rejection, sensawunda, veggies

The thing that got me out of bed this morning (well, after I'd gotten out of bed once already because I neglected to exclude audiobooks from "shuffle songs" on my iPod, and suddenly realized that a) I was listening to what sounded like the climax of an Eighth Doctor adventure and b) I hadn't heard this one yet and didn't want to be spoiled) was the realization that, hey, I never checked the mail yesterday and, hey, I have some sort of reason to maybe possibly be expecting interesting mail.

And lo and behold, there in my mailbox was my SASE, with a prompt rejection from F&SF (and the story was so short they shoved my manuscript back in there to keep the rejection company). I dug up the folder of my old rejections, from when I was doing this as a hopefully-not-memorably-bad teenager, and discovered that a) "This tale didn't grab my interest" may possibly be meaningful in some way, and b) I actually kept submitting things, or at least receiving rejections of things, until October 2001. So it's really been less than seven years since I did this.

I'm torn about whether to resubmit this story elsewhere. If I wanted to dip into the murky and hazardous waters of rejectomancy, I could say that "failed to grab my interest" is a fairly damning indictment of a 300-word story, but then again it was F&SF and that's a ridiculous long shot for anybody; the majority of things submitted presumably fail to grab JJA's interest. Looking at the rejection I got seven years ago, it could be considered a step up from "didn't work for me," even.

But let's not go there, really. That way lies madness.

The point is, I don't think it's particularly that I'm discouraged by the rejection. I still think that this story is as good as this story is going to be; it's just a question of a) whether this story is one anyone wants to pay me to publish and, crucially, b) whether this story is one I want Out There in the World with my name attached to it. I mean, it's 300 words I wrote because I was peeved with somebody in the comments of a political blog--not exactly my heart and soul poured onto the page in the form of deathless prose. If it were fanfic, it's the sort of thing I would post to my own journal but not link anywhere else, nor expect many comments on. If it were fanfic, I would have done that six months ago and already forgotten that I wrote it.

But let's not go there, really. That way lies madness.

I don't suppose it's necessary to make any decision on it now, or anytime soon. It'll still be just as weird and irrelevant (and full of entrails) a week or a month or a year from now. I suppose to some extent I submitted it because it was the one thing I had written that I knew I was finished with, and I was ready to try, so out it went. The logical solution would be to a) revise the story I wrote last year into some sort of properly coherent form, or b) finish one of the half-begun stories that's been idling on my hard drive for ... a while, or c) write something entirely new and exciting and fun. Just, you know, any of those is more work than sending this one out again, and I've got stuff to do, and, in conclusion: writing is hard.


One upside to all of this is that it got me to actually go to a bookstore and circle the magazine section in increasing bafflement until I finally found a copy of F&SF to buy. After a couple of stories--sorry, tales--that didn't grab my interest (nyah nyah) (sorry, what, I'm totally a reasonable adult over here) I ran into Carolyn Ives Gilman's "Arkfall," which was exactly the story I didn't know I wanted to be reading just then. It's pure sensawunda stuff, combined with one of my very favorite tropes: people engaged in building or growing something (there is a reason I keep rereading The Secret Garden). It's terraforming of a planet without native life, in this case, and it's left me walking around for days thinking happily of what that challenge would be like, trying to seed an entire world from the ground up, bacteria to humans all at the same time.

It has also left me spending a lot of my Tetris time (Tetris turns out to be much better for Thinking Things Out than walking is, for me--walking is excellent for letting me not think at all) wondering how I can do that. Did I mention that writing is hard? Writing is hard.


And unrelated to any of the above, I went grocery shopping today, so here is a picture for Rachel, who thinks I need produce in my life:



Shut up, salsa is totally just like produce.