Triangle, Be Damned!

Map image from Mysteries Zone. Good debunks, but also many, nice links to the entertainingly full of bunk.

Can it be the worm has turned? That the months of career silence have just been the warm-up for a building roar? Maybe not, but a couple nice things have happened.

First, I got a rejection from a magazine to which I'd submitted a short story. How's that nice, you ask? First, it came quickly, so I can get on the stick rewriting and/or resubmitting. And, they actually responded with grammatically correct, courteous words on official letterhead, flourished with a human's signature at the bottom. Unbelievable.

It's become the laughable norm that. for some reason, I seem to get blown off completely by people with prestigious professional careers in publishing. We meet, I say please and thank you, we seem to be getting along fine, I send the query package, then my SASE's get harvested for postage (I suspect), and I never hear from them again. Ever. Not after polite follow-ups. Never. I'm treated like an invisible non-entity, undeserving of even a photocopied rejection stub or an e-mail with those three little words: Not For Me. This Bermuda Triangle treatment, sadly, has been common even from nice-seeming people to whom I've been personally introduced, people with whom I've conversed at length about my manuscripts, who asked pertintent follow-up questions and specifically asked me for chapters and everything.

To get a prompt, professional rejection is at least an acknowledgement of receipt (and my existence), and also means I didn't waste the stamp on that SASE at least. I'm going to keep buying copies and will submit to that magazine again. I like the cut of their jib, I do.

In the second nice thing, and this is more obvious, I've finally been published online in an e-literary journal. I announced a while ago that this site had accepted a flash fiction piece of mine, but before it appeared, the site went dormant. For several months. Reverse Bermuda Triangle this time: I didn't disappear, they did. However, surfing today, I discovered the site's been enlivened with two fresh issues, and has also included my little effort.

The second issue of The Angler had a suggested theme of Hallucination. My few hundred words are from the perspective of a trustafarian, or the kind of young celebrity better known for her appearance and ubiquity than substantive talent. It's called Lunch at the Hotel.

And it turns out to be true that late is way better than never. Thanks much, Donovan.