Geoff says the story that just got rejected today is good and will be published somewhere and to keep my hopes up, but all the candies left in my Quality Street box are the orange creme ones and well, all this is just not making today awesome at all.
Still have British Kit-Kats though. Anyone want to send me Matcha Kit-Kats from Japan?
Well, that was unexpected considering my mentor and I ended up at odds and I never submitted my final submission and I haven’t heard a word from anyone at Humber since March, but apparently I paid my fees and so I passed.
So now I have educational proof of my vocation. I’ll try not to lose it the way I managed to toss my Masters somewhere along the line.
A piece of writing is never good … There is simply a moment when it is less bad than before
Joël Dicker – The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair
(Although there’s still a lot of more bad still in The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair. Poor translation? My difficulty enjoying commercial fiction? Possible drek? Hard to determine at half-way through. Maybe the book will turn around and surprise me.)
At the end of my undergraduate career, I found a paint-your-own-pottery place. Rather than go to my graduation, I went to the paint-your-own-pottery place and painted some plates. Leaving afterwards, I was euphoric. It felt like I hadn’t done anything creative in five years, which, other than math, I hadn’t.
The end of undergrad was ten years ago. I’ve been writing full-time for two years now. Last month, I downloaded a logic game for the iPad with over five thousand puzzles in it and I play it constantly, staying awake to do the next puzzle, then the next one, then the next one. I think I’m missing math.
I keep thinking about my ideal job: do math research for as long as I want, then do creative writing for as long as I want, back and forth. Of course, I could do that now; I have the time and I have the resources. But is it a devaluation of myself to be giving my work away for free? I already get little-to-no remuneration for the stories I write. Throw in free mathematical research in there, and what? I’d like to think my work is worth something, but it’s also a bit esoteric and pure math researcher doesn’t have any immediate real-world applications. As my twitter handle says: Reality is not my domain.
Maybe I’ll go prove something about math today. Just to be sure that I still can.
You know those Inspired by a true story provisos movies put at the beginning to say that they stole a little from someone’s life and then imagined the rest. I wrote myself an Inspired by a true story last week. I like the story I wrote. But I can’t do anything with it. How much can I do with a story inspired by true events, especially true events in the UK where the libel laws would like nothing more than to smack me down. Even though I don’t use any names or times and I change details grossly, I don’t think I can do anything with this story. Here, in Canada, the story gets no coverage. I can’t imagine a Canadian journal taking a chance on my stream-of-consciousness story about a forty year old Irish murder.
So what do I do? I guess I just put it aside as a study in writing I did. But that feels like a failure. Each story I write should be better than the last. I should be getting better the more I write. This, the newest story, by that measure, should be the best and I’m condemning it to rest forgotten on my hard drive. Until I write another story which then becomes the best. Then maybe I can look back at this one and realise, with disdain, how puerile it is.
When I was younger, I always wanted to write a story about The Troubles in Northern Ireland. I don’t know why. But now I have. So at least there’s that.
In the most recent writing course I took (which I guess I dropped out of since I missed the final deadline and haven’t heard back from my mentor since and now it’s been two months so yeah, that) one of my mentor’s complaints was the unlikability of my characters, which I understand. They were bitter. I was bitter when I wrote most of that story, which has now died a death at the bottom of my drawer. I thought my faerie story was immune from such bitterness, but now I’m struggling to come up with an ending that isn’t utterly depressing. And my characters are veering into unlikable territory.
So I brainstorm. I have a roadmap to my next point; I just have to write it down and get there. But then, when I get there, I’m lost again. Everything is so sour. I’ve written my characters into places where the decisions they have to make are all awful, which is pretty much like life but not so much like an escapist YA story about faeries. Everything I try (in my head) just makes me pucker my lips like licking a lemon (which Geoff does – eats lemons by themselves because he is odd). I’m souring like bad white wine and writing inane metaphors here rather than fixing my own work.
I like writing much more when I’m doing awesome and getting strings of acceptance letters for journals than whatever it is I am doing right now.
Trying to be productive before the threat of summer.
Wrote a draft zero (in longhand in notebook) thinking about Jean McConville’s murder. Likely not a very convincing story, but I did it so it counts. Still have to type up last week’s schnitzel house story, as well as newest faerie chapter. The two stories are shorter, under 2500 words for those under 2500 words please submissions. Would be nice to write another 5000 word piece though, but the fan story wore me out. My focus is not that I can do 5000 words of anything any longer.
Maybe story six of my twelve stories of 2014 will be micro. Maybe I’ll give myself one hundred words and see what I can do.
I like reading short stories.
But then I always feel like I have to clarify. I like reading short stories, in a book, all by the same author. I do read anthologies and literary magazines. I’d be a hypocrite otherwise since they publish my little stories now and then. But I don’t enjoy those as much as a book of short stories all by the same person.
Except for focus. No matter how many books of short stories I read, it always feels like snacking. I’m never full at the end. I can’t remember ever getting book-hangover from finishing a book of short stories.
But snacks are good too. I do enjoy chocolate covered almonds for instance. I wouldn’t eat a bowl for dinner, but they are tasty.
Yesterday, after feeling bad about not getting anywhere with stories, I sat down (well, laid down actually, I was sleepy), and wrote a story that is not complicated and sort of just there for the sake of being there. Like technique exercises in piano. All plunky and wrist hurting (writing while lying on my back and holding the notebook up with my right hand and my pencil in my left was not too clever of me. Frida Kahlo painted in bed using a special easel. Perhaps I need a special bed-writing-desk.)
We went to Schnitzel Haus on Wednesday. So on Thursday, I wrote a story about people going to Schnitzel Haus. To make it not so autobiographical, I made the story people go to Schnitzel Haus on a Tuesday and not on a Wednesday; actually, the story isn’t autobiographical at all other than the characters in it have been to Schnitzel Haus and I have been to Schnitzel Haus and so has pretty much everyone who lives around here so maybe my story is about them and not me in any case.
I wanted to do one short story a month this year. I missed January because of my failed attempts at satisfying my mentor for my course. So I’m only one behind now. So far, I’ve written about an ad for a psychic in a newspaper, a lifeboat, yelling into a fan while it’s on, and now Schnitzel Haus. But it’s only May 9. Maybe I can fit two short stories in in May and catch up. If I can think of something new to write about now. I’m out of ideas, which I always say when I finish a story. I announce I will never write again, and then write a new story. So maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll write something new.
Tomorrow I hope to have a picture post. But for today:
Why are none of my stories working out?
In the past few weeks, I’ve started two stories and they’ve just drifted away. I tried to work on my faerie story; again, drifting. I have plans to work on my faerie story again today but maybe not.
I’ve also had a string of rejections. Or a sting of rejections. The second sounds better. I’ve had a sting of rejections. I know something will find a home soon, and it doesn’t seem like rejections phase me when I get them, but I think they worm deep underneath and work to poison what little productivity I have.
I have beginnings, with no endings.
I have complicated stories I don’t know how to write.
I have uncomplicated stories I don’t want to write.
I have a story in PDF because in LaTeX I know how to reverse letters and I don’t know how to in Word, so I have to wait until some place allows me to submit PDF and not Word so I can use it.
Should I self-publish a small collection of short stories? Who would buy it? My family probably. Maybe I should just ask them each for ten dollars and save my time.
Why is my internet dial-up slow today?
Off to try and write.