Frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

I just sold a poem.

A poem.

You have to understand, I'm not a poet. I don't pretend to be a poet. Sometimes, though, my flash fiction is um, well, not so much with the narrative drive, and so I stick line-breaks in and call it poetry. I submit it because, well, I'm a professional writer and that's what I do with the stuff I write. I never in a million years expected I'd actually sell it.

But I have.

To The Magazine of Speculative Poetry.

I still can't find my Sheaffer converter, and you know what? I don't even care.

Yee-ha!

productivity

Spurred, perhaps, by unexpected success, I have made substantial headway in getting my short story situation sorted, including finishing revisions and tweaks on two stories (the 9,500 word novella ended up a svelte 6,500 words), getting them submitted, preparing another turnip to go out on Monday, and asking a particular market if they'll look at a fourth.

I have, therefore, fourteen stories out, and two ready to gallop off in all directions.

This leaves me with one story still in that stage where it looks like what happens after Mirrorthaw has taken a computer apart but before he's put it back together again, and one story that I'm in the middle of writing. And a number of flubs, but let's not talk about those.

The story I'm in the middle of revising, which used to be two stories, has between its two forms racked up twenty-nine rejections in not quite four years. Now that I've figured out that it's really one story, I can see why. It's like that thing Diana Wynne Jones is fond of doing, where two or more characters turn out to be the same person (literally, not psychologically); all of the splinter personalities are interesting, but none of them are quite as present as they should be. One story had all the thematic stuff and the bravura prose and clever structure and the emotional gravitas; the other story had the plot. Integrating them together is a bitch--as any of DWJ's split characters would tell you--and I just hope I'm up to the task. It doesn't help that it's an extremely feminist story, and it's hard to tell an extremely feminist story without getting preachy. It also doesn't help that one half is magical realism and the other half is straight-up RL fantasy (I can't call it "urban fantasy" when it takes place in a small town) with a selkie even, and how cliché can we get?

The thing is, and the reason I think the selkie story never worked on its own, is that the point of the story isn't that she's a selkie. Editors kept responding to it as if they thought I thought that was supposed to be some sort of big reveal, and, no, it's not. She's just a selkie who needs her skin back. The point was over in another story where none of us had access to it.

Threading plot and theme together can be easy or it can be difficult. I've just never had it be quite so obtrusive before.