Data dive: Every Ghost Story is a Love Story

"Ghost Story" was the first story I wrote after an almost decade-long hiatus from writing fiction.  (Grad school, life, etc.)  Psychopomp Magazine published it this fall (it did place, but did not make the cut in Fiction Desk's Ghost Story competition.) 

The story is very much inspired by the rowhouses that line many streets in DC.  If you've never seen one, they tend to be strangely narrow but deep, and they are connected directly to neighbors (leading to delightful noise issues at times).  They typically have an English Basement (which is more half underground than actually underground) with a walk up to the "first floor."  I found these houses delightful when I first moved here, but have since decided that I never want to live in one.  Some of the rowhouses in DC date way back, which on the one hand means sometimes long and interesting histories, but on the other can also translate into creepiness.  Creaking stairways, wooden floors that "settle," old pipes that make mysterious clanging noises.  The potential for ghosts seems high...

Logan Circle rowhouses, picture by AgnosticPreachersKid

As I've lived here for a while, I've become more interested in not-necessarily-politically-related history about the city.  Below is an old picture from the National Park Service of Meridian Hill Park (mentioned in the story).  Way back when the city was first created, all the land it was eventually built on was owned by one rich dude.  Then the hill was used as a vantage point during the Civil War before it was eventually turned into the park.  The image below is a bit idyllic; when I was here a couple decades ago, the park had a reputation as a place for anonymous sex, drug dealing, and getting stabbed and stuff.  It's a bit cleaned up now (probably all of the above are true, but its nice during the daytime and kids play soccer), but there definitely isn't neatly trimmed topiary or lily pads last time I checked.   One of the things I would love to do via fiction is highlight that side of DC that is not the DC you see on TV.  On the one hand there's House of Cards and All the President's Men. But on the other, there are tons of people that you never see on your TV or in your standard "The corruption goes all the way to the top!" thriller.  My friends are teachers and medical professionals, security folks and all kinds of lawyers, IT people, chefs, and artists.  There are people who never wear suits and people who sport them every day.  And you live in this weird city where occasionally you're stuck in your car and hangry because the traffic holdup is a motorcade, where you might bump into a Supreme Court justice, or where people say "well if we get nuked we'll be first, so we won't feel it."  Anyhow, add this story to my collection of DC stories that have nothing to do with politics.

NPS.gov

Number of submissions: 44.  Ratio of positive feedback to number of submissions: 27%.  Time from completing story until publication: about 3 years.  Lesson to be learned: if you keep getting positive feedback on a story, keep sending it out. I'm happy this one found a home. The title actually is a reference to the David Foster Wallace biography, but the story isn't about him.  (My friend came up with the inverted title, which I thought was clever, so I kept it.)

In which I am on the top 100 Bestselling Kindle Singles list

I had to take a screen shot because I will probably never get to be on the same page as Stephen King (my idol), Jennifer Weiner, and Alexander Mccall Smith, all who have insane numbers of fans. This is for fiction Kindle Singles.

Proof that this actually occurred!

I actually have no idea how this happened.  "Twelve Years, Eight-Hundred and Seventy-two Miles" was published last fall, but there's been a bump in interest in the past few months.  I'm currently waiting on the data to see how many copies were actually sold/ downloaded.  What chicanery goes into calculating these ranks?  Who knows.  Being the obsessive person I am, I have been checking it a lot the past few days.  Within an hour of posting this, it will probably hop down to 400 or something.  But hey, for the next hour, this is where I'm hanging out.

World Building: Draw a Map in Your Awful Serial Killer Handwriting

At one point, I was writing about a small liberal arts school in New England that had been taken over by an armed cult.  When I was in high school this was the liberal arts college I had in mind—an amalgamation of every New England liberal arts school (minus the armed cult part).  Brick buildings with ivy growing on them, huge fields of green grass, a more or less enclosed space.  Somehow every single school I went to ended up being a city campus which probably is the best match for my personality, although when I was in graduate school and had a brief flirtation with becoming a professor, it was those campuses I was thinking about.  Small, enclosed, green grass.  Quirks I saw during a brief stay at Middlebury: the aggressive sign in the cafeteria which said “Please do not take the lunch trays—THAT’S NOT SUSTAINABLE!”  (Presumably people were taking them to go sledding.)  Also there was one main street “in town” that had one bar that everyone would go to. 

