Monday Sucks - Rejections Coming In, Anti-Social Feelins

 I closed the night by sending "Problem Solving" to The Rumpus and "No Ordinary Word" to Jet Fuel Review.

Let me say I did not want to go to work today. Grumpy for unknown reasons, I was not a people person. We got done early. Back here, I did some cleaning, some reading of emails, and working on blog posts. I meant to go to Vespers here in town with CC, so I started dinner. She got locked in at her storage bin, and I missed Vespers. Not having much luck with church or religion this week. I ate dinner when she still had not shown up an hour later.

I expanded on this post with:

Alain Delon, angel-faced tough guy of international cinema, dies at 88 - what I knew of French actors when I was young was Delon, Belmondo, and Bardot. Never did get Bardot.

Another rejection for "Problem Solving": 

Hello,

Thank you for your submission to ARTWIFE. This work is not right for our magazine, but we appreciated the chance to consider it. We wish you the best of luck placing it elsewhere.

Thank you,

ARTWIFE

www.artwifemag.com

This just came in at 7:19 PM- "Problem Solving", again:

Hi Samuel,

Thank you for your manuscript and magazine submissions. 

Unfortunately, I don’t feel that they are a good fit for Noco Books or this issue of EDGE CITY. 

José Carpio

Editor @ Noco Books  

That was fast - it just went out yesterday. 

I will let all the rejections run their course, then I will rewrite the thing. I think it is a good story.

And I got the announcement that I did not win the first-page contest with the opening of "Chasing Ashes":

Good morning Samuel,

I'm delighted to announce the winners of the 2024 Gutsy Great Novelist Page One Prize!

This year's competition had 559 entries from all over the world, in a wide variety of genres, and a large number of those were notably good, making my task a significant (and enjoyable) challenge; it's inspiring to me that so many worthy writers are crafting such compelling novels.

I hope you'll join me in congratulating the winners, and please do visit the website to read the top entries.​

Prize Winners

• 1st ($1,000) > Yvonne Fein, Melbourne, Australia
• 2nd ($500) > Kris Ann Valdez, Phoenix, Arizona, USA
• 3rd ($250) > Peter Chordas, Hiroshima, Japan

Notable Honorable Mentions

• Cooper Ireland, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
• Morgan Nyx, Maynard, Massachusetts, USA
• Adam Straus, New York, New York, USA

Honorable Mentions

• Nina Chordas, Eugene, Oregon, USA
• Reyna Favis, Lopatcong, NJ, USA
• Michelle Geoga, Harbert, Michigan, USA
• William Kaufmann, Hudson, Wisconsin, USA
• Trey Montague, Brightlingsea, Essex, UK
• John Morrison, Annapolis, Maryland, USA
• Rachael Rands, Auckland, New Zealand
• Daniel Rousseau
• Zena Ryder, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada
• Greg Tulonen, Auburn, Maine, USA
• Jenna-Marie Warnecke, New York, New York, USA
• Peggy Wirgau, Arvada, Colorado, USA
• Trevor Zaple, London, Ontario, Canada

​Click here to learn more about these writers, and read their diverse and compelling first pages.

I read Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries while in prison, so I had to have a look at The Literary Review's 2004 Middle-Class Anxieties; Collected Stories by Carol Shields. I liked The Stone Diaries. The review made these points about Shields and female novelists that I think are worth passing along:

As one of Shields’s earliest admirers, I feel slightly uncomfortable asking if this is not inflating a reputation too far. Shields was exceptionally good at playing with the form of the novel, and around this interest, which was as much poetic as modernist, she fashioned tales of domestic ups and downs with real perceptiveness and style. Yet it is worth remembering what she did not do. She did not, for instance, create a single memorable character – one who, like Emma Woodhouse or Augie March, you instantly knew and recognised. To be able to do so is the best hallmark of a really great writer. Her characters were in fact blanks who refused to occupy their lives, instead preferring, like Mary Swann in Swann or Daisy Goodwill in the Stone Diaries, to leave fragments of themselves for others to assemble. Hillary Mantel has written of Shields that ‘It is her specialty to isolate moments that remain distinct in the mind for years, perhaps a lifetime,’ but this, too, is questionable. Despite the elegance and intelligence of her prose, Shields did not write a single memorable phrase, not even about the issue that clearly preoccupied and enraged her right up to her death (one which, actually, exercises a great number of other women novelists) – namely, why it is that the work of women novelists in general tends to be dismissed as minor or trivial. Shields’s struggle may have seemed long and unjust to her, but after Swann was published in 1987 it was effectively over.

Can we say the same about female novelists in 2024?

Mixing. I am trying to think of an American novel or writer who achieved the kind of mixing I read tonight in Héctor Tobar's On Asturias’s Men of Maize. I have dated black women but never had a chance of meeting any Asians. I had a friend who married a Japanese woman. I have spent time in the homes of African Americans; that memory does not leave me feeling like I mixed with them. Jews, I knew in prison. I have met only a few outside. No, I live somewhere with little mixing - Irish, Scots, Southerners, African-Americans, Poles, Germans are the ethnic groups that come to mind. There is a point here that we are missing.

I found Literary Reivew's Sappho’s Priestesses; Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho and Art - The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks a laugh. Oh, how we think our sins are new, or our sinners. Worth noting how these people were rich, not the lesbians living down the street working at Burger King.

Still waiting for CC to arrive. It 8:56 PM. Done, enjoy.

sch