Waiting on Rejections

I have become accustomed to editors rejecting my work. I don’t mind. I don’t blame them. Sometimes the work just isn't good enough. There’s always a better story or ten or a hundred ahead of mine in the queue. What I haven’t grasped yet is the wait to receive the rejection. Here’s why.
The longest wait I’ve had so far has been about three months (generic review X). The shortest wait I’ve had has been about twenty hours (generic magazine Y). It took generic review X three months to reject one story; generic magazine Y rejected not only that same story but a second one, with a personalized note for the second, in about twenty hours. Both journals are not among the littlest guys; each has been around a while, has a significant presence, and is accessible via such sites as Duotrope and the CLMP.

Among the easiest things in the world to do is to read the first dozen lines of a story from a slushpile, see that said story is (incomprehensible / syntactically sloppy / a first draft / hackneyed / insert various other flaws here), and reject it. A dozen manuscript lines might take about 30 seconds to read, another two seconds to sneer at, and another ten seconds to secure in the NO pile (or shunt to the NO folder in a database). Let’s say a story a minute. A determined editor who knows how to read and knows what a quality story looks like could eliminate fifty stories in an hour; one-hundred stories in two hours. (No excuses. It could be done.)

I know that generic magazine Y did read, in full, the second story that I submitted; the personal rejection letter proves it. Someone took a lot of time and energy to reject me very quickly, and made sure to let me know they did.

What are the discrepancies between one journal’s sloth and another journal’s celerity? Some requirement to read the entire body of each story? Quotas? The use of graduate student labor? Volunteerism? Intrajournal politics and disagreement? Can anyone explain this, or am I pondering something entirely disagreeable that no human being should ever think about?

Introverts

This article with two follow-up pieces by Jonathan Rauch, at the Atlantic Monthly, clearly and definitively describes those of my ilk: introverts.

"Caring for your Introvert"
"Introverts of the World, Unite!"
"The Introversy Continues"

They Came in Leopard Print

Meet the Giant Garden Slug.

The last house we inhabited in southern Illinois had a basement. The foundation was cracked. Water stood upright on the floor. Camel crickets dotted the walls. Mold, black spots of it, along with miniature forests of small mushrooms, grew on the walls. Brown recluses scuttled about. And, at night during the summer, Giant Garden Slugs came up the stairs in a great swarm. I fed them cat food. They seemed grateful for the sustenance. These slugs grew to immense proportions, some longer and fatter than any one of my fingers. Seeing this silent and glistening host at the top of the basement stairs filled me with a sense of paternal pride. They were like my subjects! Never once did I salt them. I miss them today. The Giant Garden Slugs are the only other nonhuman inhabitants of that house that I miss.

disinterested

On hiatus. What awaits? A story about a former prostitute from East Germany, hard-boiled eggs, a retired diabetic Air Force Colonel, and a woman with cancer about a breath away from death.

Auf wiedersehen. Ich muss schreiben.

Jimmy-Brains

Lack of sleep. Sleeplessness. Wakefulness, restlessness, jimmy-brains. Sometimes known as Restless Muse Syndrome, or RMS. A condition in which the writer (or other artist) stays up and awake many hours into the night, well beyond any reasonable or healthy bedtime, in order to further develop a work-in-progress, or to read. Not quite insomnia, but neither is it a stubbornness, like that of a child who thinks he’s going to miss something. Symptoms of RMS float in an ether between two extremes. Creation, composition, intuition, and most other cognitive functions remain active and focused during periods of intense RMS activity.

Neue Jahr

Crappy Old Year, Happy New Year.

We Want to Live!

November now. Someone has been thinking over the past few weeks about the Heart of a story. What is it? How does it work? What does it do? Why is it there? How does one bring it to life? Then this same someone was reading through his writing journal (and marveling at the inanity of some of the entries therein) when he encountered a question: "What is the spine of the story?" Unanswerable at the time of writing, now the question gained a new facet of perspective. The Spine of a story is its logical straight-and-true, the literal truth of a story. The Heart of a story is its emotional straight-and-true, its flows and lifeblood, what sustains the story.

In other uninteresting news, I can't think of any. Except this: If you're the kind of person who gets lonely in the winter, go to Pet Expo and buy yourself a plastic container and a bag of bigass crickets. Crickets in winter.