Five Minute Rant

I heard once that if you want to know if a chef is really good, order the simplest thing on the menu. It is hard to cook simple dishes super well. There is no sauce slathered everywhere to cover up the over-cooked meat, for example.

I think writing linear, "simplistic" stories is very difficult. You have to really work at it. I get frustrated sometimes with stories like this, because there is nothing to cover up any mistakes I've made. The story seems so raw. Maybe that's what you're feeling?

In any case, remember writers are the worst judges of their own work. It is likely not as bad as you fear.

Jackie, you just totally made me crave a French Dip sandwich. I realize there is no reference to one of these in your post, but they should be simple, it would seem to me, yet it's rare and so awesome when you get one that's just right.

Also, I agree with Jackie, Jeeohn. We are very often the worst judges of our own work. Your story has an end. This is a victory. Let it sit and breathe for a minute, then reassess. I think you'll find it's better than you think.

Ah, so this is where the French Dip craving started.

Ah, so this is where the French Dip craving started.

Edit: I forced myself to read the story start to finish. It's actually not too bad. I need a section of exposition to break up the narrative at one or two points in order to clarify a few things, but other than that I should be fine. Not sure why all the stress. Feel free to read what's below if you'd like!

Sometimes that happens. Most of my simple stories have writing that is too simple...or so I think.

I usually ignore those feelings beyond making sure everything makes sense and fits etc . Sometimes simple is okay and might be quite good. Or so I see from published stories. So far no editor has agreed with me.

Come on! Seriously. RANT RANT RANT. And an extra RANT for there being no caps lock on an iPad.

Just needed to throw a little hissy fit. All better now...

Can you double-tap the caps to keep it upper case? That's what I do on my iPhone.

Thanks for the words of encouragement, everyone. I'll start doing rewrites today and flesh out what's missing. For now I'll be satisfied in knowing that I'm capable of writing a complete, well-paced short story in a day.

Can you double-tap the caps to keep it upper case? That's what I do on my iPhone.

I don't know--I will have to give it a try!

And I still want to rant more, but I don't want it come back and haunt me, so I'm not mentioning any specifics. RANT!

RANT RANT RANT. And an extra RANT for there being no caps lock on an iPad.

Come on! Seriously. RANT RANT RANT. And an extra RANT for there being no caps lock on an iPad.

Just needed to throw a little hissy fit. All better now...

Not much of a hissy fit there.

Maybe one minute's worth, if you are going to do one do it right.

Or at least five minutes of one.

But I have one that could go on for a minute or three.

Surprised I'm the only one to say something about them. Must be one of the first rejections sent out.

Just got a rejection from Analog---Finally! No apology for being late, nor an explanation. That wasn't nice I might even say it was rude.

Of course it was just the normal rejection...looks like the new guy is using Stanley's form. The first part there was no surprise even though I could hope for something different since it was one of my better stories but I'm the only one who thinks so.

Wonder if he might react differently if I send him a bunch of stories. If he is going to take this long usually now that could take years.

I guess that was more like the whole five minutes.

This rant is more at myself.

I can't figure out of I sent a certain story out already or not. I revised it tonight, making sure it had enough of the five human senses and printed it. Oops, found I already have a cover letter for it. That must be the story I sent to F&SF on Dec 31. But if I did, as far as I can find, I sent it without a header and with two words missing. I suppose I could of if I got in a hurry but I don't think I have made that mistake in years if ever.

As far as I can remember I did send a story that day, the cover letter was made Dec 30th.

Of course no response form F&SF yet. Even with New Year's Day in there, there should have been enough time for them to get it back to me. Scott seems to run a day or two later than Steve but still.

Oh well, if I don't receive a rejection by next weekend I will send it for sure. Actually, it might be better if I didn't send it. I think it's slightly better with about a hundred words added mostly the five senses.

I am sending in another story and got reminded that I was in the middle of revising another story when I interrupted it for some other work so I need to get that one done and sent out. Maybe to BCS first when I get the one I sent them a month ago back. Which seems like should be any day now.

Still no reject for the story I thought I sent out Dec 31. Maybe my memory is playing tricks with me--it's been known to do that--and I remembering the story I mailed the day before Christmas. But I listed it as mailed, which meant my memory was playing games the 31st.

I said I will mail it next week if I don't hear anything and assume that I didn't mail it after all, but there's another story already listed for next week. So that questionable one will go out the week after. Unless I decide to send it to someone else first.

