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Everybody's liking, but nobody's buying
Dec. 22nd, 2006 02:09 pmI got a perfectly lovely rejection from Strange Horizons today for "Eudora's Song," the kind of rejection you want to paper your wall with. They liked it, but it "didn't quite fit." Alas, it boiled down to "beautifully done" but "too slight." Which seems to be something of a consensus opinion for most of the Dos Lunas County story cycle. And I can't say I disagree. With the possible exception of the first story in the cycle (as in the one I wrote first, the one my gut wanted to expel), "A Tale of Two Moons," I'd say the rest of the cycle doesn't have the oomph that would make them the kind of stories you love rather than just like.
I say that not in an "I suck" vein but in a writer's judgment vein. It's taken me awhile to get to that place, but I rather like being there. A great deal of hard work was involved in achieving some kind of writer's judgment. When I first starting receiving editorial criticism on "Eudora's Song," for instance, I thought, "X just doesn't understand!" With much writing under the bridge, many other projects, I got to a place where I could see X's point of view—because it had also become my own. These stories have some fine writing in them, I think, but for the most part they are more incidents in search of a novel than true short stories.
I'm a long form writer, not a short story writer. I don't "get" short on some fundamental level. However, making attempts at them does appear to be part of my process. This Dos Lunas cycle is searching for a longer plot, but I don't think all of them will ever be folded into a novel, certainly not in their current forms, but they are explorations of some sort. I have a kind of plot for two or three novels based in this universe, but I don't think any of them really holds up, plot-wise. Not yet. At least one of them will get there eventually. There's a novella, "Hortensia's Man," that is already 30k and has some oomph—but I'd say it's currently unmarketable.
But I'll keep trying to market the other stories. It's good exercise—and I have gotten some really quite lovely rejections on some of them. Who knows? Maybe next time.
I say that not in an "I suck" vein but in a writer's judgment vein. It's taken me awhile to get to that place, but I rather like being there. A great deal of hard work was involved in achieving some kind of writer's judgment. When I first starting receiving editorial criticism on "Eudora's Song," for instance, I thought, "X just doesn't understand!" With much writing under the bridge, many other projects, I got to a place where I could see X's point of view—because it had also become my own. These stories have some fine writing in them, I think, but for the most part they are more incidents in search of a novel than true short stories.
I'm a long form writer, not a short story writer. I don't "get" short on some fundamental level. However, making attempts at them does appear to be part of my process. This Dos Lunas cycle is searching for a longer plot, but I don't think all of them will ever be folded into a novel, certainly not in their current forms, but they are explorations of some sort. I have a kind of plot for two or three novels based in this universe, but I don't think any of them really holds up, plot-wise. Not yet. At least one of them will get there eventually. There's a novella, "Hortensia's Man," that is already 30k and has some oomph—but I'd say it's currently unmarketable.
But I'll keep trying to market the other stories. It's good exercise—and I have gotten some really quite lovely rejections on some of them. Who knows? Maybe next time.
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