First rejection of the new year

And it's from Palooka magazine, bringing me up to A B C G I M N O P Q R S T U W

This one did include a note encouraging me to submit again, which I think is the first time I've gotten one of those. It's almost as exciting as an acceptance.

A Great Big Fiction Bomb Exploding in Your Face

That's the working title for my new painting, which I'm submitting to a cover art contest. If I don't win, I'm also totally counting it towards my rejection tally, since it's literature related.

C Is for Cookie & It's Good Enough for Me

After over eight months, I logged on to Crazyhorse's submission manager and saw that I've finally been rejected. It might have been nice of them to at least email me a form letter. Oh, well.

Current tally: A B C G I M N O Q U R S T W

Possible anagrams:
Angst Crumb Qi Ow
Gnaws Comb Qi Rut

It occurs to me that my blog has been in an angsty rut this year. Perhaps I need to adjust my Qi.

RIP, Christopher Hitchens...

...and I guess you were right about women not being funny. Or I'm not funny, at least--not according to the editor of the "Funny Women" feature at The Rumpus (who also got my name wrong). So this is probably my tally for the year, unless I hear back from some other places in the next couple of weeks:

A B G M N O Q U R S T W


***Update: Check that--Santa brought me one last rejection before Christmas, from the Indiana Review, bringing me up to--

A B G I M N O Q U R S T W

This is good, because now if I want to make anagrams from my rejections I've got the -ing words. Here are just a few of the phrases I can now spell:

Worm Bang Quits
Worm Bangs Quit
Worm Bags Quint
Worm Gabs Quint
Worm Squab Ting
Worm Tang Squib
Worm Gnat Squib
Sing Quart Womb
Wing Quarts Mob
Wing Quart Mobs
Wing Squab Mr To

I Am the Charlie-Brown-with-the-Football of Submitting to McSweeney's

So, I'm going to have to extend my project. I'll never have a rejection letter for every letter of the alphabet by the end of the year at this point, not when I keep returning to the same magazines as a dog returns to its vomit. (Sorry--I was just reading from Proverbs.)

I remember in my high school and undergrad creative writing classes how we were always warned about the submissions process and how it takes years before you even get good rejections and then maybe one day some magazine no one's heard of will accept something and then eventually you can move on to magazines that a few dozen people read, and maybe one day before you die you'll get something in Glimmer Train or something. And deep down I always thought: It'll be different for me. I'm going to send this story about a girl in college who wanders around and thinks about stuff straight to the New Yorker, and they are going to publish the shit out of it.

But this time I at least got a more specific rejection, so that's progress maybe(?):

While this certainly mounts an impressive war on Xmas, I’m afraid I’m going to pass. Thanks for the read.

Also, I am now completely obsessed with rejectionwiki.com. How did I not know about it before?

So I Still Need a "D"

I have a piece up in Defenestration magazine, a site I submitted to primarily because I love the verb "to defenestrate." It's the first acceptance I've gotten since I set out to get rejected by a magazine for every letter of the alphabet.

I other news, I was apparently on WFSU again a few weeks ago and didn't know it. I'll post the mp3 once I get it.

Jesus and Judy Blume

This is an excerpt from a new essay I'm working on, entitled "Bibliography of the Damned."

(It's supposed to be in the form of an annotated bibliography, but Blogger keeps messing up my MLA format. So just picture where the margins and indents should be.)



Blume, Judy. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. New York: Dell, 1986. Print.


It was the first time I had heard of a book being a secret thing, a dangerous thing. Up until then it seemed like all anyone wanted us to do was read—at home, at school, at church, everywhere. Billboards and public service announcements showed clean-cut, smiling children engrossed in books. Now all the girls were reading this novel, passing it around, and it was scandalous. It was the Lady Chatterley’s Lover of the fifth grade.

I wanted to read it, too. I’d heard that it talked about periods, a subject I desperately wanted to understand, since all I knew was that they were a curse brought on by Eve. But I couldn’t get past the first part of the title: “Are You There God?” How could anyone ask such a question? Of course God was there; as a good Southern Baptist girl, I knew this to be true. I had been saved when I was eight, after a Bible study teacher explained how if you didn’t place your faith in Jesus’ resurrection, you went to Hell, where you would be on fire forever, without ever burning up. That got my attention, since fire was one of my worst fears. I wouldn’t touch matches until I was thirteen. Who was this Judy Blume, then, to challenge the creator of the universe right there in her title?

My curiosity won out, though, and I read the first few pages. The basic plot concerns Margaret talking to God every day, even though her parents don’t belong to any religion. Good for her, I thought. Maybe this book wasn’t so bad after all. Then I read some of the things she was praying for: “I just told my mother I want a bra. Please help me grow God. You know where.” That was too much. Listen, Missy, Jesus didn’t come back from the dead just so you could get boobs. I put the book away and never finished it.