11.24.2007
I've been spending my Thanksgiving weekend pretty much the way God, the Founding Fathers, and the Indians they ate intended: on my ass watching the Alien series.
I worked through all four movies - Jesus... and let me remind everyone how fucking awful the fourth one is - and was watching the behind the scenes docs for... I don't know... maybe the third or the fourth one - they do all bleed together after a while - when, what pops into my inbox? A rejection!
Wa-hoo!
This was for Rebellion which I had sent to Abyss & Apex earlier this month. Well... they weren't wild about it.
To be honest, their feedback sort of confirmed some worries I had when I gutted it like a trout before sending it on. Bear witness:
It's difficult to make an opening with a speech work, because that's not a moment of action, it's a moment of announcement of action. There's also not enough context for me to care about the speech.
I'd basically turned the entire first scene, a press conference, into a monologue because the scene just seemed to drag on for fucking ever. And the speech wasn't the point. The point was the people's reaction to the speech. That was the nut of the story.
So, in my great and infinite wisdom, I got rid of as much of it as I could to get on to the good parts. Except... well... as witnessed here first, it still didn't work.
Fuck... I don't know... maybe I need to revisit it as a whole. Maybe I need to start with something totally different. Or maybe I should see whether I could just ditch the goddamned thing wholesale and jump into the Governor walking in after. Maybe that would breed more excitement. Have the contents of the speech discussed and hinted at instead of spelled out...
Yeah! Maybe that's what I'll fucking do!
Sigh
Whatever...
So... for those of you keeping score at home, this makes my thirty-second rejection after twenty-one days on the slush pile. Three remain, waiting their destiny.
On a more positive note, I've purchased myself a new printer. And not just any printer. A laser printer.
And it was cheap. Seriously. Got it for a buck-and-a-half off of Amazon. The cartridges are fifty by themselves but whatever. They're supposed to be good for 2,000 pages each. I figured it out... that works out to seven cents for each page - slightly less than Kinko's, those lazy bastards - to cover the cost of the printer and then two-and-a-half cents a page every cartridge after that.
Put it another way, if the damn thing only lasts me five replacement cartridges, the total lifetime cost per-page is still only a little over three cents a page. Which Kinko's can go and suck on, as far as I'm concerned.
I have a hate-hate thing about Kinko's. And FedEx buying them hasn't helped any. In fact, I think it's just made them worse.
So anyway... the good news is that with my handy dandy new printer, it allows me to do two new things. Firstly, I can now edit my work on paper using a red pen. Which is great because I see stuff my eyes just seem to skip over on the screen. And secondly, I can now be rejected via the US Postal Service and not just email for the places that only accept hard copy manuscripts.
Now that's win-win if I ever heard it.
All right. I think I've said enough.
Enjoy your Thanksgiving kids.