Not You, Not Ever

Announces its Spring 2008 issue now available online and featuring:

FICTION
Richard Bausch         Italy, Winter 1944
Lisa Cupolo               Bread
Louise Jarvis Flynn A Windfall
Barry Gifford            The Age of Fable
Jeanie Kortum         Stones
Reese Kwon              Superhero
Mattox Roesch        All the Way Rider
Holly Wilson           Where’s the Beauty, Jimmy?

POETRY
Matthew Dickman
Mike O’Connor
Alberto Álvaro Ríos
Jennifer Tonge

NONFICTION
Lynn Ahrens        Going Hollywood
Rick Bass             Oil
Tom Grimes       The Leash
Donald Hall        Gaudeamus Igitur

WORKS IN PROGRESS
Marvin Bell
Amy Bloom
T. Coraghessan Boyle
Robert Olen Butler
Stuart Dybek
David Guterson
Jim Harrison
Min Jin Lee
Cynthia Ozick
Jane Smiley
Ayelet Waldman
and many others

CLASSICS
Stephen Crane     The Blue Hotel

Go to NarrativeMagazine.com.

The Narrative First-Person Story Contest, with $7,000 in prizes,
is accepting entries of fiction and nonfiction. Entry deadline: July 31.

_______________________________

Note From W,R:  This came today, following an email from earlier in the week with fabulous photographs of a very fancy party and all the literati smiling like fat cats.  As for this announcement, though, what's with the works in progress?  They won't publish your finished masterpiece, but they will publish the mindless scraps of famous writers.  Oh boy, that's taking reality too far.  I like the finished products, thank you. And, also many others? How many others?  Who's left? (Besides you and me, that is.)

Why Waste Paper?

Here's one from today's mailbag: "I once received my query letter and manuscript returned from an agent without a rejection letter. Just a charming rubber stamp message on the top of my letter.  It said REFUSED."

MBA Not MFA

My petulant banner ad at the bottom of the blog has changed yet again. Where once they sported faulty links to rejection, cheerleaders, potties, and medical devices, now my ads feature higher education.  Yesterday, LROD was promoting business school ads.  Nice!  Looks like those bastards at Google AdSense are trying to tell me to get a real job. 

Bakeless Doesn't Rise

I sent in a book of creative nonfiction for the 2008 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize.  Sadly, though, no dough.

B.Y.O.R(eadership)

Oh, if only every author came with his or her own huge, eager readership fan base. Wouldn't the publishing houses snap us all up? Now, you can build your own legit audience, and HarperCollins is going to help you.  It's yet another attempt by the publishing industry to harness the electrical juice of the online community.  HarperCollins UK calls it Authonomy.

Here's what Victoria Barnsley, CEO and publisher oF HCUK, says: 

“Very often we hear from budding new authors who tell us their script was loved by their family, book group or wide circle of friends. Authonomy™ is an opportunity for these authors to woo a large audience, get an army of support behind them, and really test whether their work has got what it takes to make it.”

Ho-hum.  Actually, I only know about this travesty from my own huge, eager readership fan base (just kidding, guys), but thanks puc.

VQR Rejection

An anonymous LROD reader, sends us this fuel for our recent fire:

Dear [name of rejected writer]:

Thanks for your recent submission to VQR. While the piece had obvious merit it just doesn't fit our needs at present. We wish we could offer a more personal response to your submission, but the number of manuscripts we receive makes this impossible. Please know, however, that we've read your work and appreciate your interest in our journal. Please do keep us in mind in the future.

Best regards,
The Editors

Says our rejected friend: "I sent this not even four days ago and I got a rejection, which makes me blatantly hate the journal even more. Why don't they just have their rejections instead say, "We wish we could read your work, but the number of manuscripts makes this impossible." At least then they'd be being honest. Anyway, thought I'd share."

BTW, keep reading the stories Ted Genoways posted. We don't want to look like schmoes, or anything, do we?

Janet Maslin Does James Frey

Everyone is in a tizzy about Janet Maslin's review of James Frey's new book Bright Shiny Morning. (By everyone I mean Galley Cat and New York Observer.) Maslin writes the entire review in an imitation of Frey's style:

He wrote a book but it was bad, liar bad, faker bad, it got him in trouble. A million little pieces. It was the name of the book. It was also how hard he got hit. He had to sit there on the couch. Everybody saw. The television celebrity book club woman got mad, she let him have it. He had to sit there on the couch. He squirmed, he cringed. Everybody watched, everybody blamed him. Then it was over. Then he was gone.

