I received my copy of The Rejected Quarterly today and found more than a few librties taken with my story. I understand that a little editorial discretion is to be expected, even appreciated, but there comes a point where the author will become offended.
It started with small stuff. A paragraph split into two paragraphs, a narrative aside comment grouped into quotation marks (a if spoken aloud…by the wrong character). I took those in stride; they really just changed the perspective of the story. But then…
In a fairly complex part of the story, where the protagonist explains the root of his psychological problems, twenty-eight words were completely omitted. It ruined the logic of the story. The printed version makes no sense. That reflects on me (assuming anyone reads TRQ). They didn’t ruin a masterpiece, but it was a clever story that comes across a lot less clever when you start scratching your head and saying “what did I miss?” You missed twenty-eight words.
Why did they do it? The splice point makes sense from a bad-typesetter perspective, but I sent an electronic copy of the story that should have been pretty much cut-and-paste. It seems as though the cut was made in order to save the story from spilling over onto the next page. If they needed twenty-eight words cut, I could have cut from several different places, just sectioning out a joke or a POV reaction. It’s too sloppy to be an attempted edit. It was simply sloppiness and is unacceptable.
I am furious and embarrassed. I had intended to buy copies of the issue as gifts for my mother and maybe some other people. No longer. I don’t expect to apply there again. I wonder if others have had this experience before. I have not shared my displasure with the editor yet; I’m not sure how to approach it. All I know is that I’m unhappy.
I’m not talking about sending The Clash to college, I’m talking about the use of improper punctuation.
Were you paying attention? I just did it. Very first sentence. (We’ll discuss fragments in another post.) The two clauses in that sentence are both independent an thus should be joined by a conjunction (and/but/or/a few others) or a semicolon. But I used a comma. What kind of vandal does that make me, desecrating the laws of punctuation like that?
Renni Browne and David King, in their book Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, suggest that using commas in the place of conjunctions or semicolons (in small doses) can lend some modern sophistication to a story. They especially seem to advocate the use in dialogue, but it follows by extension that character thoughts might also benefit from such comma usage. They claim it better represents the rhythm of human speech.
“Don’t worry about it, she’s only sixteen.”
“Try the blue ones, they taste like cotton candy.”
He pushed the engines harder, the entire ship started to shake.
Semicolon genocide
In these examples, a semicolon is probably the “correct” punctuation mark to use. Do the commas detract from the meaning? I doubt it. (Full disclosure: the first sentence is from the book, the other two are mine.) They could even be independent sentences with periods where the commas are. That might make the sentences seem choppy (and hence the paragraph or even a scene). It’s a convention I try to pay attention to when I read. I tend to like it, though semicolons and I are still well acquainted.
I carry the convention a bit further. For instance, I occasionally leave out commas between independent clauses joined with a conjunction. This was pointed out to me in a recent critique. While the critiquer suggested the offense was widespread, this was the sentence used to illustrate:
Her son would remain a [drug] dealer and she would continue to supply him.
I confess, there should definitely be a comma in front of the and. But. (Wow, how’s that for a fragment? Too much?) The point of this part of the scene was to express the main character’s resgnation to the fact that she has fallen into a perpetual cycle that she can’t escape. The thoughts are supposed to be droning and a bit muddled. I feel like the run-on sentence here portrays that feeling pretty well, kind of a punctuation poetry. I’m not great with poetic devices like alliteration that could probably do something similar (I try on occasion). I just think it works. It can also work to express when a character feels rushed or anxious.
To me, this falls in the same category as starting sentences with conjunctions and ending sentences with prepositions. I wouldn’t do it in a dissertation; I find it acceptable — even beneficial — in fiction.
Am I an expert? Interesting question. I have no degrees in English (or any other language), literature, creative writing, needlepoint, poetry, or juggling. I have no professional publishing credits. I have never held a job as any sort of editor. I’m not even very good with chopsticks. So who am I to say these things are okay?
