All It Took Was a Change of Title

All writers produce stories they like more than others.  One of my favorites has just been "reprinted" on the Literally Stories site.  It originally appeared two years ago in the Rind Literary Magazine.

I knew this was a successful short story, because I presented it several times at public readings.  It always got laughs in the right places.  Nevertheless, I couldn't seem to sell the story to a magazine.  It kept getting rejected, over and over.

Eventually, I decided that the original title was the problem.  The story is about a drunk writer who shows up at the house of his ex-girlfriend late one winter night.  I called it "Reunion at 3 a.m."  That title didn't pop -- it didn't make an editor want to publish it.

I decided to change the title and submit it to literary magazines.  So I gave it the oh-so-pretentious title of "The 3 a.m. Litterateur."

That's all it took.  The Rind Literary Magazine picked it up immediately.  And now it's up again, on a new site.

Sometimes it pays to be pretentious.

Inspiration

I write a lot of short stories.  Some of them work, some don't.

Some time ago I started a short story about an injured man who was led to safety by a pig.  (It was set in Texas, of course.)

But it wasn't working.  Too much of the story was just a lost man with an injured ankle hobbling along after a pig in a storm.  That part of the story wasn't really interesting.

So I put the story away and forgot about it.

The other day, I was listening to a radio interview with neurologist and author Oliver Sacks.  He was plugging his new book, titled Hallucinations.

Sacks noted how people in extreme peril sometimes hear a voice giving them advice.  Sacks himself once experienced this.

And it hit me: THAT was how I could make the long trudge interesting!  The PIG would TALK!

(Or, more precisely, the injured narrator would assume the voice came from the pig.  I love what writers call "unreliable narrators.")

So I brought up the story, and made the pig talk, telling the injured man to keep moving.  Since the narrator is a good ol' boy from Texas, he imagines the pig talking like an educated Yankee.  (He says, "the damn pig sounded like Thurston Howell III from 'Gilligan's Island.'")

As far as I can tell, it works.  I'll find out once I bring it to one of my critique groups.  Thanks, Oliver Sacks!

Tales of the Battleground State of Ohio, Part One

The big election is over, and once again pundits claimed that the road to victory went though the state of Ohio.

Now, I've been to Ohio many times.  I know people from Ohio.  But lately, my view of Ohio is colored by a collection of short stories by Donald Ray Pollock.  The collection is called "Knockemstiff," which is the actual name of a rural town in Ohio.

To my fellow writers: did you ever read something so good, so powerful, so well-written, that you wanted to give up writing?  That's how I felt when I read the first two stories in "Knockemstiff."

I won't give it all away, but bad things happen in "Knockemstiff."  Very bad things.

And if these stories are truly representative of Ohio, and our election hinges on Ohio...well, all I can say is, we're in trouble.

More tomorrow.

Two Out of Twenty

Well, Hurricane Sandy hasn't stopped every editor from working.  I got two rejections this past week.

But October was a very productive month for me.  I sent out six short stories to twenty different markets last month.  So I have eighteen more chances from October - which doesn't include what I'll send out this month.

Nevertheless, every rejection hurts.

The Capricious Muse

Yesterday, the writer's muse granted me three good ideas for short stories. Unfortunately, yesterday was an absurdly busy: I rushed from appointment to appointment with no time to site down and write. All I managed was to scribble a few notes while standing in line.

Today I had more time, so I sat down to flesh out the three story ideas. But the muse is capricious. I failed to cherish her gifts yesterday, so today she took my talent away. (I don't suffer from writer's block, but on bad days I just grind out dreck.)

When my talent returns - tomorrow, I hope - I will get some decent stories out of these ideas. In the meantime, I've been given a warning. I must write, write every day, every damn day until I die. Then I can stop.