I've recently had
a couple of near misses, short story-wise. I've hinted at the frustration
caused before and, mentally, I'm in the
same territory that I was a year ago. Must be an October thing.
The only difference between a near miss and a swift rejection is that the
former wastes so much more time. Otherwise, it gets you to exactly the
same place. An inch really is as good as a mile.
One was from token-paying Wyldblood,
for a short that started off life as an exercise to see how many of
Clarkesworld's rules - the bit here that's
prefaced with "this is not a challenge" - I could break in one
story. It has a talking cat and, originally, even a punning title: Catmandon't.
On the back of that rejection, I had a fascinating email exchange
with editor Mark
Bilsborough, in which his take on the reality of the cat was quite
different to mine. I'm not saying he was wrong and I was right - as
Ursula K. Le Guin's said, "The
unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The
reader reading it makes it live: a live thing, a story" - and Mark's
take was quite legitimate, although I’m not completely at the extreme end of
the ‘if a story is read in a forest and there’s no one there to hear it, it
makes no sound’ spectrum.
Incidentally, Mark and I are the only two British silver honorables(sic), in fact, the two highest placed Britons, in the latest quarter of the L Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future. Congratulations to us, although I guess that's another near miss if you're being glass half empty about it.
The other rejection I had in mind was from Flash
Fiction Online, who published my Product
Recall some three and a half years ago. This story, which was with
them for over seven weeks rather than the fortnight it usually takes them to
put me back in my box, made it to the final 5%, and, as I assume is reserved
for the cream that isn’t the creamiest, editor Suzanne Vincent offered me
feedback. A nice touch, much appreciated, thank you.
I’m used to the editorial trope that there are more publishable
stories than they had space for, so expected something along the lines of good
but not good enough, too similar to something else, didn’t
quite do it for me...
But, fuck me... “Tension is
lacking... started off quite well but didn't get going after that... much
of the story is little more than internal monologuing, without much really
happening. And when something does happen, I'm not sure about the significance
of what happened... interesting but not developed in a convincing way... the
resolution isn't satisfying because the character's reaction isn't one of
understanding or empathy... I think the story is trying to do too much... I
didn't find this believable... I’m not really engaged in the conflict here or
the science behind the solution. It just comes off as kind of bland overall... This for
me is bland... I'm not really sold. The conclusion isn't great... I started
skimming near the end. The writing wasn't bad, but there was nothing to hook
me... the end falls flat for me.”
Christ. What do they say for the ones
they don’t like?
I can take all of those on the chin and, once
you've had several gins and a good cry, it's all grist to the rewrite mill.
You can’t please all of the people all of the time, although those people
do seem to be disproportionately more populous amongst slush pile readers.
But I do think there’s a sense of proportion missing here. I’m
writing sci-fi. Hand-waving, rubber science, sci-fi. I’m not
writing the Great American Novel. It’s not my credo that I'm setting out
from my hermitage high in the hills. It’s meant to be a throwaway
1000-word entertainment.
I'd hate to see what these people make of Star
Wars - or, perhaps they think having your spaceship attacked by your
estranged father-in-law and throwing a message in a bottle into space to be
found by your unknown brother is convincing; that Jawa sandcrawler looks
perfectly stable on the Tatooine surface; that the best freighter pilots in the
galaxy are bound to be found on a planet with no evident industry or other obvious need
for interstellar logistical infrastructure; that there’s nothing odd in an armed freighter;
that Mos Eisley spaceport clearly has at least another 93 docking bays; and
that it is perfectly, naturally normal to get out of your means of transport
within sight of your destination and talk about it, as though to an unseen
audience. Oh, hold on...
But what got me were the readers who felt they
were reading a story about beauty, and that I’d set my Malay-German heroine, Lilly, up to be a white man’s demonstration of how ugly Asians are.
This rather threw me. Actually, threw me an
extremely long way. As far as I was concerned, I’d written a story
about the disconnect between internal emotional states and facial expressions
as externally perceived. Aesthetics wasn’t even on my radar. I
don’t think there’s a single element that steers the reader that way, except in
a seeing your parents fighting in an inkblot kinda way.
You can be Mila Kunis frowning, or one of life’s unfortunates grinning;
the two aren’t related and if I didn’t clearly say they weren’t, it’s for the
same reason that I failed to point out they weren’t correlated with the price
of fish, either.
Plus, I’m rather fond of Lilly and, even
though she’s fictional, I thought she was illustrating a universal truth, that
we may be serene on the surface but we're all paddling like crazy underneath,
and I feel slighted that there’s even a suggestion that I think she’s a minger.
The thought that I’m left puzzling over is, were
my story genuinely about "anti-Asian stereotypes and Western standards of
beauty", would any of the slush pile readers have mistaken it for a simple
story about the (mis)perception of facial expressions? I’m inclined to think
not, because the woke aren’t on the look-out for that, are they, like religious
zealots checking their toast for faces? But mention in passing that you
prefer Blonde
on Blonde to Back
to Black and you may as well put on a pointy hat and call yourself
Grand Wizard.
So, yes, a story needs a reader and a writer, and the two together make the dance. And if reader and writer muddle through and it transpires one was dancing a mambo and the other was working on the basis that it was a rumba, maybe something interesting might come out of it. But if I’m coming to tango, don’t go complaining to the judges that I’m dancing a goosestep, because that may just start an argument...
