This sounds stupid, but sometimes, acceptance makes me want to cry, especially after you hear back from a piece that’s been held. See, for me the submission process goes like this, bright beautiful hope for about five minutes. Until I hit send. Then it’s doubt. Did I forget to attach the story again? Did I format right? Oh crap, did I forget to close my edited quotations? Is it good enough? Was I stupid to think it would be? Then, why did I send that? This leads into a period of indifference where I almost forget about it. I have stuff out and I know that, so I check my email obsessively, but I expect nothing. Then impatience and more doubt. And a certainty that you were wrong to send it, that it’s rejected, rejected already maybe and they just haven’t got around to the form, or maybe they don’t send the rejection letter, just let you assume it. Then it’s over and the emotional investment in it despite all of this is minimal.
Unless they let dangle maybe.
Then it’s expectation which, in a few hours, days, becomes a sort of desperation, the quietened voice of doubt returns, insistent, nagging even. The waiting resumes. The email comes and you see the sender and your heart races, you’ve exposed yourself as much as if you’d run naked down the sidewalk. And here is the response. It’s no and that voice is right. Doubt knows best. Next time, doubt says, I’ll edit better, make sure my legs are shaved before doing the run. Doubt is no enemy, you see. I don’t know where I’d be without it.
But if it’s yes, it stuns. It doesn’t matter, really, where it is, whether they accept one hundred and four percent of submissions. Somebody stopped to look. And for that minute, Doubt only whispers softly, and that’s when his voice is sweetest. The make-up for the in-spite-of gesture of exposing yourself.
But enough mixed metaphors. I’ll update when it comes out.
I’ve also just written my first sonnet. No, it wasn’t like I just got bored one day and said, “Hey, you know what I think I’ll do? Write a sonnet.” Because who says that sort of thing when there’s television? It was for an assignment, but I’m still really proud of it. It proves not only that I can count to ten, but all the way to fourteen. I still have to write another one, but I can’t think of a topic for the life of me. My first one is probably actually dumb (but with the proper meter) but it seems like it has a double meaning, something I have trouble doing intentionally. And now what I’m doing in comparison reads like Dr. Seuss Does Verse. That’s always been my trouble with poetry, it sounds too contrived when I write it, and I’d prefer to say it plain. And it’s a bitch trying to avoid the obvious rhyme.
In the crook’d corners once lived a sly cat
Fur black as char, he wore a tall red hat.
Power Lame.