staying up far too late.

Rolling with the punches

Or writing with the punches?

It’s been an oddly hectic time in my life, which is terribly frustrating since I’ve been all “Huzzah, graduation!  Goals goals goals ideas plans” and then life responds with, “Hey, Phil.  I see you have goals, ideas, and plans there.  Let me piss all over them.”  The big issue of sorting out student loans has really punched me in the face, and then there’s other things that don’t bear mentioning here (It’s my misadventures in fiction, folks, not my misadventures in sorting out life; that’s far, far less interesting, and you should all be grateful I’m not making those posts here).

I’m reconsidering my plans for NaNoWriMo, if only because it’s not entirely conducive to what I’m aiming for (I need to try getting my work out there for publication consideration, and though the challenge is totally awesome and horrifying, it’s not really jiving with everything else at the moment; I’ll probably keep with it in some way or another because I’m terribly bull-headed).

Right now the biggest plan is to get “Death at Teatime” out there.  I’m thinking I might dust off some of the things from early-summer, fix them up, and then share them because I realized I have no actual samples of my fiction on here and that goes against one of the major points of this blog.

Thanks to my followers, and anyone who happens upon this blog otherwise, for your patience and sticking with what’s been relatively erratic updating and an unfortunate lack of content.  Also, sorry that I’m sort of not sorry for the post that’s to follow.

To say “to hell with tonight’s goal” or not, that is the question.

And it’s a difficult question to answer, I’ve found, because it’s the sort of mentality that leads me into my weird, non-writing funks which get me nowhere but bored.

A bored Phil is not a good sort of Phil to have around.

However, the trouble, I think, comes largely from this: I have a short story floating around in my brain from a couple weeks ago that needs some love.  I may say that’s my five pages for the night and just see what happens with “Joshua’s Nightmare” (which will get love regardless because I had what I feel are some pretty cool ideas at work).  I’ve got another short story title idea in mind and I may just make it

Also, just taking a moment to say “hi” to the new followers, because I totally didn’t expect to log on and see new followers.