Monday, April 18, 2005

The entry that was never meant to be


I had an entry nearly completed earlier but Blogger ate it. The entry included references to rejection, humor, neurochemical imbalances, Jonathan Safron Foer, my girlfriend, nuclear reactors, the postal service, John Fogerty, baseball, the tendency for rejection letters to appear on Mondays, hideously deformed monsters, a rejection letter named Clyde, inconsistent capitalization, Saturday night, the death of post-modernism, and a piano-playing walrus. And that all only involved three footnotes, none of which could be considered the longest paragraphs of the entry.

Okay, so I lied. There were no piano-playing walrus references.

Suffice it to say I got a rejection for a story last week, on Monday, and today, Monday, I prepped the story for submission elsewhere. I know why I only send out stories on Mondays--once upon a time I never sent anything out until I dubbed Monday night, which is, like, one of the more worthless nights of the week, to be my own personal Paper Chase Night, wherein I sit down, address envelopes, prep and print stories and cover letters, and eat food I'd normally eat anyways but without feeling guilty about it, and thus I became a Submitting Machine--but I'm baffled as to why the rejection letters have been landing in my mailbox on Mondays and only Mondays, for at least the last four rejection letters. I wonder if it's sort of a corollary of the whole "offices only fire people on Fridays" but I mean, I dunno. It's probably just mass coincidence.

Also I've been slacking off a bit too much on the April story so I've got to get down and dirty with it this week and turn that little bastard out. If I'm going to maintain my schedule I guess I've got this week and next week to finish it so I can send it out the first Monday of May. I think, I don't know, I feel weird about the story. It's not a particular easy story but writing it has been easy, at least compared to the March story, but. There's this sparseness thing it's got going on that I guess I'm finding mentally daunting. I hesitate to say the story's a "mis-step" just yet, but I'll insinuate such an accusation, in order to motivate myself to take the next two weeks to make this story not be the year's mis-step. Nevermind the fact that in 20 years I'll look back and look at this whole year's out-put as one twelve-month streak of mis-steps but nobody's listening to future-me anyways right now so future-I can just go suck it.

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