Welp, here I am, posting another pandemic periodical. In my last post, just a couple of weeks ago, I wasn't too sure I would be posting anymore about the pandemic. But with the way the delta variant is plugging up hospital beds in Florida and Nevada and, locally, turning all of the counties adjacent to Hood River County back into red wear-a-mask status. Oh wait, new update: Hood River County is also in red status. (Of course, this is the week our toddler starts daycare.) So, yes, we're in another stretch of pandemic anxiety and the thread of pandemic periodicals continues!
Now onto wildfires...
I look out my window and Mt. Hood is not its usual clear self but a hazy pyramid of a mostly-melted glacial volcano in the distance. The sun rose beet red this morning. There's a yellowish tinge to everything and the sky goes suddenly from an opaque general gray cloud cover to a Venus-like smog.
It's my first time in the West during fire season and though I read much of the news coming out of Oregon last fire season, it's surely a different thing when you start to experience it yourself. Kelsey, my wife, grew up in California. So a few smoky days in late summer are somewhat normal to her. But it makes me wonder if when you're raised in one environment, or region, and then end up living long-term in another, if you ever really adjust. There's home and then there's home.
It's how a place and time can come to define yourself. How trees of a certain type, climes of certain features, storms coming from this direction, winds from that direction, pollen or no pollen, distinguishing smells and odors on the air—all of these tap into the memory bank, to nostalgia, to who you are and who you want to continue to be.
Who we are and where we are may be inseparable. Our environment is part and parcel of what makes us. Take away part of who you are, or watch helplessly as it changes forever, and it can feel like you're not quite yourself anymore. Not who you want to be.
Anyways, enough woolgathering. Onto the topic of this perhaps weekly periodical, which is, that I got booted out of the Veterans Writing Award, which I spoke about here. The Savage Taste of Blood, a short story collection I hastily put together last February, was rejected. It did not enter the finalist round.
I don't know what to do with it now. There was no feedback in my rejection letter, so I can only guesstimate that it was rejected because of:
- the low word count (my manuscript is 38,500 words when 40,000 words is typically the cutoff for a "full-length" short story collection)...
- or the incoherence of all of these particular stories being mashed together (one concerns an Iraq vet, three take place in or right after Afghanistan, another's sci-fi while the others have ghosts or magical realist elements, the characters are all different from one story to the next...)
- or, perhaps, it was a total lack of literary merit which doomed it all.
The Savage Taste of Blood was likely in the first pile of rejections.
I gave the judge too many reasons to throw it out instead of more reasons to keep it in. It's like A Square of Dirt, a recent short story of mine, also not going anywhere (only 2 submissions who haven't rejected it so far, another 4 already have).
So—what to do? Something tells me I am going to have to go back to the drawing board with this one. I'm still thinking about it. Perhaps a retinue of fresh eyes can tell me what's wrong. Beta-readers, assemble!
In other news, I am in the finalist round for the 2021 Colonel Wright Award presented by Line of Advance. I'm biting my fingernails until I hear back (maybe next week) about the winners! :*
I seem to recall writing in one of my recent posts, back in June or thereabouts, about how August was going to be a busy month for me...
Anyhow, that's the news from the end of the river that empties into another. Bub-bye for now.