For the book I was writing, why bother going with a real school when I would make up my own and therefore have all my own rules (they can take the lunch trays whenever they want!!)  Particularly in stories that take place in an enclosed space, knowing where everything is—and having your characters know this intuitively without them figuring it out on the page—is critical.  How big is campus?  Where do people live?  Where do they eat or congregate after class?  Where did that kid get caught having sex in the bushes by the campus police?  Where’d they find the dead girl?  Where would you hide a gun where no one would find it?  How far do random pairings of characters live from each other? 

Yup.  That's a croissant stain.  Deal with it.

I’ve been working on a lot of things at once recently, but have wanted to get going on this speculative fiction thing I’m writing which is sort of like a literary/scifi retelling of the Jonestown Massacre.  So I more or less know the beginning and the end.  Our heroes arrive at a commune where family members have claimed that abuse is occurring.  It’s an enclosed space.  I know that things start out fine—the commune seems idyllic and people play volleyball and have plenty to eat.  Then things go horribly wrong.  How and where do they go wrong?  I didn’t have a pre-set idea of things already arranged in my head like I did for the college story so I figured I would start to draw a map and maybe fill things out.  I mean, if I were building a commune, where would people eat?  Sleep?  Where’d they bury the dead girl?  Where’s the fence weak?  Isn’t that an incredibly small area to grow crops for a commune that is allegedly self-sustainable..?

Points for anyone who can actually read this.

Pushcart Nomination... Not too shabby!

Southern California Review has nominated "Whatever Happened to the Six Wives of Henry the VIII" for the Pushcart Prize.  Will I win?  No.  It made me grin like an idiot though.  And that's a good thing. 

Data Dive #3: The Bleeding Room

The Bleeding Room was just published in Glimmer Train in Winter 2015, but I originally wrote it more than 10 years ago in the fall of 2002.  I submitted this story a few times nonsimultaneously in the early 2000s, stopped sending it out for 10 years, and then, on a whim, submitted it to one of Glimmer Train's Fiction Opens.  It placed second, and was published with no revisions from the original finalized text.  All of the journals I submitted it to are really well respected, but submitting to them one at a time was a silly thing to do.  Then there was a 10 year period where I literally forgot about this story and I wasn't really writing much because Iwas busy with grad school.  One day I thought to myself, you know, maybe I should get back into that writing thing.  I never expected to place in the contest, but once I did, it gave me a confidence boost that launched an incredibly productive period of writing and submitting for me.

If you look at the below graph you see something moderately interesting.  These are the acceptance rates (according to Duotrope) of all the journals I submitted the story to. These fluctuate in general right after something gets accepted and gets input into the system, and who knows what percent of submitting writers actually use Duotrope, but some data is better than none I guess.  Bottom line of the below chart: this story was rejected by several magazines that are "easier" to get into than Glimmer Train is.  You can never account for subjectivity.  I still believe in tiered submissions, but ultimately, it's somewhat arbitrary which specific journal picks up a story. 

Acceptance Rates at Submitted Journals (%)

H was a contest, but the reported rate is for general submissions

Number of submissions: 9.  Ratio of positive feedback to number of submissions: 22%.  Time from completing story until publication: 13 years.  This was my first acceptance.

"Twelve Years.." is out on Amazon!

Here is the link to purchase the novella: http://amzn.to/1QFAE3F

Will insert the cover artwork once my computer is not being wonky..

Data Dive: "Twelve Years, Eight-Hundred Seventy-Two Miles"

Photo of the Arizona desert from the National Archives.

Woe is the writer who happens to write a story that runs from 8,000 to 40,000 words!  The dreaded novella.  Dreaded only for the reason that there are so few markets who take them (I will shortly be adding another post detailing a non-exhaustive list of literary magazines that take novellas).  This is why you have to be twice as persistent when it comes to shopping novellas, and maybe come to the realization that some may only get to live on in a collection. 

"Twelve Years..." is a story about two brothers taking a road trip from LA to Arizona to see their father executed on Death Row.  That makes it sound darker than it is, as it's really a comedy with some dark undertones.  A road trip offers a unique setting where the characters are essentially trapped in a car for hours.  They will talk, and shit-talk, and argue, and tell stories. 