Then again, I do have more published SF stories than any English teacher/professor I ever had (that I know of, some might lead secret lives). I can, of course, point to a thousand examples from true professionals (but those big-wigs can get away with anything). And who is more qualified than me to declare what belongs in my fiction? Oh yeah, editors.
Will an editor reject my story because it needed a semicolon instead of a comma? I hope not. They might even decide I didn’t know the difference between a semicolon and a comma and still request a rewrite, perhaps even asign the editing chore in-house. More likely they would decide the story was pretty good and buy it if it was close enough that punctuation was the deciding factor.
I’d like to think that some editors (not likely all, but some) would hop on board with Browne and King and find sophistication in the punctuation (or at least appreciate the rhyme). I have a fairly significant mastery of the rules of grammar and thus use these non-standard forms intentionally (or at worst subconsciously). I consider them a strength in my writing. I just need to find editors who agree.
It might be wise to reserve these non-standard techniques until after the reader is hooked. Wouldn’t it suck to have a story nixed by a slush reader because I missed two commas and a semicolon on the first page? Or have an editor open an e-submission in Word and see nothing but green squiggles?
So I will continue to dabble in the dark arts of non-standard punctuation when I find it to my benefit. I’ll go through a story or two tomorrow with an eye for this specifically; overuse can minimize the effect, after all. I encourage people to do the same, even watch for it in stories I critique to see if I can find a reason they chose a given style. (I probably miss some intentionals and over-rationalize mistakes.)
For the record, I encourage my reviewers to point out any fishy punctuation they find in my stories. I may not have done it intentionally or I may not realize how often I’ve done it. Never break a rule you don’t know and you always need to know when yyou broke a rule.
I’m so excited! I have two stories coming out this month. My issue of The Rejected Quarterlywith “Excuse Me” is out soon. In fact, I should get my contributor’s copy any day. Apparently these bookstores carry TRQ, or you can buy a copy directly from their website. The rejections themselves are often enough to warrant the cover price. I’ll have a full sales pitch for them once I’ve seen the issue.
My story, “How Quickly We Forget” hits Every Day Fiction on July 29th (my anniversary, as it turns out). Be sure to read it and give me lots of stars. You should be dropping by EDF anyway; their supply of flash fiction is perpetual and delightful.
I just read a Clarion Update from Rochita and it helped me understand that I may not have been ready for Clarion West.
I don’t doubt that my writing is up to snuff for the workshop (I wouldn’t have been waitlisted if it weren’t). What I may lack is a certain level of self-awareness. What kind of fiction do I do best? What do I enjoy writing about most? What is it I bring to stories that no one else can? I suspect that the workshop is supposed to help me find those answers, but it’s been a while since I even asked those questions.
The questions I’ve been asking recently have been “How can I make this story better?” or “How can I turn that into a story?” or even “Why can’t I finish this !@#$**! story?” The answer to some of those questions may be to abandon them and try something else, something I need to write rather than want to write. What stories are really mine to tell? Ideas are cheap. Any idiot can come up with an idea for a story. I need to do a better job of finding the right idea for me.
I think that is what I’m supposed to be working on right now. For instance, I think my military clone novel (Honor by Proxy) is a great idea and may be my best chance at selling a novel. However, I am far from a military expert. That doesn’t mean I can’t write the story, but it may mean I need a new direction. While my YA space novel (untitled) will undoubtedly draw on my more immediate expertise as a close observer of children (teacher). I don’t yet have my characters polished for that one, so it keeps skidding to a halt every time I try to work on it.
Am I well-suited for YA writing? I don’t know. I’ve sold two stories to youth-themed publications (“Faerie Belches” and “Brother Goo”). Time will tell.
I need to reorganize my projects, set some deadlines, and bring order to my chaos. (It can still be chaos, just scheduled and catalogued chaos.) I have eight months (+/-) to raise my game and become part of the class of 2010. Right now “Poison Inside the Walls” seems my strongest submission candidate (and likely my next WotF entry), though “Secondhand Rush” (my current WotF entry) seems a good second. I might be able to use both. But ideally I’ll create something between now and then that eclipses both.
