Rejections and coping
Or trying to. And, books that remind us why we read.
My short story rejection count went up by three last week. My novel exists but she seems to be living away from me, like a lost sister, far, far away. My short stories sit like droplets of coloured tears, each a compound emotion.
Uncle Melancholy keeps me company as my (many) writerly worries nip at my ankles.
I have a hibiscus plant whose leaves curl and wrinkle into unnatural shapes. Black ants walk up their stems. They make nests of white inside the mud along the plant’s roots, clinging to them and choking away nutrients slowly. I did not know ants made nests this way, but TIL.
Dear reader, does sadness stick to the underside of your eyelids as well? A blurred-lens that defocuses everything but keeps the melancholic in relief?
Elizabeth Strout writes this beautiful paragraph:
And as I put the page down, my playlist switches songs.
Karen Dalton croons ‘Goodbye, oh my old sweethearts and pals / I’m goin' away, I may come back to see you, darling / Some old rainy rainy day’.
It takes a while, I think the fine prose get its due at the most unexpected moment, this
tiny little fellow will be lying for you on your doorstep waiting to be seen by you, even as
your mind's searching attention will be looking for it away from the natural light, like that
of a good number of others, it not yet conclusively proved, even though now taken for granted.
But still there is, on the whole, a mass of facts and indications in its favour is so considerable, only borne out of the overwhelming bundle of work your brain churns out as words and then arm twisting sentences that chronicled your arrival as a hero of a mind boggling treatises that serenades to your reader, who is looking for something new & yet quietly different.
Even though sounding ultra optimistic, for a solution of our ever ascending aspirations, an eventually good writer, seems to start with an extraordinary poverty of original broad variative conceptions and to proceed to more extraordinary richness of other minuter consequential variations to forge a simpler but natural tendency, to move, to as a result, a very crop of a good
well written tale of two minds, one with a natural grace of mingling sounds, the other actually taunting the reader to a greater sense of satisfied reading, when they both conspire to render a tale in mystery of life's one simple incident which is a day to day merchandise , that happens regularly, except only one diagnosis, to utter the truth of its existence. Hence to assume its is not happening is only to say it is happening or has already happened only to be perceived a little later.
oh sweet melancholy - its always there. Thanks for this beauty of a post.