Got another rejection today. That makes three in five days. Sigh. Dawn talks a lot about certain confluences of events being messages from God -- I wonder if this is a sign that I should just stop caring about writing (which would entail that I stop caring about everything else). Give up, sell your soul, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em; become a zombie. This rejection didn't even have anything along the lines of "please try us again."

Just finished shovelling snow (see, Caren, we got some here -- should be coming your way soon). Good exercise; now I feel all sore. And I weighed myself yesterday -- down to 121 lbs. Yay.

Interesting dreams over the past few days, and I penned a page of a new short story yesterday. Still writing by hand; I tried sitting at the computer for one and it really didn't work for me -- the white screen was like a barrier for things that just seem to come out once I get into a handwriting groove. So we're back to pen and paper. This new story's going to be taken largely from a dream I once had, so I already know the direction of it. Should be short; technically it's already finished; should be actually finished whenever I decide to sit down and finish it. Also, I penned another short story the other day -- more like a writing exercise than a story, really. I'm not sure if I can sell it, but if not I'll definitely make a Scary-Crayon feature out of it, illustrated with crayon drawings. That would be pretty awesome, I think. Though it wouldn't pay anything.

Please visit Scary-Crayon and e-mail me comments and stuff! AND HAVE A NICE DAY. Seriously.

Oh it's true, it's true -- Scary-Crayon is finally open. Or you could just click here to skip the splash and go straight to the main. Enjoy!!! And if you do (enjoy, that is), send an e-mail and let me know. 🙂 (more...)

So I woke up around noon today to find another rejection sitting in my inbox. Not the one I'm waiting on, though -- this one was for a poem that I'd kinda/sorta forgotten that I'd submitted. Which makes it worse. I wasn't expecting it, you see, so it's like this thing blindsides me from left field and says, "Hey, by the way, you suck!" Except it didn't actually say that. It didn't really say anything, being a standard rejection. (It did contain a personalized parenthetical -- or I assume it was, owing to the typo -- although this only said, "Trry us again, B. Thanks." Which is pretty much what the rejection said, minus the "this work was not selected" bit.) And this lack of commentary, I've found, also somehow makes rejections worse. Yesterday's rejection was for a piece that I still think is the best story I've ever written, and it was the second rejection I received in response to that story. It said nothing; standard reply. The first rejection, however, did have brief comments of a rather unflattering nature. But this was somehow comforting, since not only do I disagree with them entirely, but several persons to whom I've shown the story have had encouraging things to say. So then, at least, I could respond (i.e., to myself, not by way of nasty direct replies) by saying, "Philistine!" or something to that effect, and I didn't take this rejection very hard at all -- the rejection came on a Friday, and the story was in the mail en route to another editor on the following Monday. And even if I had agreed with them, or seen anything worthy of note in them, I could've sat down and revised the story in an attempt to make it better. But this telling me nothing...tells me nothing. And it's kind of hard to take. (more...)

What the topic says, plus a sigh. 🙁 Just waiting on one more now...

Since I'm finally getting around to responding to the C.S. Lewis quote that Dawn left in "Go Wes", I thought it only appropriate that we start off the post with a bad pun in the topic. Other recent meditations inspired by Dawn's post can be read here. (Also, if you scroll up, you can see my completed Krang drawing, which I posted at the end of the previous post. I'm really pleased with how it turned out. Look at that smile! Excellent.) (more...)