Skip to main content

Planet Heaven

 I’m taking a little break from The Space between Atoms this week to share some news.  I hasten to add that the “struggling” part of “blog of a struggling writer” doesn’t refer to the struggle to write.  It’s the struggle to get published.  The Space between Atoms is finished, just being unveiled slowly.

The news involves overcoming, for a little while, the struggle of getting published.  My twenty-fourth story, “Planet Heaven,” has been accepted for publication.  It will appear in the next issue of Sein und Werden (“being and becoming,” roughly).  This particular story was finished ten years ago.


I submitted it to a now defunct mag.  They didn’t like it.  It sometimes takes me awhile to recover from rejection.  I suffer from what one of my friends calls aporripsophobia, the fear of rejection.





Then there was a publishing website—I forget its name—that had a call for submissions that was perfect for this story.  I submitted and waited.  And waited.  And waited.  I’ve got so many stories going at any given time that I figured I could hold out until the publisher responded.  Before I knew it, years had passed.


I reread the story.  Damn, it was good!  I tried another publisher.  After several months of not hearing back, I tried Sein und Werden, for a themed issue.  They liked it well enough to put it on the docket.  I’m very pleased.


As a formality I wrote back to the one press that hadn’t yet responded (I think the years and years press went out of business) only to have them reply that they had rejected it for being “too preachy” and “anti-religion.”  Those two things, it seems to me, contradict one another.


I withdraw stories so very rarely that I’d prefer to think the decision was mine.  Still, some editors feel they’ve got to keep the upper hand, even when silence was all that was expected in return.  Or maybe even a “thank you.”


I’ll post again when “Planet Heaven” appears so that anyone interested will be able to read it.  Until then, keep writing!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Maybe Okay

  A couple pieces of encouraging news, perhaps, dear struggling writers.   I had a couple short stories accepted for publication in recent weeks.   As a fellow writer recently said, “You've got to keep trying.  Somebody will like what you wrote.” That’s a bit of sunshine.   And it’s likely true.   But the stories:   “The Crossing,” about two men in a boat trying to cross the Atlantic, was accepted by JayHenge Publishing.   JayHenge is a small, but paying publisher.   I was flattered when they wanted it for their Masque & Maelström: The Reluctant Exhumation of Edgar Allan Poe anthology.   Being associated with Poe in any way feels good. The second story, “St. Spiders’ Day,” had been brewing in my mind for years—yes, this is a long game!   A friend pointed me to The Creepy podcast.   Since the story hadn’t been written, I followed their guidelines of what they wanted.   It worked. I recently heard a successful wri...

Working Through It

  The thing about being a working writer is you don’t have time.   Between working nine-to-five and trying to eat and sleep, and write, of course, the week is shot.   Weekends are spent doing the errands that you can’t do during the week. I should probably have known better than to join a local writers’ group.   Their meetings, although only once a month, are all-day affairs on a Saturday.   I generally don’t have all day Saturday to spare.   I work all week and I need groceries and the occasional Target run.   And I haven’t yet learned to go a week without eating. This is actually the third writers’ group I’ve joined.   One was not too far from home, but not terribly helpful.   They met on Saturdays, but in the morning only.   Nobody seemed interested in what I was writing, so I stopped going. The second one was about an hour away.   They also met on Saturdays.   Their big thing was having lunch together after the meeting. ...

Creative Righting

  Rejection of my writing is a rejection of my imaginative world.   That’s why I was cheered by the acceptance of one of my stories this week.   That makes number 31. I’ve been working on a lot of fiction lately, even as nonfiction book number 6 is going to press.   The ideas are still there, and bizarre as ever, but publishing venues just aren’t welcoming. The other day I had lunch with a professor whose wife is also a professor.   She just had her first novel published, and so he pointed me to her indie publisher.   I went to their website to learn that they’re closed to submissions.   I have to admit that my latest accepted story, “Creative Writing Club,” was probably given the green light because I know the editor.   That seems like a pretty dicey way to get any notice, doesn’t it?   You have to know the right people even in the low circulation world. My fiction is difficult to classify.   It’s got speculative elements to it.   ...