I just paid for a year membership with OWW, despite my disappointment with the number of reviews my stories have received. The quality of the stories I’ve read there have been only marginally superior to those at Critters. I’ve even had a crit-4-crit fail to reciprocate. But I paid my fare and I’m in. It’s only fifty bucks (twice what I’m making on my last three sales combined).
So why did I do it? It’s a way to get feedback, just not as fast as I’d hoped. Bottom line, I’ll need to do a bunch of reviewing in order to get my stories reviewed. I have a plan: find writers I like and bookmark them so I can set up a regular crit exchange. If I review one of your stories, you might feel the need to review mine. If I do two or three, you’ll probably feel obligated. Right?
Anyway, it’s an idea. It will just take more than my free month to get there. So I’ll try it. If it doesn’t work out, I won’t re-up.
A while back I startedrevising “Leech Run” from both ends and had a little trouble when those ends met in the middle. That was when I put it aside. Going back over it helped me realize that it wasn’t that bad. I still have a decision to make about Titan’s actions (whether to reveal them or not), but otherwise I think I ironed most of it out. It wasn’t so bad. A lot of the fixing I needed to do was fixing my previous fixes.
It wasn’t quite the task I imagined it to be so my revision notes are only half the coup against writer’s block that I hoped they would be. I’ll hit the keyboard with those revisions tomorrow. Little by little, it’s all coming back. I knew it would.
I’m going to a wedding on Saturday. (Trust me, this is related to writing; Clarion West specifically.) Weddings are generally happy occasions with people coming to wish the new couple well. But I suspect that every wedding has an angry spinster or two. Or a jealous younger bridesmaid. Or that guy whose girlfriend just dumped him. In other words, though wishing the couple well and meaning it, there’s always someone hurting as they realize how long it will be before THEY say “I do.”
I am the spinster at the Clarion West wedding. I want every attendee to have fun, learn, and succeed. I am trying hard to keep up with the logs of their experiences. But inside, there is that nagging feeling that this could have been my dance. I can deal with that. What I think is bigger is the issue of how long it will be before I get my turn.
Best-case scenario, I’ll be there next year. (We are planning another baby inside a reasonable window of time there, so we may be looking at two years! Let’s ignore that for a moment.) I believe I will make it into one of the Clarions next year. Does that make me egotistical? I suspect it does, though I like to call myself “confident”. Same thing. I doubt it’s a stretch for a writer on the waiting list to expect to make it next year. Anyway, that’s a long way off. I still have to write new stories, isolate my “best”, send them out, wait out that interminable acceptance interval, get accepted (please), find the money, make plane reservations, wait until summer, then FINALLY go. See, it feels like a lot. Still, I know I need this kind of experience to really get me going.
Ever watch American Idol? You know how there is always that guy that makes it all the way through the audition process and is the last guy cut, watching the dude standing beside him move on to primetime while he gets a heartfelt invitation to jump through the hoops again? That’s me. And the first episodes of the show are airing (or blogging) now. I watch; I cheer; I’m sad.
I dwell on this now because I am slumped. I can’t focus on writing. I have other distractions contributing (notably my involvement with my church’s bible school), but I’m also inventing distractions. I pulled out an old video game and am obsessing over it. I started reading a book that has been on my shelf for months (though that may help). I check my email for story critiques seven times a day. Writing just isn’t coming out.
Face it, I’m depressed about CW. Lame of me, but I am. I dared to hope and now I reap the consequences. I need something to snap me out of it. I go camping in a few weeks; I tend to do well there (not internet to distract me). I did some late-night freewriting for a story idea based on Japan’s Festival of the Naked Man; maybe breaking ground on a new project could get my wheels spinning again. Or seeing some of my stories in print. Or some forced keyboard time. Or taking those morning walks I keep insisting I’m going to do.
I need to do something.