He waited. They forgot about him. He tried again.

The review goes on.  It is a rave.  It is clever.  Whatever.

These Years of Struggle May Be Your Best

About all our hopes and dreams to become recognized as important writers, the New York Times offers this little Doris Lessing ditty: 

Doris Lessing, the 2007 Nobel prize winner in literature, told the BBC that receiving the prize was “a bloody disaster” that brought so much attention from the news media that writing a full-length novel was next to impossible. “All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed,” Ms. Lessing, 88, complained in a radio broadcast on Sunday. Discussing her writing, she said: “It has stopped; I don’t have any energy anymore. This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me, don’t imagine you’ll have it forever. Use it while you’ve got it, because it’ll go; it’s sliding away like water down a plug hole.

Rejection Letters in Space

The great thing about the world wide web is that you can find pretty much anything you are lookning for...even rejection letters.  Above are a few I located for your reading (dis)pleasure.

David Sedaris is My Hero

Concerning the question about how real creative nonfiction needs to be, David Sedaris told the Christian Science Monitor: "We live in a time when our government is telling us some pretty profound lies. And then James Frey writes a book, and it turns out some of it's not true. No one asked for their vote back, but everyone wanted back the money they'd spent on that book. We're in the shadow of huge lies and getting angry about the small ones." I say, Amen to that, Brother. (Sedaris' new book When You Are Engulfed in Flames is due out soon, and he claims it is "real-ish.")  Of course, Galley Cat misses the point entirely. What do you people say?  How much real does there need to be?  Or can we let the artist decide?

Ward Six Responds to Genoways

Our friend, and all around good-do bee, Rhian Ellis at Ward Six read all the VQR stories Ted Genoways put up for consideration.  She gets a gold star.  Her thoughts are here, for those who are interested.

Blog Articles on Rejection

In case you need a little bolstering of the spirit today, here's some stuff to read:

• Moira Allen on "Coping with Rejection" at writing-world.com
  
• Laurie Pawlik-Klenlen (say that name 5 times fast) on "5 Steps to Building Resiliency: Facing Rejection & Bouncing Back After You've Failed" at Suite101.com
• Coping. org (tagline: We remember.) offers a how-to-overcome piece called "Handling Fear of Rejection" (Translation available in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish)
• Topdatingtips.com offers up "Tips for Dealing with Rejection," which applies to literary rejection if you squint your eyes a little while reading
• Wikipedia offers this on the Rejection Letter. I would add LROD as an external link if I had even the first clue about how wikipedia actually works, but I do not. Alas, as they say.

Back in the Drawer, Please

Lest we lose our focus, an anonymous novelist wrote in to share the following advice, found hidden in the middle of a publishing rejection:

"Many best selling novelists had to write two or three books before they hit their stride. You clearly have talent, and I hope you will continue to write. I think this story would benefit from being put in a drawer for some months while you complete another book."

Bold, no?

 I had a friend who used to keep his novel manuscript in the refrigerator. He said it kept it crisp between rejections.

Surprise, Surprise

The Guardian reports that there's a self-published short-story collection among the finalists of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize: Mary Rochford's Gilded Shadows. You can read a sample and buy her book here.

When In Doubt Stop Global Warming

Edward Nawotka at Bloomberg.com has an article covering Bob Miller's new "HarperCollins Studio," as everyone is calling the proposed experiment in nontraditional book-sales (i.e. stiffing the authors on their advances by offering profit- sharing, not buying back books from book stores, and bundling hardcover, nonfiction books with e-book versions of the same titles.)  

Here are some highlights:

"Returns date back to the Depression, when publishers implemented the practice as a way to ensure that bookstores would continue stocking new books.

Today, publishers have convinced retailers that stacks of books piled high in the aisles will attract customers and spawn bestsellers. It's a leaky theory posing little risk for booksellers. If the books don't sell, they're only out the cost of shipping and handling the returns.

``Let's face it, returns are bad for everyone, and things have to change,'' Miller said in a telephone interview last month. ``The only way to make it happen was to start something entirely from scratch.''

My favorite part of the article is the part where The Bob Miller Project appears to be about saving the environment by reducing global warming (no more trucks shipping books back and forth, no more unread books in the landfill), rather than about the dollar in the publisher's pocket. Galley Cat seems to have bought the old green publishing argument hook, line and sinker.  It's actually a brilliant marketing ploy because who's going to argue that books aren't to blame for boiling the environment.  (Certainly not me.)