Calliope

A writer’s life is one of introspection and self-doubt.  There’s nothing like the ratio of rejection slips to acceptance emails to drive home the message that somehow your words are defective, your thoughts substandard, your ideas puerile.  Then a miracles happens.  A small miracle.

It was a bleary-eyed Monday morning.  I hadn’t even bothered checking my email for a few days, sometimes trembling at the very thought.  Some days there’s only so much criticism I can take.  But this was something good.

On a whim I entered a story in Calliope’s annual writing contest.  This story had been rejected a total of seven times, but I believed in it.  Calliope is associated with Mensa, and I had an intelligent subtext to the tale—my stories are never about what they seem to be.  I sent it in and tried to forget it.

The forgetting part worked, for the most part.  Daily life attempts to drown my writing hour from time to time.  Mostly it is work or personal crises.  Such was the case on Monday.  A young writer friend was having difficulty and the weekend had been one of trying to help.  Writers often have trouble fitting in.

My story, “Initiating an Apocalypse,” the email said, had won third place and publication in Calliope.  I am thrilled and honored.  It will be my first print publication.  My first published story, O Tannenbaum, won a prize at Danse Macabre, but since then the negative reinforcements had been falling so thickly that I had assumed it was a fluke.

In fact, I couldn’t even muster the energy to post on this blog.  Those magazines most desperate not to publish my work close down rather than consider my efforts.  Now I can tell them they’re rejecting the work of a writer who has two awards, modest, but honestly won.

They haven’t changed my daily life except that I’m now writing new material with a bit more vim.  A modicum of hope has crept back in as I face that smooth, high wall with no places to grip—the wall between writer and publication.  For just a brief moment I’ve been allowed to glimpse the other side.  And yes, there is a promised land over there.