Professionalism, rejections, and perseverance.

I don't read it regularly, but the editor of Shock Totem, K. Allen Wood, has a blog that is usually pretty good. I did, however, read this one, in which there are two links to less than desirable ways to respond when someone doesn't particularly like your writing. I found them entertaining, but they made me think about the fact that writers and editors are all people, and as such, are not always the most professional people.

I like to think that I demand a high level of professionalism of myself, even when faced with a less than professional response to my own writing. While it hasn't happened often (I usually only receive form rejections) there are times when I really have to wonder what happened on the other end of the submission email. There was one instance in which the editor, who provided a synopsis as part of the response, clearly didn't understand the story at all. I would normally consider this a problem, but my wife understood it just fine, and she hasn't read that much of my genre. Others have similarly had no issues understanding the story and it definitely was not a "you're not supposed to understand it" type (which I loathe, by the way). That was not an example of lack of professionalism, just an example of editors being human and just as prone to mistakes as the rest of us.

An unfortunate example of unprofessional behavior that I've experienced in my writing career was a personal rejection that I received that felt like the editor was attempting to make a personal attack against me. The funniest thing about it was that I quite clearly got an emotional response, which is generally considered to be the sign of an exceptional story. But this editor decided to pass, and in an appallingly unprofessional manner.

All of that aside, rejections are a way of life for writers who do not have a household name. Even writers that have dozens of published stories still face rejection, and when you have a string of them, it gets a little hard to take. I'll admit that even thought I consider myself to have a pretty thick skin, it has gotten to me at times. The funk generally only lasts a few days at most.

So the name of the game, as far as I can tell right now, is perseverance. Keep trying until your story gets in the right hands. There is an editor that will love it, and the job of the writer is to find that editor. It's really as simple as that. Not always an easy task, but simple nonetheless.

My writing

I often hesitate to give any kind of specific update here, mostly because when I'm asked what I'm up to with my writing (usually by someone who isn't a writer) I am able to answer in the same way: "I'm writing." I could get into specifics about the story that I'm working on or the fact that the ending of the novel I'm trying to finish seems locked inside a Fort Knox style secure location, but most of the time I get blank, glossy stares after a few minutes of this. Most of the people around me just don't want to hear the specifics anymore. Unless there's a particular problem with something or a really clever idea I have (I know, beware cleverness), there really just isn't that much to tell people. Writing is a solitary habit.

But here today I'm going to talk about two projects that I'm considering taking on for good or for ill: a short story collection, and a website.

This isn't a website, it's a blog. A website might have a "News" section, but this is still where I post the insane ramblings. They will be linked. The website would be more for information about me as a writer, links to all of my stuff and to create a true web presence. The question is: Is it really going to do anything positive for me? Well, that sort of brings me to my next section.

I've been thinking about collecting my short stories for a while now, but recently I actually added up word counts and I'm getting close to the 40,000 word minimum. I'd like it to be something closer to 50-60k, but we'll see what happens.

These two ideas go together because a website helps promote and sell the book (and any future books) and the book will hopefully direct people to the website where they'll learn about other things I'm working on, read my blog, etc. The ideal situation is a positive spiral where eventually everyone understands what kind of a brilliant writer I am. Or not.

Maybe I'm just looking for an excuse to learn how to program in Python.

Point of View

I wrote a story a while ago in 2nd person perspective. You see, when I was a Creative Writing major, we had an exercise in a class that forced us to write a scene from a story in all three points of view: First (I'm doing something), Third (He/she is doing something), and the not-often-used-but-when-it-is-it's-usually-terrible Second person (You are doing something). Now, as I said, 2nd person is usually done very poorly. However, I had the misfortune of having a professor (a really good one, by the way) who believed in me and thought that this particular exercise demonstrated that I understood how to properly write in 2nd person perspective, and she told me this. This is unfortunate because now I have it in my head that I'm capable of using this oft misused point of view, and now I have a story that is probably nearly unpublishable. It's been rejected two or three times already (not that much, I know) but I think that the number could grow by a factor of 10 or 20 before I finally try to include it in a short story collection of all my stories, published and unpublished. Honestly, I think it's a great story, but the weird perspective might mean that this doesn't matter, unless I find an editor that hasn't yet been bombarded by terrible 2nd person perspective stories. Maybe I'm wrong and this is just such a terrible 2nd person story, and I'm only contributing to the problem.

For an example of a really good 2nd person story, Google Lorrie Moore's "How to Become a Writer". You'll be glad you did.

So, ultimately, my advice in this post is that unless you are Lorrie Moore, don't write a story in second person point of view. If you do, prepare to get it rejected over and over and over.