A Found Poem Consisting of Sentences From Rejections of My Stories:

I really enjoyed the nipple part and wish

this had been developed more.

The story is at once humorous and moving.

We know very little about him except

he’s pretentious and insufferable. Some of our

readers got sidetracked by the boyfriend’s name. You might

consider changing it to something less obtrusive

than Elvis. It does not suit our present needs,

I’m sorry to say. Good luck with this one,

we hope you will feel encouraged,

We wish you luck, we encourage you to keep writing,

we do wish you the best of luck,

keep working at it.

The ending seemed a bit too much like

adolescent fantasy.

We’ve decided to pass.

Hello, I am handing in my manuscript in five days. 

Some Important Workshop Comments From Five Months Ago:

• “This rings painfully true with all of my breakups! Hooray!”
• “There is a lot of swearing in this story.”
• “I think it’s like in ‘Claws of Axos’ when the Master materialized his TARDIS inside the Doctor’s, whose TARDIS was inside the Master’s.”

"To be honest, I felt hysterical: that Victorian word for the tantrums of unstable estrogen-addled women, but that I know actually describes a rage forcibly contained, the hot burn of the involuntary tears, the snap in your composure when you are told for the millionth time that what you feel or think or say or do does not matter. I thought that complex, nuanced, funny, difficult, despicably lovable characters were the emblem of a good writer, not evidence of the insecure woman thieving our sympathies through sneaky writer-succubus tricks. And yet one hundred and fifty years after Edith Wharton wrote a number of canonical, excellent books, some rich white straight dude gets paid—what does the New Yorker pay for that kind of piece, like ten grand?—gets paid like ten grand to come to the riveting, breathtaking conclusion that she might be human, and maybe even A Writer, like him?"

Meg Clark at The Rejectionist on the whole Edith Wharton/That Guy debacle.

I am really behind on my New Yorkers (cool thing to say) and so I haven’t read the piece in question yet. The piece is by That Guy I’ve mentioned here probably too much already, whose name I will not write again for fear he has a Google Alert set up and will misinterpret my intense dislike for him as breathless preoccupation. Needless to say, it is crazy as balls to bring up the physical appearance of a writer in your critical analysis of said writer, but it happens to women all the time. If you want to argue that it happens to all writers, find me a New Yorker article written by a lady in which she points out that Mark Twain could have been way hotter, and I will renounce feminism as a way of life (no, I won’t, but you could still try to find an article like that). 

Anyway, if you’re reading this blog, you probably already know this shit is disgusting, so go read Clark’s response because it’s exhilarating.

Girl Stuff

My manuscript is starting to feel like a real book, with themes and a title and everything. The title of the book is the title of this blog post. I didn’t come up with it; my committee chair did. She found it in the story where the girl falls in love with wax FDR. Wax FDR finds her crying and she says it’s just girl stuff, and wax FDR says it’s human stuff. Girl stuff is human stuff, is the thesis of my collection of short stories. Would you want to read a book that posits this?

I am putting so much of myself into this revision that it hurts. I am listening to The Animals sing “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” I am missing everybody I’ve ever met. Is this normal? I kind of don’t care one way or the other. Girl, there’s a better life for me and you.

I’m just going to leave these two quotes from Jonathan Franzen here.

• “It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”—The Guardian
• “I’m just saying my hit-counter’s going crazy. I’m getting hot-linked all over the world.”—Freedom

Look, I’m just being honest here:

In the last two weeks or so, every time I’ve heard about anyone I know having professional success of any variety, to any degree, I’ve wanted to stick rusty nails into my own eyeballs.

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michelledean:

lifeaquatic:

natashavc:

tmills:

3. Today’s drawing was supposed to be heartbreak but I went with insufferable instead.

Boy oh boy.