Close Calls and Human Flaws

A Chihuahua at the End of the World

Got two more close-call rejections from lit mags over the weekend. One telling me my story made it to the “final round,” but couldn’t Rocky Balboa its way to victory. And the second, which arrived at 9:36 pm on Sunday night:

We regret that we are unable to publish your manuscript, but we like your work and would like to see more of it.

This was from the editors of The Paris Review, which hovers somewhere just below The New Yorker in terms of “prestige,” but since I no longer have any grasp of what makes a literary publication prestigious in our current publishing environment, my estimation should be taken with a shaker of salt.

I’m grateful that they like my work, but that was pretty much the best story I had to send them (it’s not on this blog). And a near miss is still a miss, and after 17 near misses in a row I’m discouraged.

I try to remember my years in grad school, researching Flannery O’Connor for an established author who was writing her biography, and I slipped into the shadowy rare manuscripts room at the New York Public Library and, paging through The New Yorker’s archives of typed letters, read rejections aimed at Flannery, Vladimir Nabokov, and pretty much every other writer you could think of from the 50s.

Rejection is the writer’s life. So either take the punches or hang it up. I guess, mostly, I feel like Balboa at the 45-minute mark, downing raw eggs and running up stairs in Philly. I’m often down. Never out.

Been thinking a lot about the early days of this blog, probably because, in the course of its resuscitation, I had to restore a bunch of lost early posts. Which meant reading old memories with maybe some fatal nostalgia, as times when I connected with a whole bunch of queer bloggers engaged in similar online experimentation, and getting together sometimes in the real world, which led to some real friendships.

Blogs have faded and, 18 years later, I’m a more guarded man. Unwilling to write about my new job, where I’m killing it in a way I’ve never killed it before, for any job (probably because I’m finally writing), but also where the political waters have risen up around me and submerged huge chunks of my mental real estate, about which I’d love to say more, but the precarious nature of paychecks keeps me muted.

And my experiences with family and others in the recent past have left me gun-shy about real-life humans, scanning for hidden agendas and personal blind spots in myself and others that make every real-life relationship a total piece of work. Some days, when it comes to people, I feel like my barometer is broken.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m stumbling along here, trying to figure out what I can write about freely, which feels less than what I could write about back at the dawn of blogging, when I was young and invulnerable. I’ve got a couple of posts I’m tinkering with that’ll take some time to form, but until then I wanted to say hey and make you look at my dog.

She’s always staring off into the distance.

5 Replies to “Close Calls and Human Flaws”

  1. Understandable wanting to keep more things close to your chest nowadays, but still looking forward to whatever you share next. Also…can’t go wrong with cute dog pics (and stories)! Agnes definitely knows her angles.

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