More venting on me:

But man I hate it when that happens. It's rare but when I misremember sending a story or get distracted so it really doesn't go out. It makes it worse when I forget to list a story as sent...I get it back and can't find the list for that market. I once did that with a new story so it hadn't been listed at all. Ugh.

Well, to be fair, LD... the mail isn't delivered on Sunday.

I would like to rant at myself for hyperactively checking my mailbox.

It doesn't help. Just stop it.

(Especially on Sunday.)

Well, to be fair, LD... the mail isn't delivered on Sunday.

But that was written on Saturday and we still have Saturday mail.

And since we are talking about F&SF I should have gotten something by now. Even if five or so times it has taken a lot longer. Well, twice it took over a month and the others were only a week or so longer. So there is still a chance I will receive something. Oh, once I received a rejection for story A a couple of days after I received a rejection for story B. A must have gotten forgotten.

Well, well I did send it.

Nothing to indicate why it took a week or so longer than usual but they might have had a Christmas-New Years break.

And if I did send them the copy I think I did I understand why Scott rejected it. He might think I'm a newbie or something with the shape it was in. I was going to say amateur but he already knows that.

As stated before the "didn't pan out" statement most be his standard line. No idea if he has any other lines.

So next week I'll send another one and send the new version of the freshly rejected story to someone else. LIghtspeed maybe, they should reopen tomorrow.

But sort of changing the subject BCS seems to be taking a bit longer this time.

But if it's like usual since I said that I will probably get a reject from them in a day or five.

Right on schedule.

The editor at BCS sounded almost like Scot at F&SF.

"nother one from me.

This one concerns Lightspeed. They or is it He, pulled a fast one on me.

Instead of being closed to submissions for thirty days it's going to be three months for SF and six for Fantasy. That means I can't send my best fantasy for half a year...of course my best probably doesn't mean much with my writing. In either case they could have said that when the closed Dec 15th. Or are they having problems and they need the break from buying stories?

As hard as JJA is it's surprising that they have that much of a backlog.

Which doesn't say much for my writing.

I don't think it's that they have a backlog of stories to work through - clearly they keep up with that. I believe they said they've purchased stories for far enough in the future that they don't want to keep buying and end up holding stories for 9 months until it's finally time to publish.

Even though it's a bummer for people hoping to sell, I say good on them for finding awesome stories and actually taking a break. We haven't exactly made it easy on them - they get so many a month.

I don't think it's that they have a backlog of stories to work through - clearly they keep up with that. I believe they said they've purchased stories for far enough in the future that they don't want to keep buying and end up holding stories for 9 months until it's finally time to publish.

Even though it's a bummer for people hoping to sell, I say good on them for finding awesome stories and actually taking a break. We haven't exactly made it easy on them - they get so many a month.

I wasn't clear enough, I meant backlog of bought stories.

And he-they may have a good reason to close to submissions but still they said they would reopen on the 15th. If they did it was for one or two days.

Which means I need to find a new market for my fantasy. Which is possible of course and is a relatively minor problem especially when you consider that more than likely he would have straight out rejected my story in one to three days anyway. But I was looking forward to it anyway.

Would anyone mind if I had a short rant about an aspect of writing not directly connected to WotF?

I happen to enjoy writing poetry as well as prose. Sometimes when I have no story ideas I can just sit at the keyboard and poetry almost writes itself. It can be effective in getting the creative juices flowing again. I think it can also have value in helping one understand the beauty of language as an art form distinct from the content.

When I espoused the idea of competitive writing, I tried poetry as well as prose. I speedily discovered that discrimination seems to exist in poetry competitions, at least in my country. First, second and third in every competition that I entered always seemed to be 'free verse', that is to say free of both rhyme and scansion. I am not opposed to this form of poetry, though I do feel that in the hands of some exponents it is not so much poetry that I am reading as badly punctuated prose.

What I found hard to accept was that in every competition no entry of rhyming form was ever good enough to be placed, let alone win. Reading judges' comments I found questionable justifications such as 'the Victorians used up all the rhymes' or 'free verse reads better.' It got to the point where even poetry competitions organised by 'outside' bodies (that is nothing to do with poetry) had the same pattern of results.

