End of Another Month

 Let me start of by saying this was not a good day. After last night, I was tired and stiff and moving like a snail.

The highlight came with me calling Paul S. He cheers me up, but he said from reading this blog it sounded like I was being put through the ringer. Folks, I really do not feel that way. for the first time in a very, very long time, I feel pretty good about being alive. I just will not walk home with wet feet. 

Stephanie S wants me to be doing something better with my life. I think being able to do what I have been doing with my writing is a good thing. I feel it is an accomplishment to write a good story.

Not that today amounted to much!

I did get to the bank, but forgot to get the routing route. I cashed my $44 for my training.

For lunch, I splurged and went across from my bank to Twin Archer Brew Pub for lunch.  I had a Big Dillinger, one of the daily specials. I liked – a cheeseburger with fried pickles. My only complaint was that the fried pickles were spear cuts and did slip around the sandwich.

There was a wait for the #3 to take me north towards work. During this trip, I talked to CC about her pretrial conference. Maybe I got through to her how her rebelliousness was unprofitable. Maybe not. I do not see it so much rebellion as childishness. 

I did get my shirt from work. Ont he way there, I telephoned KH about “Road Tripping.”  It was still damp, by the way. Then I walked to Payless, got a few groceries, almost missed the bus downtown, and then caught my #5 bus home. I kind of collapsed there. I fell asleep for about two hours, getting up before 7.

Then I did my laundry. I had soup for dinner. When laundry was done, I called Paul S.

Firefox has been balky, I have only had time to write this. It is going on 11 pm. This will be the last thing I write today.

Orthodoxy and Great Lent, Methodism and revivals: The Asbury Revival and Lent: An Orthodox Appreciation by Paul L. Gavrilyuk.

Which made me think of my sister at the Orthodox Vespers service to which she accompanied me. She spent her time deleting emails. If we are not open to the Holy Spirt, then the Holy Spirit goes right on by.

Oh, tomorrow, tomorrow.

Another rejection came for “Colonel Tom”:

Thank you for your recent submission to LEVITATE. We cannot accept "Colonel Tom" at this time. However, your work made it through several rounds of discussion, and we hope you will send us more work in the future.

We know you have many places to choose from when sending out your work, and we value being included on your list.

Sincerely,

Inti Navia & Jocelyn Rivera

Editors in Chief

LEVITATE

https://levitatemagazine.org/

KH cannot understand why this has not picked up. We have picked this over, and I think it is that I am just not fashionable enough. Fashionable I never expected to be, so this is not so upsetting. Look below for the essay from LitHub. My plan is to stop circulating this story. I may self-publish and let you, dear readers, make up your mind on the story.

My reading for the night:

The Best New Crime Shows Coming Out in March  - I want to see the Perry Mason show. I grew up having to watch Raymond Burr as Perry Mason (I think my mother had a crush on him), I have tried to read a couple of Erle Stanley Gardner's novels (meh), and I have seen a couple of the Warren Williams' Perry Mason movies (which I really like and are so different from Burr's Mason), but the real reason I want to see this is Matthew Rhys. I was a fan of The Americans.).

On Friendships as Catalysts - from CrimeReads, a bit of fun.

With the rejections piling up, with me driving KH's mind around the bend, I had to read Donal Ryan on Mourning the Death of an Unpublishable Novel , and I cannot say it was necesarily reassuring:

Finally it was done. I lowered the hood of my late father’s old MG Roadster and drove out of the city and into the Silvermines mountains. I walked to the summit of Keeper Hill and I sent a prayer of thanks heavenward on a column of rising air. My wife was in treatment for cancer but she was doing well. My children were healthy and happy. Mickey’s voice no longer wheedled through my thoughts. And I knew as I looked across the Shannon valley towards the opposing Arra mountains where I and all before me were born and where much of the book I’d just spent two years writing was set, that it would never be published.

I’d managed to split myself in half. One side of me retained my conviction that creativity needn’t be purgatorial or oppressive; the other side of me ceded to that stupid notion, embraced it, loved it. I must have flickered unconsciously between those opposing states, pushing away any conscious interrogation of my binary creative existence. Writing fiction can by its nature be a wilfully schizophrenic experience; it’s necessary sometimes to enter an altered reality, to inhabit a different consciousness in order to gain a sense of what it might be like to be someone else.

No one was going to buy it, though. In any sense of the word. My novels enter some dark territories but this explication of a man’s conscience was a relentless hellscape, as funny as the hoary old bastard was, and as much as he had loved and been loved. But even in that moment of acceptance, of explicit understanding of my foolishness, my folly, my other half remained cleaved to my delusions. I descended the mountain and drove home and sent my manuscript to my editor and my publisher.

They’re kind people, and emotionally intelligent. They took their time about forming a gentle, reassuring, but clear response to my monstrous submission. It would need to be taken apart and all of its parts either replaced or radically reconditioned. I knew that they were right, of course. What I had convinced myself was faithfulness to narrative integrity, to the truest expression of an artistic ideal, had somewhere become indulgence, weakness. This was my art but it really only benefited me, and I couldn’t expect anyone to invest in it or to pay for it.

Maybe if I were younger, the writer's happy ending would outbalance that story. Writers, do read this and take note. 

sch