thank you, Virginia
I love the Stephen King story about how he hammered a nail into the wall of his writing room, and used it to keep all the rejection slips from publishers. He said he wrote, and submitted, and wrote, and got rejected until the nail fell off the wall.
My nail in the wall is a writer’s website called Submittable that I use to send my stories to different publishers who are looking for the kind of thing I write, and here’s my track record.
I will get Gold In The Abraham accepted one day! I’ll sneak that angry little story into a pile of others and maybe it will have its moment. These are just a few of my rejections over the years, and I kept submitting and writing and submitting until I got a little break through.
In 2022, a literary journal in California called The Ear picked up my short story All The Colours Of Death and published it in their May print edition. Getting that letter was a moment that made exactly no impact on the universe but felt like it changed my world entirely. There’s something that hits different about validation that comes from somewhere so disconnected to you - no friend of a friend recommendations or family members, just a little email as I was checking my phone before bed.
It was so exciting to read, and then to learn what ‘First American Serial Rights’ meant, and just to feel a part of that world. What followed was just as exciting, including an invite to the launch party of the new issue. I did look up flights to L.A. but I decided that maybe I was getting overexcited. I also learned a lot about communicating with the publisher. I read the proofs, and some very key italics had been removed. It changed the narrative voice so I decided to ask if they could be put back - it turns out it was a mistake so I’m glad I said something.
The whole thing was so exciting, and then seeing my little story for real in the book when I received it was even better. The bio, the contents page, then the story itself just gave me a feeling of, I guess acceptance in that world. More than that though, I adore the story. Everything I write comes from a deeply personal place, every one of the characters is part of me. The girl in All The Colours Of Death is an outpouring of pain that comes from my journey with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and the breadknife moment is a very real desperate thought I’ve been to many times. It was the most cathartic experience to follow the thought through. To take it to its limits and try and experience it as fully as I could.
My novel is one thing - I’ll finish it on these early mornings I’m currently enjoying, and then get in contact with an agent or agents, or a million agents until I can convince someone to read it - and short stories are another thing entirely. An agent won’t be interested until you have at least nine stories on a similar theme. I’m on seven, all on the theme of love and death, and I’ll name the collection after the last line of my favourite story, my first published story, and hopefully one day I can say it was the story that started it all.
Now I Can’t Breathe, Finally I Can Breathe.
RJ