Rejection Never Felt So Good

So, I submitted my first writing submission to a magazine ever--a short story for Weird Tales magazine's website series of "One-Minute Weird Tales."

After about three weeks, I received a polite rejection notice. To my surprise, I felt... great! It was wonderful to know that I'd actually put myself out there and submitted something, and that someone had at least glanced at it long enough to say "no."

For the interested, here is my story:

"Master"

My cat, Schmoopie, had been reading.

Each day after work, I would catch her with a volume of the encyclopedia.

She would stare as I put it back on the shelf.

And the next day, there would be another.

On Monday, it was Delusion - Freon

On Thursday, it was Truffle - Zygote

Yesterday my key wouldn't open the front door.

I could see her little face in the window,
calm, and completely still.

When I went back to the car, it wouldn't start.

I live in the middle of nowhere.

Each morning since, I find bowls of water and cat food on the steps.

I am saving some until there is enough to get me to the next town.

3 Weeks

I'm on the last couple days of a 3-week 1-credit course on books, paper, and preservation--right in the midst of working on my final paper on the preservation and conservation of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This course is taking place during "UWinterim"--that gray area between Fall and Spring semesters that is synonymous with "claw out your own eyes."

Normally, a 3-credit course takes 15 weeks, so 1 credit is usually the equivalent of 5 weeks, not 3. The information we've been going through has been super-compressed, and I am experiencing info overload to the point where I've been out sick the past couple of days.

Yesterday evening I wrote five pages, but today I have reached the deer-in-headlights point. I stayed up too late last night working on it, and now I am forgetting to drink enough water.

It's about lunch time, though--maybe I can put off that paper for another half hour and make myself eat something.

Review - Girl Meets God

Girl Meets God by Lauren F. Winner

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Another book that I just couldn't get through... although Lauren is a great teacher (took a writing class from her), and I've read snippets of her other books which were excellent, this was one I couldn't get into. It's very introspective and just goes on and on and on, with a writing style that got on my nerves. The style is very forced, like she is trying too hard to pattern her sentences the same way most of the time.

I like the setup of the book, though--the division into vignettes that have to do with various religious seasons. However, I think the chronological setup of the seasons was deceptive since she did not relate her story entirely chronologically. Maybe that wasn't the point, and the vignettes were just supposed to go along with the themes of the various seasons, but it left me pretty confused about what was happening after what.

Maybe I also couldn't get into it because I don't know a lot about Judaism. I could identify with her spiritual experience in the sense of converting from one worldview to another--in my case, agnostic to Christian--but I couldn't really identify with her spiritual anguish in choosing one faith over another, since I have never identified with another faith as strongly as I have with Christianity. Oh well. I suppose some books just don't speak to some people.

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