Month: January 2017

I’m sure our readers will be deeply shocked to learn that sometimes, very rarely, our short story is rejected by a publication. (Quelle horreur! Break out the smelling salts!) The one of us who usually does the submissions is, of course, prostrate with grief. But that only lasts for a few moments, because she soon realizes the editors of the publication that turned down such a masterpiece are incredibly poor at their jobs. Clearly, these people cannot recognize greatness when it is staring them in the face.

Not that we would put ourselves in the same category as the following authors––we’re barely on the same planet (especially since they have all gone to the Great Library Up Yonder)­­––but they, too were rejected, sometimes brutally.

• Rudyard Kipling was told, “you just don’t know how to use the English language.”
• Publishers wouldn’t touch Beatrix Potter’s work so she initially self-published The Tale of Peter Rabbit
• And Saul Bellow’s believed rejections “teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, ‘To hell with you.’”

Post-rejection, one of us embarks upon a flurry of activity, searching for other contests, anthologies, or magazines worthy of such a magnum opus. If those publications have an imminent deadline, all the better: the sooner submissions are closed, the sooner we will hear that our story has been accepted, and we can adjust our egos accordingly.

Now, on those once in a blue moon, more often than we would like times when the story is rejected again … Well, it’s not pretty. It’s darn right amazing that more lamps and vases aren’t broken the house. (Okay, I put the vases away after losing half of them to a particularly egregious rejection.) Frantic emails ensue to one another as we spew assurances that our story is maybe not a masterpiece, but is still exceptional. The search for a new outlet resumes. But there is a difference this time. One of us rereads the story.

Clearly, there is a computer bug. Why else would we have started a story in a 3^rd person vignette, which switches to 1^st person for the remainder? Or used three lines to describe a character when one tightly written construct would have sufficed? Or inserted some beautifully written phrases, so utterly unnecessary to the advancement of the story? What we thought was a tightly knit story is full of dropped stitches and holes. Not just a computer bug, but literary moths are to blame.

Writing and rewriting, reading and rereading, and we failed to see it. Sigh.

The rewriting begins. The story is shaved to the bone, and reconstructed. Everything in questioned: why does a character do one thing and not another? Is this adjective or adverb necessary? Were there perhaps, the wee problem of five too many coincidences to be plausible? Does it matter that the 80-year-old woman drives a red Chevy Camaro and flies jets on the weekend or that her cat (not just any cat, but a Maine Coon cat named Jasper) understands Arabic?

Finally, the story hangs together. Another publication is found and the story submitted. And when we hear the story has been accepted, there is rejoicing, a fair measure of gratefulness and a few remote high fives that some entity has agreed to publish our good, but not quite great, story.

And what if we are rejected, yet again?

We persist.

 

 

Some of our millions of devoted fans and followers… OK, maybe thousands…OK, our mom…has asked us when the next Maddi Davidson book is coming out. Truth is, we did start another book but got a ways into it, and, with a big “meh,” deciding that we didn’t want to write another book just to write another book, not when we were having so much fun with the characters. (Haven’t we all had that experience of loving a mystery series and then deciding after the 15^th book in the series that it was time for an apocalypse to kill everyone off?)

For now, Emma and Keoni and crew are on an extended surf vacation, and the waves are epic. As for us, we decided we were going to explore other literary venues like … writing epic poetry! But our Latin and Greek weren’t up to it, so we settled for short stories.

Truth be told, short story writing is a lot of fun and it hones your writing skills. You don’t have 150 pages to blather on about bad childhoods: if it is a mystery, you have a few scant pages to kill someone off and hook your reader (without making it too obvious whodunit, like only having one other character in the story). You have to keep the pacing going, as someone expecting a short story is not going to suffer through 8 pages of angst-written background material: they want to get to the blood and gore, pronto. Or neat knife in the neck.