The idea for this story originally came to me when I was in graduate school in California.  I had driven across the desert to Las Vegas or to San Francisco more than a few times during my time on the West Coast.  There is something eerie about the desert.  When you stare out the window at this totally uninhabited land, it isn't too hard to think back to a time when it hadn't yet been explored.  It's beautiful, but desolate and terribly lonely.  I wasn't writing during that long stretch of time in CA, but some ideas for stories stuck with me, and I ended up writing this in 2013 when I was living in DC.  It was actually during that odd period of a few weeks of government shutdown when Congress was, you know, being Congress.  I was inhabiting coffee shops on the weekends, and would occasionally hear an odd tidbit like, "I'm just gonna break into that park man--what are they going to do, stop me?"  (They did stop people, incidentally.  I tried to go to Great Falls during that time and was turned away by a park ranger.) 

Day One had given me positive feedback about a speculative science fiction novella I had submitted in the spring of 2015, so I thought "Twelve Years" might have a decent chance.  I was surprised when four days later the editor sent me an email asking if she could call me.  (Call me?  Why??  To tell me that she liked the story, but that it was too long which is such a shame because she sorta liked it, which is what a couple other journals said?) 

No, she wanted to publish it.  I must have been grinning like an idiot during that phone call.  I love all the things I write in different ways, but there's something about "Twelve Years" that's always made it close to my heart.  Or maybe it's because each of my novellas is like a tender duckling with little hope of seeing the other side unless I tend, tend, tend to it to find it the right home. 

When this baby goes out--in mid-September, I'm told--it will have been the longest thing I've published, but not the longest thing I've written.  It will mean I have a product on Amazon that could be reviewed--yikes.  It will mean disseminating an awesome joke I once made about traffic in LA to an entire population of readers.  Score. 

Number of submissions: 12 (3 of these were contests). Ratio of positive feedback to number of submissions: 35%. Time elapsed between completion of story and publication: 1.5 years.

Everywhere I've submitted and what happened, July 2015 edition

Below is a graph which chronicles all my submissions dating back to the early 00s until the date of this posting, but I'll come back and update it periodically. 

Red dots: flat out form rejections

Yellow dot: detailed request for revise and resubmit.  This like, never, happens

Orange dot: nice rejection with invitation to submit again, sometimes with personalized note

Blue: shortlisted for contest, or editors mentioned that a standard submission was shortlisted

Green: acceptance.  Yay! 

A few notes: magazines that never got back to me are not counted (because who knows, they might just be taking a really really long time, or perhaps they never got the submission).  Contest submissions are counted as regular submissions. 

Total submissions over the last decade and a half: 164.  33% of submissions receive some positive feedback (either a positive rejection, shortlisting, or publication). 3 were accepted, which means about 2% of all my submissions made it. 

Why this critque of Disney princesses is totally wrong..

You probably saw this circulating on the internet, posted it on Facebook, or the like.  I think it's part of this anti-princess movement, as if little girls wanting to be princesses is something that should be alarming.  I'm not sure it is: princesses are in line for the throne.  Diana, Elizabeth I, Grace Kelly--all princesses.  And little girls might like sparkly things and might want to feel special.  (Hey, some little boys too.)

Suspiciously absent: Mulan, Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Pocahontas, all movies from my youth.

Let's start with The Little Mermaid.  Last time I checked, Eric falls in love with Ariel based on her voice, not her looks.  In fact, when he interacts with voiceless Ariel, she looks exactly the same, but he's just not that into her.  Her looks don't matter, but her specific talent does.  But fundamentally, The Little Mermaid is a story about immigration.  Ariel is pretty unhappy with her life way before she meets Eric--she hears stories about this fantastical other world and clearly wants to travel there.  Despite her relatively privileged station in life, she's attracted to foreign lands and the potential adventure they offer.  Enter Ursula: I can get you where you want to go for just a small price--I've totally done it for other people, and they are all happy!  She's a coyote.  And a bad one.  You can view the story as Ariel "abandoning her family for a man" or you can view it as the sacrifices that first generation immigrants make.  It's painful to say goodbye, but that's the price of immigration.  Ariel, incidentally, is not really even close to her sisters, and has a loving but apparently strained relationship with her controlling father.  Can you blame her for wanting to immigrate?  Immigration means freedom for her, companionship with a man who seems to get her more than her own sisters, and the big wider world. 

