I'm drinking and blogging tonight! To H-E-double hockey equipment with the "public and permanent" rule.
It's happy drinking, though. Just got news of my 3rd publishing credit. Thanks to the highly progessive and open-minded folk at Penduline Press, my baby, "The Camp Seminole Wiener Wall" gets to be born.
This story was conceived in winter, by a hotel pool in Cape May, New Jersey. I was attending the Peter Murphy writing seminar and enrolled in a fiction course hosted by Richard Weems, who is a brilliant beacon of unbridled awesomeness. We were prompted to write about characters with a hidden agenda.
I felt like writing about youth and sexually cruel rituals at a summer camp. Dunno why. Mashed that with the prompt as best I could.
This was '09. I evolved the damned thing and sent it out. Rejected. Evolved again. Rejected. I found at least eight rejections in my research this evening.
So me congratulates I on not giving up. I congratulates myself for tenacity in editing. I'm stealing this premise from Lilly Taylor's insanely self-congratulatory monologue in "I Shot Andy Warhol."
My writing group was awesome too, for pointing out nuggets like this one: My original draft had all the seventeen-year-old training counselors picking on the fifteen-year-old campers. Dave, on his first night in the group, asks me, "Where are all the sixteen-year-olds?"
Never thought of that. Where were they? Was this a camp for fifteen and seventeen-year-olds and if you're sixteen, fuck off, see you next year?
That's the kind of thing it's easy to miss. An utterly unsarcastic (no, seriously) thanks, Dave.
A little victory. This makes me feel like hope is back!
Oh, what a fucking feeling. March issue (Dastardly) of Penduline Press. Read and laugh.
-J
P.S. Here's the links to published stories one and two:
Read "The Gay Bomb" in Blipmagazine.net at http://blipmagazine.net/archive-4/winter-2011/15-james-russel/
Read "Friends and Pyromaniacs" in The Quotable at http://issue3.thequotablelit.com/fiction/friends-and-pyromaniacs/
It's happy drinking, though. Just got news of my 3rd publishing credit. Thanks to the highly progessive and open-minded folk at Penduline Press, my baby, "The Camp Seminole Wiener Wall" gets to be born.
This story was conceived in winter, by a hotel pool in Cape May, New Jersey. I was attending the Peter Murphy writing seminar and enrolled in a fiction course hosted by Richard Weems, who is a brilliant beacon of unbridled awesomeness. We were prompted to write about characters with a hidden agenda.
I felt like writing about youth and sexually cruel rituals at a summer camp. Dunno why. Mashed that with the prompt as best I could.
This was '09. I evolved the damned thing and sent it out. Rejected. Evolved again. Rejected. I found at least eight rejections in my research this evening.
So me congratulates I on not giving up. I congratulates myself for tenacity in editing. I'm stealing this premise from Lilly Taylor's insanely self-congratulatory monologue in "I Shot Andy Warhol."
My writing group was awesome too, for pointing out nuggets like this one: My original draft had all the seventeen-year-old training counselors picking on the fifteen-year-old campers. Dave, on his first night in the group, asks me, "Where are all the sixteen-year-olds?"
Never thought of that. Where were they? Was this a camp for fifteen and seventeen-year-olds and if you're sixteen, fuck off, see you next year?
That's the kind of thing it's easy to miss. An utterly unsarcastic (no, seriously) thanks, Dave.
A little victory. This makes me feel like hope is back!
Oh, what a fucking feeling. March issue (Dastardly) of Penduline Press. Read and laugh.
-J
P.S. Here's the links to published stories one and two:
Read "The Gay Bomb" in Blipmagazine.net at http://blipmagazine.net/archive-4/winter-2011/15-james-russel/
Read "Friends and Pyromaniacs" in The Quotable at http://issue3.thequotablelit.com/fiction/friends-and-pyromaniacs/
No comments:
Post a Comment