Another fun part of short stories is – contests! There are short story contests where you have to work your story into whatever the heck the contest theme is – uncomfortable underwear, for example. Sometimes we’ve written a story that we are trying to foist…ah… submit for a contest, and we find ways to rewrite it to include a thong as a core plot device. Hey, we didn’t say we were successful all the time! We have explored not only our writing style (we aren’t always snarky and funny in the short stories), but geographic locale. We’ve set a couple stories in Idaho and one in Hawai’i. We’ve set them in modern times and in the 1880s. We’ve done sort of science fictiony ones, and some that are low tech and character driven (one character was driven right off a cliff). Best of all, we’ve had some successes in getting our stories in anthologies, “placing” in some of the contests and generally have had a ball with trying something new.

So, with heartfelt appreciation for the fun of doing something different, here is an excerpt from our story “Heartfelt,” the lead story in Mystery Times 2015, available through Amazon.com

Hannah felt the chill of the mid-February day: cold, dreary, and the kind of damp that made your bones hurt if you were old enough. Today, she felt old enough and then some. Bob lay on the frost-nipped grass, gasping for air and periodically flopping about as spasms gripped his chest.

He looks like a freshly landed fish, she thought. Funny, I’ve always pictured him as a snake. But now? Decidedly a fat trout. A catch-and-throw-back trout.

The cacophony of sirens reached a crescendo as a fire truck and ambulance rounded the corner and screeched in stereo down the street.

She wondered why they always sent a fire truck with an ambulance; she’d told them specifically it was a heart attack. Nothing on fire here: Bob’s heart had been stone cold for years.

Two men in dark blue jackets with reflective EMT logos on the back jumped out of the ambulance and sprinted to Bob’s side while neighbors popped their heads out of half-opened doors to discover the source of the hubbub. Most gave in to curiosity, venturing forth from their sepia-toned ranch homes to join the flock gathering across the street from the emergency vehicles.

Intent on watching the medics working on Bob, Hannah was barely aware that a man from the fire truck had approached her. It wasn’t until he spoke that she realized he was there.

“What happened?”

Hannah turned to find baby-blue eyes staring at her. Innocent eyes, she thought. She blinked for a few moments, considering his question. Shit happens. Thirteen years of it.

 

We’re baaaaack! After a short long unprecedented hiatus, we are returning to the world of blatant self-promotion blog writing. I’m sure y’all have been wondering about the mysterious silence. The solution lies in one of the explanations below.

1. We’ve spent the last two years as Church of the Humane missionaries to the Chinstrap penguins of Antarctica who are no closer to being “saved” but at least squawk blessings over their herring.
2. Contracts for each of our recently published stories stipulated that we not blog about our success.
3. One of us has had severe amnesia leading her to believe she was a mixed martial arts fighter. A recent blow to the head restored her memory that she was, instead, an extremely gifted writer who can opine on the finer points of Calibri vs. Palatino ad nausea.
4. One of us took a timeout, and has been sitting on the beach in Hawaii for the past 18 months, drinking Mai Tais, surfing, and listening to Hawaiian music. (Guess which one of us) <Hey, that was MARKET RESEARCH. Someone has to do it!>
5. Technical problems with our Internet connection <No lie! Power outage yesterday for 2 ½ hours. Which doesn’t explain the entirety of our blog outage, dang it, but it’s a start…>

If you guessed a), you are correct. Having served humanity mankind global interests, we have returned to selfish noble literary pursuits on the order of Count Leo Tolstoy—ok, make that lyrics like Count-LT, the famous rap star—pursuits. Not that we’ve been entirely quiet; we’ve had a number short stories published in the past 18 months. “Vehicular Homicide” received an Honorable Mention in Grammar Ghoul’s 2015 Short Story Contest and appeared in The Ghoul’s Review. The story concerns driverless cars and what could possibly go wrong with the technology. Here is an excerpt from the story.

“When I give it instructions to tootle around, it takes me for a scenic drive.”

For a split second, Jumpsuit just stared at me. Then he laughed. “You’re pulling my leg.”

My weak smile must have served as confirmation, for when I impulsively mentioned it had taken a dislike to someone who had spilled beer on her seat, he whooped and slapped his thigh.

“That’s a good one; a car with vanity instead of vanity plates. Don’t tell me: it made a mad dash for the car wash where it demanded to be detailed.”

The full story is available here: https://www.joomag.com/magazine/the-ghouls-review-summer-fall-2015/0470749001444854998?short

Happy reading! And look for our next blog on Monday, Jan 23. (2017, not 2023.)