Aladdin.  Did we seem the same movie?  Jasmine rejection patriarchal notions that she should have no say in who she marries and loves.  Specifically, she falls in love with a poor boy she meets in the marketplace.  Love outside of caste--what could have been more taboo back then?  She is unimpressed with Aladdin when he returns in disguise as a hot-shit prince.  Put this in context of this being a historical fiction: this wouldn't have happened in real life.  She would have been forced to marry whoever her father wanted and Jafar probably would have gotten his way.  Who even knows what would have happened to a parrot that sounds like Gilbert Godfrey.  Anyway, Jasmine is depicted as being strong-willed despite living in a male-dominated society,  her father is depicted as ultimately being tender-hearted, and Aladdin's story highlights that money doesn't buy happiness.  Maybe I've gone soft, but these don't seem like bad values to harp on. 

In Beauty and the Beast there's a similarity to The Little Mermaid about feeling out of place.  Belle does not fit into her parochial small town.  She's intelligent and bookish, and the townsfolk think this is a con rather than a pro.  Gaston values her for her beauty rather than who she is as a person--obtaining her is a status symbol, I don't even think he is necessarily fixated on her beauty per se.  Belle falls in love with Beast despite his appearance.  The above picture implies that beauty doesn't matter if you're male, but it does if you're female.  So... the only conceivable reason that Beast could fall in love with Belle is her beauty?  Not that they both have a mutual love of books, and that she's kind-hearted, and willing to risk her life to save her father? 

Mind you, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs came out in 1937.  I wouldn't even attempt to argue that it is as progressive as the above-three films, but I never found it particularly offensive.  Prince Florian's love does not protect Snow White: she bites the poisoned apple.  The dwarfs believe her to be dead--they didn't have stethoscopes back then.  But does Florian even fall in love with her because of her beauty?  He first hears her singing as she's working dressed as a scullery maid, then they sing together, which I imagine is how musicals depict the emotions surrounding what it is like to feel the chemistry of falling in love.  His kiss brings her back.  Is it "a man" bringing her back or "true love?"  Isn't love something we should value?

Cinderella-- made in 1950.  Yes, the character is supposed to be beautiful while her stepsisters are both plain and cruel (although in modern adaptions the stepsisters are often attractive and cruel--not sure what that development says about our society.)  But also, like pretty much all the Disney princesses, Cinderella remains kind and caring despite the cruelty she faces.  She befriends mice instead of beating them to death with a broom while screaming in terror.  But yeah: the prince falls in love with her at the ball.  Should we default to assuming this is because she is beautiful, or through some holistic combination of her personality, values, apparent good judgment, humor, etc.? 

In Sleeping Beauty (1954) we see the same story again: Prince Phillip falls in love with Rose/Aurora because he hears her singing.  Aurora was gifted with beauty and song by two separate fairies.  He doesn't fall in love with her simply because of her looks, and she is conscious when it happens.  More interestingly, Phillip is totally unaware of the fact that the singing peasant girl he met--Rose--is actually Aurora,  the princess he was bethrothed to as a baby.  He wants to marry her despite his princely obligations--another cross-class relationship!  In the 50s! 

So what are Disney princesses telling our little kids?  That looks won't get you shit if you're a terrible person.  Never give up the thing about you that is unique.  That kindness and loyalty matter, and that you can be brave enough to be different, or fall in love outside of your social class (or even species?)  Sadly, the nihilistic atheist in me can't help but to think that the most dangerously inaccurate thing in Disney movies is that the good guys always win and the bad guys are always vanquished.  Look at the endings of the original Little Mermaid and Aladdin.  A bit bleak. 

Okay, end weird soapbox. 

Data Dive #2: Whatever Happened to the Six Wives of Henry the VIII

I love the New Yorker's fiction podcast.  On each podcast, a New Yorker author reads another author's short story, and then discusses it with the fiction editor, who has the most soothing voice ever.  I really like this part at the end because it includes a mixture of analysis, editorial notes, and interesting tidbits like "I don't know what he was thinking or even what that means, but I always loved that part."  One author selected a Donald Barthelme story that I originally read when I was an undergrad.  I remember how much I loved it back then, and how awesome it was that you could take facts and then completely make up stuff about those real facts because ultimately, it doesn't matter. 

So I thought about Anne Boleyn on the cover of Forbes Magazine with the stitch marks of where they had reattached her head.  This became a short story about all 6 wives of Henry the VIII converging in one location for a reunion of sorts.

"Whatever Happened.." was ultimately a perfect match for Southern California Review because they were doing a themed issue on "Remnants."  At its core, it is fundamentally a story about the wreckage left behind after a relationship ends (either by divorce of beheading, in Henry the VIII's case). 

Number of submissions: 13. Ratio of positive feedback to number of submissions: 38%. Time elapsed between completion of story and publication: 1 year.