Month: April 2012

I’ve been working on a short story pretty hard lately. Annealing it. I’m going to send this one to a literary journal, see what happens. I expect it will be rejected, and even as I type that word it sounds harsh and defeating. There’s quite a lot of competition to get short fiction published. I’ve been combing through my copy of the Writer’s Market (2011) and see that the top journals receive two to three hundred manuscripts a month, not all fiction, but still. Of those they may accept eight to ten manuscripts for eventual publication, it varies. Most of the journals don’t respond with a formal rejection, and those that do usually don’t comment on the work, but occasionally they do, and that would be helpful, but I understand they don’t have the time and/or money to comment on every manuscript they reject. Most of these journals operate, it appears, on pretty slim budgets.

I said “top” journals, which reveals my assumption that literary journals, like science journals, where I am published, must have impact factors. I haven’t been able to find that they do, but just reading around a lot it seems to me that some lit journals are more prestigious or challenging to get published in than others, which I guess is a tacit indication of their “impact”. Ploughshares, for instance, seems to be pretty highly regarded.

I’d considered sending this story to a national magazine but few of them publication fiction anymore — The New Yorker & The Atlantic (once annually) are two I can think of. For a new (fiction) writer like myself it seems like the chance of getting my first story published in either one of those is roughly equivalent to having the result of my first lab experiment published in Science. Occasionally people knock it out of the park on their first swing, usually not.

I’m new enough to this that I don’t know if sharing a paragraph or two of the story on this blog would jeopardize publication. I doubt it would, but I’ll hold off just in case. I like the story. To my ear anyway it has the language and pace I was trying to achieve. It’s sort of a professional coming of age story with a tragicomic end. A few of the characters are loosely (very loosely) based on people I’ve known. The others are entirely fictional, as are, for the most part, the events in the story.

The Happy Wife is traveling to Phoenix for work soon. I’m putting the manuscript on her Kindle Fire. She’s a good reader, I’ll get good feedback. Turns out, by the way, that formatting the manuscript for the Fire was a snap. I wrote it with Microsoft Word using (mostly) a 12-point Times Roman font with normal indents. I e-mailed the file (as an attachment) to the e-mail account associated with the Fire and Voila!, it was automatically reformatted, perfectly. I also reformatted it myself to a .pdf file, and sent that to the Fire, but it didn’t render nearly as nicely as the MS Word version.

Who reads literary journals? Mostly wannabe writers I think, plus agents looking for new writers, so I’m told. But also people who just enjoy reading short fiction, creative non-fiction (e.g., essay), and poetry. The number of paid subscriptions to these journals varies widely. One I really like is Zyzzyva (ziz-i-vah). They publish work by west coast writers only.

So here I go. Wish me luck, or leave a comment if you have advice for this newbie.

A rough draft of chapter 1 from Lilek‘s forthcoming e-book: Graveyard Special.

I enjoyed it — had the cadence and sentiments of decent short fiction, which I thought it was until the end.

We’ll be writing a check for a large amount payable to the US Treasury next week. We have no say, directly or indirectly, how the federal government will spend this money. A vote is not a proxy for assent (though withholding it may be laudable dissent). Whatever we have to say about how the money ought to be spent our so-called representatives care little, yours even less. This isn’t cynicism. It isn’t sour grapes. It’s a sad fact. Send in the money they say, then move along citizen we’ll take it from here. Failing this we’ll penalize you even more — jail time in the worst case — under the cover of self-serving laws we’ve likely never read, are obsolete, or don’t understand but which you are subject to. What, you don’t want to pay your fair share for our foreign wars? They’re keeping you safe from terrorists you know. Right, and any day now SETI will discover intelligent life — not likely in Washington D.C..

I was not raised to think I could ever get something for nothing. I was raised to think that, in this country anyway, I could choose the vector my life took, make my own mistakes and abide the consequences, choose and pay for what I valued and avoid what I didn’t. Not that I’d be forced to cover the bill for the myriad laws conceived and passed by people I wouldn’t trust as far as I can spit, not to mention didn’t vote for. If that’s what is taught in high school civics I’m pleased I never took the class (or don’t recall if I did).

People who apologize for sprawling government, coercive taxation, and clamor to have the rich to pay more claim that 1) not everyone was as fortunate as I was coming up (My formative years were spent in a tiny house on a busy street with my parents and two sibs; I shared a bedroom with my brother; my father repaired tv sets; my mother worked on and off in the public schools); 2) not everyone is as smart as you are (I was a C student in high school,  somewhat better in college, even struggled at times as a post-grad); 3) there are certain things only a central government can accomplish (You mean, like, education? Besides, it’s not the thing or two they get right that’s at issue, it’s all the things they don’t which we (taxpayers) must pay for whether we value them — would willing fund them — or not); 4) the rich are disproportionate beneficiaries of government, they should pay more (Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his garage; Sara Blakely invented Spanx in her basement sans husband or inheritance; Oprah was born into poverty to an unwed teenage mother; other examples abound); 5) it’s hypocrisy to object to a system you personally benefit from (I can’t condemn medical malpractice and see my doctor at the same time? Of course there are taxpayer funded programs I personally benefit from — I want access to the police and courts if I need them, I enjoy national parks, my recent academic training was partly paid by taxpayers. But so long as the law compels participation, especially where non-coercive alternatives are possible, this is not hypocrisy. Direct or incidental benefit from a system you’ve been forced to support is not hypocrisy.); 6) like death, taxes are unavoidable (A lament is not an argument).

We’ll send it in next week, what’s the realistic alternative? There’s conscientious objection to fighting in a war but not paying for it, or for that matter any other coercively funded government enterprise many of us no longer value, if we ever did.

Rufus is in a bad way but his condition has improved this past week. When we returned home from Seattle last week Sunday he had a large mass over his chest and left shoulder and was unable to stand without collapsing under his own weight. When we left for Seattle three days earlier he was fine. What it was that could come on so quickly and present so prominently we didn’t know. We still don’t know for sure, in spite of x-rays, duplicate blood work, ultrasound, aspirates, and evaluation by two veterinarians. He continues to defy diagnosis. One hypothesis had it being a mast cell tumor. But if that were the case it was certainly a grade III variety, and you don’t get better with a stage III mast cell tumor, you go downhill, fast. Our vet who we trust implicitly thought it might be a very virulent infection causing massive inflammation and bleeding into the tissue (Rufus’ skin showed severe ecchymosis). Accordingly, he gave Rufus an injection of a long-acting antibiotic. That diagnosis may have been correct given Rufus is, like I said, improving steadily, though slowly. He’s able to walk on his own now, albeit feebly; he’s eating and drinking, and peeing and poohing (outside!); his skin discoloration is less and his spirit has clearly improved — he barks when the doorbell rings and gets up to greet visitors.

…

The bike fitting was a success. I spent nearly three hours with a physical therapist who also happens to be a certified fitter for Serotta. Every nook ‘n cranny of me was measured three times and averaged. Physiology was assessed, riding preferences discussed, and then I spent about 90 minutes on the fit trainer hooked to a software program to measure various power outputs while every dimension (e.g., drop, reach, setback, stack) was dialed in to precision, recorded, and eventually sent to Serotta. Three days later MySerotta appeared on paper. A beautiful thing. Now I must decide on which Grouppo and Wheelset to add, and then in eight weeks or more the beautiful thing will be a reality, in our garage, ready for me to ride.

Happy Wife and me at Trace and the next night at Purple. So much wine and so little time.