rejections hurt

Four in a row. The first two, for a Lunatics' Ball essay, were really really nice, from eminent print journals where I didn't expect such strong interest, so I was kind of buoyed. The third, from a journal where I've published flash before, was also nice, and I already thought that my flash didn't quite fit the theme of their special issue. They said they were fans of my work, so that was nice too. 

The rejection today was the least important by far, but it really slayed me. A big 24-hour party that takes reprints and takes tons of writers and I was one of them last year and the year before. Always a blow when you're not invited to the party. And of course I opened twitter to find a number of posts from writers who were invited instead of me.

I'm carrying on a Facebook private message correspondence with a third-year student in the Ukraine who was assigned a story of mine in her English class and is having trouble interpreting it. Very strange for a number of reasons, but firstly because it was one of my very first stories, in 2011, in a magazine that's folded with no archive. I couldn't open my old Word files of the story (I hadn't kept a .pdf) and Word kept freezing my iMac. Finally got it open on my laptop. So weird to imagine that a long-ago story, any story really, might be read halfway across the world in a class, or by anybody really. I guess that's heartening. The story, "Benediction," is a bit mysterious, a creative nonfiction flash that I still like.

​Heat wave has started. Today is our son's 32nd birthday. 32 years ago I was in labor, a long one. I think he was born at about noon, after about twelve hours of labor, so that's an hour from now.

p.s. And in a strange twist of fate, Sam Rasnake of BLUE FIFTH REVIEW just tweeted one of the rejected reprints ("What Remains," a story which is also in the newish BENDING GENRES anthology) and it's getting more attention today than it would have at the party I won't be part of.