In my case the effect was so discouraging that I almost gave up writing poetry altogether. Now this would have been a pity, as it turned out, but there are limits to even my optimism. Finally the only thing I was willing to enter was my local writing festival, because I like to enter all the categories there just on on principle. The strange thing was that my poem placed first and the judge commented that the entries contained one outstanding poem and thereafter it was very close for second.

I am not writing this to invite praise for my poetry. What I am ranting about is the effect of discrimination in favour of free verse on the writing of poetry generally. How many aspiring poets who write rhyming poetry have given up in the face of the difficulties that 'fashion' imposes on them? How much good work has been lost to us as a result?

Obviously this is nothing new. Artists in all media may have to struggle against a popular tide and in some cases that tide will seem philistine to them. I would just like to feel that one is not disqualified from achievement simply because one is unfashionable, and that unfashionable may include old-fashioned as well as new-fangled. There are new heights yet to be climbed by rhyme.

I agree, Ishmael, that free verse has recently become very pervasive. Part of the reason for this, I think, is that when many poets (especially new or young poets) try to incorporate a specific form, it comes off as contrived--a rhyme for rhyme's sake, if you will. (Then again, this could just be my feeble attempts at composing couplets...) Free verse doesn't have such constraints, which is why it's so popular in my opinion.

But when done well, form poetry can be far more meaningful than free verse. I want to hear the spoken rhythm of blank verse. I want to get carried along by the rhyming sonnet. Granted, I can't write any poetry worth a thing, but I think we've lost a bit of the nuance that was around in the 18th and 19th centuries.

That said, I enjoy modern poetry; it definitely has its place in the canon of great art. But form poetry should have a place, too. Keep writing what you want, Ishmael. <img src=" Bring back the rhyme!

I see a lot of submission calls for poetry to "not rhyme" what's up with that? Some of the best poems rhyme. I think even better to combine rhythm and rhyme to make it interesting. My husband and his dad do some amazing poems and they all mostly rhyme. Maybe I have a bias ear to rhyming? Maybe I'm not cultured enough to understand? I don't know, but when someone is clever enough then I think rules and current tastes will evaporate.

Ishmael, you should visit our poetry, limericks, doggerel in the contest forum (where we come up with poems about waiting for the contest results). I think we should have just a regular thread for poetry in general. Put it in the writing forum and have the people in the know teach basics to us who are still a bit clueless. Cadence is one of the most important lessons in writing.

I think we should have just a regular thread for poetry in general. Put it in the writing forum and have the people in the know teach basics to us who are still a bit clueless. Cadence is one of the most important lessons in writing.

Agreed.

I definitely would love to see a thread for poetry, especially if it covered some of the basics. I zoned out when we were taught poetry in school, because at the time it was 'boring'.

Ok this is strange. I remember writing in this thread a couple months ago because I was having problems with the formatting when submitting to daily science fiction. I can't remember who, but someone was very helpful and wrote a list of steps to go through to set up the formatting. You had to go to replace and fix the paragraph marks. Last time I tried it it worked really well. But now today I'm trying to submit a story, and I'm following the same steps but I'm still getting messed up paragraphs! I'll get ones that look like this:

"Stop!" he
said.

No matter what I do I can not get the word "said" to appear on the previous line in the text box they give you. So my question is - does this happen to everyone else? Is it something I can overlook? Or will it mess up the entire story? Very frustrating! I really want to submit to this market but I can't figure out the formatting!

Hey Stephanie, not sure if this will help (or if you haven't tried it already), but this is generally the way I format my DSF stories, so it might be worth a shot.

1) Use the find-and-replace feature to add an extra line between each paragraph (Press ctrl + f, click on the "Replace" tab, type ^p into "Find what," and type ^p^p into "replace with")

2) Copy the entire story into Notepad. This is to get rid of any pesky formatting presets you might have in Word, which could cause problems because the submission manager accepts plain text.

3) Copy the story from Notepad into DSF's submission window.

This has generally worked pretty well for me, but it might be that you have some stray formatting marks that just aren't apparent because of where the line break falls. Try showing the proofreading marks (ctrl + *) and see if there's anything odd going on with the lines that are messed up in the submission window.

Hope this helps!

I haven't had any problems with them but with everyone else having problems maybe I should double check next time I send them something...which should be soon.

Thanks Austin, it seems to work when I copy everything into notepad. I figured out how to fix the lines in notepad and now I'm working through it so I'll be able to transfer the entire story to DSF. I hope in the end all this work will have been worth it!