Monday Morning Has Come

 I wrote for the balance of Sunday. I kept adding words to "Best Intentions." Then I wrote two letters while watching TV. I splurged on a pizza. Got to stop that.

"Colonel Tom" got rejected again.

Thank you again for trusting us with your work. While your story, "Colonel Tom," was not selected for publication, we hope you continue to submit it to other journals. I hope it finds the right home!

Warmly,

Nicole

Nicole-Anne B. Keyton (they/she)

Fiction editor & assistant editor | Vagabond City Lit 

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So I sent it out again - after finding I screwed up the latest ending. One word missing. I feel like a fool. That version went out to two places on Saturday.

I read Magical Realism Meets Noir: On Michael Fessier’s “Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind” by Jack Mearns. I would like to see this book. It sounds like someone had similiar ideas as I have for "Chasing Ashes."
 

 I admit only skimming The Paris Review's Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1, but Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71 has interesting points:

INTERVIEWER

Did any writer influence you more than others?

DIDION

I always say Hemingway, because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time. A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. I mean they’re perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve called Henry James an influence.

DIDION

He wrote perfect sentences, too, but very indirect, very complicated. Sentences with sinkholes. You could drown in them. I wouldn’t dare to write one. I’m not even sure I’d dare to read James again. I loved those novels so much that I was paralyzed by them for a long time. All those possibilities. All that perfectly reconciled style. It made me afraid to put words down.

###

INTERVIEWER

You have said that once you have your first sentence you’ve got your piece. That’s what Hemingway said. All he needed was his first sentence and he had his short story.

DIDION

What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

INTERVIEWER

The first is the gesture, the second is the commitment.

DIDION

Yes, and the last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up. It should make you go back and start reading from page one. That’s how it should be, but it doesn’t always work. I think of writing anything at all as a kind of high-wire act. The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities. Unless you’re Henry James.

 I would never have put Didion with Hemingway. Shows what I do not know and the limits of imagination. The thing about last sentences, I came to notice that. Some books have last sentences that make you want to read the whole thing. I still have not been able to hit that mark.

Plans for the day: laundry, dentist, work. Yes, not taking off the day.

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