Moving on to the divorce part of the post, I find myself very disappointed with the SFF Online Writing Workshop. The quality of the critiques I have received has been pretty good, but I am displeased with the quantity. So far it’s just two apiece on the stories I posted. Critters could usually deliver anywhere from eight to twenty, depending on the length of the story, though the quality of the comments was admittedly inferior (not immensely, but somewhat). It’s tough to determine a consensus with only two and a consensus is what critique groups should offer best. How do I make alterations based on that? To make matters worse (the way plot lessons always tell you to), my one-month free trial is over in less than a week. I need to decide: do I pay for a year or not?
I confess, a month is the time it takes for a story to reach the top of the Critters queue to get read, so maybe I need to give my stories a month at OWW to generate a reasonable number of critiques. Still, I find some things lacking. There is almost no incentive to offer a SECOND critique at OWW. A story with no reviews earns double poiints, so why comment on a story with one or two? The crit-4-crat approach may work better, but I have struck out there, too. I opperedC4C on my longer story and have since had one taker. I’ve been getting more attention on stories at Baen’s Bar (though, admittedly, the comments are less complete there).
We’ll see what I decide. It may be worth the fifty bucks to try to generate a community of people who want to read my stuff (even if it’s just because I read theirs). As for my jealous spinsterhood — this too shall pass.
I confess, despite knowing the late speculative element made “Glow Baby” a WotF long shot, the flat rejection left me wondering about the story’s quality. After all, it was the second story I submitted to Clarion SD (along with “Leech Run”) and was soundly rejected from Strange Horizons. Of course I know how tough the Clarion competition is and SH is a tough market (what pro market isn’t?).
I wasn’t really down on the story, but I was questioning. I needed feedback deeper than a form rejection. I thought about sending it to OSC’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, or Asimov’s, but even a close call there might warrant no more than a dismissive strip of paper or email. I had already passed the story through Critters and OWW seemed unlikely to produce many more useful gems (my two stories there have accumulated only two reviews each). So where to go? The bar.
Baen’s Bar, to be exact. I hadn’t put anything there in a month or so. I’m still hammering the kinks out of “Leech Run” based on their suggestions. My other Bar graduate, “Secondhand Rush” is in the bin for WotF’s third quarter. So I posted GB late last night and sat back to await comments.
While I value comments from every Bar Fly, the slush editors are always the comments I tremble over. Gary Cuba sounded off on GB today. Like the post title says, it was the boost I needed.
I won’t plaster his comments here, but I will share a quote or two. First he said he wanted to stop reading after 200 words, then 500 words, then after 1000…(gulp), but he didn’t. Why not? He wasn’t sure; maybe it was “some sort of subtle tension” or “just the quality of the writing, which [he] thought was very good”, or “the slow but incessant churning of a millwheel, cracking husks of wheat, revealing more and more of the protag’s character (as well as her aunt’s) via her old memories” (my favorite), or the setting, or something else. Whatever it was, he did read to the end. He felt the last half was “super” and liked the ending and the story as a whole.
I would go so far as to say that this may be one of those rare stories that stick with me for a while.
He agreed with something I decided a while ago: this story must be accepted in (pretty much) the form it has achieved. The beginning can’t endure a lot of hack and slash or even reconstructive surgery.
One other thing Gary mentioned was that he thinks the story falls into the horror genre…”the best kind of horror”. This was news to me, though others had suggested it brushed the edges. I intend to leave “Glow Baby” at the Bar for a while, but I may eventually have to start seeking a horror market for it. I don’t usually read horror, let alone write it, so I’m not sure where I might place a subtle horror story like this. Market suggestions are most welcome.
In the meantime, I guess it’s back to the keyboard. These stories aren’t going to write/edit/critique/rewrite/outline themselves.
As anticipated, the late arrival of the speculative elements in “Glow Baby” elicited a rejection. Sigh. Joni seems to be putting a personal touch on the rejections, crossing out “contestant” and writing in the name, as well as scribbling in an invitation to submit again. Nice of her.
Now it’s time to figure out a new place to try”Glow Baby”. Can’t let it just rest.
Scott W. Baker .net 