Being Unprofessional, 52|250, Reading Doldrums

Received some good writing news Saturday night. "Breakfast in the Garden" was accepted for publication by Bards and Sages Quarterly. I wrote this story in 2008 and had it critiqued via Critters. The critiques were, of course, mixed. Amid the usual line edits, there were a few suggestions for rewrites. Some of the suggestions were good. I noted them and set the story aside to be rewritten at some later point. Except the longer I waited, the more distasteful the thought of reworking the story became. In May, I did the unprofessional thing.  I figured, "Screw it." I was never going to make time for the revisions and the piece was just gathering dust. And…I liked the story as it was. I cleaned it up, made a few minor changes, and shipped it of to a few short story markets. At worst after a couple months of emailing it around, it would end up as more free fiction by me on the web.

The "screw it" philosophy is probably not the best way to get fiction published. Or maybe it is. The only thing I know about the publishing biz is that no one knows anything definite about the publishing biz.

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In the land of more free fiction, I returned to 52|250 this week with a piece called "RA." The theme was Red Meat. I kept picturing a gruesomely wounded knee, but then added a little auto-biographical to my fiction. My hands and feet have been aching since Friday. I took liberties with the actual medical science.

I like 52|250. It’s interesting to see what other authors decide to do with a theme, and  in bite-sized chunks!

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The doldrums of summer creep into my reading.

I couldn’t get caught up in The Strain. I may be forever vampired out.

I moved on to Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. Luck for Hire has some potentially noir qualities to it, so I figured it was about time I tasted that genre. After fifty pages, I find that there is so much distance between the tale and reader that I have no feelings for the characters. I don’t hate them, but I don’t like them either. I simply don’t care what happens to them. This doesn’t make me compelled to read on.

I’m going to putter through some short fiction on my defunct reading list.