But, as Byron said, I digress.
In summary, many thanks to Brit Mandelo at Strange Horizons magazine for taking the time out of a busy schedule to personally respond in detail when my story was rejected. Thanks to you and your fellow editors' feedback I have a very good idea of where my weaknesses are and I'm encouraged to try again with a different story in the future. :)
So, better late than never:
I hope that, if it resonates with you, you go right now and sit down and do something creative that brings you closer to your life goals.
Enjoy! :)
Today's Mood Puppy is a Mood Saber from our first litter, pictured here all grown up at a year old. I feel like my writing is growing up, too, in important ways, and I owe it all to a very difficult short story.
It took me a long time to develop enough of an eye to see the flaws in my writing. The short story I workshopped at Viable Paradise in 2010 was the main tool of that learning, and it occurred to me last night that I was lucky that I did put all that time into it instead of something else. Here's why.
Areb Dar (the short story) went through at least five major edit/rewrite/revisions and countless small tunings. All while I was working on finishing the raw rough draft of my first novel and writing the roughs of other stories and mapping out the next novel, I also would take the old story out here and there and futz with it. When I got useful or specific feedback from my rejections, I re-examined the story in that light and tightened it. Those of you who have read my previous posts on this subject know that it was by turns frustrating, exhausting, and sometimes outright depressing to keep going back.
Yet I did--because I really believed in the story. I believed in what it was in my head when it was born, and in what it could be.
There are a lot of sources that say that once you start sending a story out you should just do so. You've surely read it, that advise against stopping to edit between submissions. I have to argue with that, because during those early submissions, I sensed that the story was still not quite there. At the same time, I did not yet have enough experience, enough of a feel for my craft, to pinpoint how to fix it. The time that elapsed between submissions and the feedback I got and the work that I was doing on my novel was invaluable toward fueling the back burner that the pot of this story simmered on (and it was always simmering, somewhere in the back of my head).
When I finished the most recent draft of Areb Dar, in October, I sent it to all the beta readers who had seen earlier versions for final feedback. Somewhere in that last set of revisions, something clicked in me and when I read it over I knew that I had leveled up. I was finally happy with the story--or as happy as I would ever be with it at that length. (6200 words, for those wondering. I still think it has enough potential complexity to fuel a novel in the future, but for now I'm not going there.)
So how exactly was I lucky? Well, think about it. Last night I was working on my second novel. I was also jotting down scenes and ideas for editing the first novel. Between paragraphs, it suddenly occurred to me: what kind of shape would I be in, going to edit East of the Sun, if I had not grown so much via working on Areb Dar? It was hell at times, working with the short story--and the novel is twenty times as long, and much more complex. I imagined, for a moment, how lost and depressed I might have become if I hadn't cut my teeth on those 6200 words.
So despite the fact that Areb Dar is not yet published, and may not be ever (such is the gamble of the freelance writer), I am currently thanking my lucky stars for the long education I got from my short fiction. Areb Dar, you have been a bastard of a story to work on, but I love you.
Now get published, dammit. I want you out of the house!
