Rejections

Heading for home, today, which has me in high spirits (although I'm a little afraid that I'm going to experience delays on the way home. Never good).

Received a rejection letter from Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, which I posted on my wall next to the others, though the curtness of the reply and the swiftness of the rejection left me feeling more--well--rejected than the others. So I'm a bit low.

There's a few things that I find cheer me up when I read rejection letters. The first is posting them on my wall as a reminder that this is part of my body of work. Rejections mean someone has looked at my work, even if they didn't see fit to pay me for that. They mean I've been looked at by an editor. In some cases, the editors have been very helpful and kind, too, which I appreciate. So there's that. The other thing is everything contained within this article. To explain--no, that would take too long--to sum up: no matter how bad it feels when you receive a rejection letter, it isn't personal. Never ever ever is it personal. This is what I keep in mind, and it really does help me. Just last week, I sent a letter to the brother of a friend of mine, saying pretty much "Rejections suck, but they're a part of the life of a writer, and all you can do is buck up and move forward." And they do. And they are. And you must.

So the adolescent boy in me is saying "Screw you, buddy!" and the determined business manchild in me is saying "Alright, so I'll send it to someone else" and the editor in me is saying, "It's nothing personal. Just a matter of tastes. How can we make this story better?" but the writer in me is saying "Ah well. Keep writing."

Which is what I did last night. And I'm happy with the way my new short story opens. So here it is:



1. Morning

He woke beside his beloved.

The sun rose sideways into the room, neatly drawn and quartered into rhombuses by the sash and grill of the window. Light trickled across the books in the library, casting long faint shadows from the ziggurats of literature piled around his love’s bed. The books in the shelves grinned out at him like great sets of teeth, smiling because they knew they were a part of history. The whole room in which he lay beside his beloved smelled of it. Decades of bohemianism, revolution, art for the sake of art for the sake of beauty for the sake of decadence hung in the air, as palpable as the dust in the sunlight, carried on the scent of mushrooms. He rose amid this—twisting his head until, much to his delight and with an audible pop from his vertebrae, the tightness that had taken residence in his neck through the night freed itself—and wagged his nose at the ceiling. Stories written in mildew across time-moistened pages, told in a voice as sweet and tender on the taste buds as truffles, traveled their old vaporous paths into his nostrils. In one breath, a book of poetry bought for a lover on the day the bookstore opened, later bought back, dog-eared and worn by a lifetime held close to the woman’s heart. In another, oil from the fingers of a great playwright, days before he would begin writing two plays—one a brilliant parlor drama, the other a play that would redefine the art of theatre—grazed across the pages of a philosophical essay, turned to for inspiration. In another, long dried, set into the margin of a history book, these words scratched in India ink in terse loops belonging to a traveler who passed through the city, like so many others, looking for the poetry locked in its walls and cobblestones:

Love is pure, and poison, too
Liquors of bliss and blindness both
Distilled from the heart and the water hemlock
Mixed in phials of morning dew
For the taking of spirits
When other faiths fail us

Other stories in other sips of breath. His nose cluttered with each of them, all of them competing for his attention. His attention turned toward his beloved.

Sylvia. Ah, Sylvia. Beautiful porcelain Sylvia, bound under sheets of white linen. How his heart leapt at the mere sight of her face, at the thought of her body hidden under the blanket, her nightgown just covering her, revealing just the slightest curve of her buttocks, the barest shadow of her sex. He inhaled again and drowned in the scent of her. Lilac bath oils, sandalwood incense, fine jasmine perfume, and musk—inescapable and pungent—musk, blended together in an effluvium called Sylvia. He watched her roll over in the bed and turn her face toward him, making slits of her eyes.

“It’s morning isn’t it, Jamon?”

“Past morning, dearest. Into midmorning by now or, dare I say it, late morning,” he said, turning to her.

“But not noon? Not yet?”

“No, no. There have been no bells to indicate noon.”

“Good. Then I needn’t be awake,” she said with a small smile. And she turned over in the bed, taking the blanket with her to cover her eyes from the invasion of light.

He returned to watching her, listening to her, inhaling her, and smiled because he could do so. Because he was close to her. His beloved.

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And that's what I have so far. The title is something like "Parisian Decadence," or "Parisian Delight" (because it's written as a Decadence story and the Decadents hated that term for themselves...so would they use it in the title of a story?)

Happy Christmas, all. Pleasant New Year. The next two weeks are going to be fun. Going to NYC sometime over my time home, getting to see lots of old friends, and then a week of Amanda, drenched in rum rolls and absinthe.