It snowed pretty good for a couple hours this afternoon. I snapped this from the upstairs bedroom.
A stack of 8 photos, each 50mm, f/1.8, 1/800 sec, ISO 100. Processed in GIMP.
A bit of snow in the air
Blog
So close
I received this in the ol’ email inbox this afternoon.
Thank you very much for your story, and for letting us hang on to it for as long as we did. The piece has received more than one read, as our first reader enjoyed it a great deal. Due to our current (thematic) publication needs, however, we are unable to place this story.
[…]
Although we can’t use your work at this time, we thank you for thinking of us and encourage you to submit again in the future.
The funny thing is, they didn’t tell me which story they were rejecting, and I couldn’t remember what I’d submitted to their market. (I also couldn’t find my initial submission in my outbox, but that was less surprising; a lot of markets these days are using Submittable or Moksha or some other online submission gateway.)
Thank heavens for The Submissions Grinder. I did a quick search on the market name, and found that, yes, I had submitted a piece to them, wa-a-a-ay back in June 2020. Their submissions page said that they don’t generally send out rejections, so if you didn’t hear in about three months, assume you were not one of the lucky ones. I had assumed that, since September came and went with no word, that I was not one of the lucky ones.
Turns out I was right, but it seems I came closer than I thought.
Oh well. Once more unto the breach and all that. At least they liked the story; with form rejections it can be very hard to tell.
PS: If you’re a writer and you’re not using The Submissions Grinder, I strongly recommend you at least look into it.
Rejection → Rewrite
At the start of December I heard about an anthology looking for stories on the theme of “Derelicts”. The deadline was tight—stories had to be submitted by Dec. 31st—but I realized I had a story and so I slammed it out. I wrote 7,500 words about a colony world with a medieval-Iceland–influenced society—stratification into thrall, carl, jarl, and royal classes, for instance—that had been settled by a swarm of faster-than-light colony ships. They were surprised when, two centuries after the colony was established, a very old, slower-than-light vessel showed up. They were even more surprised to discover this new ship was empty, except, perhaps, for a ghost.
I sent the story off on about Dec. 29th, and this past week I got the rejection note. The anthology received 1,400 submissions, and could take only 20 stories. The odds were not in my favour.
But—after a few minutes of unhappiness—I’m OK with this situation. The story was a tight fit at 7,500 words. There’s more to tell, I think, things I was forced to elide to fit the word-count limit. And I was never really happy with the title, either. I called it “The Smoke” but that felt like a placeholder title.
Where there’s smoke there’s fire, as they say, and I’ve decided to dig into that. The new title is “Praise the Torch When ‘Tis Burned”, which ties into the Icelandic/Norse feeling I’ve got going on: One of the poems in the Poetic Edda is the Hávamál, the “Sayings of Odin”, which features a stanza that I’ve loved since I first read it:
At evening praise the day, a torch¹ when burned,
A weapon when tried, a maid at wedlock,
Ice when over it, ale when it is drunk.
It’s a very “don’t count your chickens till they hatch” piece of writing. I have adopted “Praise ice when over it” into my list of preferred proverbs, partly for its wisdom and partly because, where I live, you’re driving on ice at least four months of the year.
So my plans for the next draft of this story:
- New title
- New focus
- Improved world-building
Wish me luck!
Photo by Igor Lepilin on Unsplash.
—
¹ Some translations have it as “a woman when burned” or “a woman on her pyre”, and I don’t feel I’m the author to explore that.
Monochrome
Fog in the morning and then clouds in the afternoon. It was grey, but picturesque all the same.
A colourful day
Today was Kathleen’s birthday. I ordered up a flocking from the local Kinsmen club, and so this morning, before dawn, two dozen plastic pink flamingos showed up on my lawn.
Then, tonight, my phone buzzed: there was a strong possibility of aurora. So I grabbed my gear and drove out of town, where I found it was cold and very bright under a nearly-full moon. There was indeed aurora, right at the edge of vision, but the moon washed it out quite a bit.
But I did find a new location for star trails, to be filed away for a warmer, darker night, so at least there’s that.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I might need a hot chocolate.
Half-moon
There’s half a moon in the sky tonight. I snapped some quick photos from my deck. It’s a bit chilly so I didn’t spend much time out there.
Nerdy details: 1/100 second exposure, ISO 100, 250mm, f/5.6, handheld. Photo was cropped and the colours tweaked a little bit in GIMP.
Sundown
Kathleen came down from upstairs and said, “You should check out the sunset.”
She wasn’t wrong.
Even frostier
It must have been another misty Manitoba morning evening last night, because there was even more frost (edit: probably rime ice) on the branches and everywhere else. So when I went to pick up the week’s groceries, I grabbed my camera, too.
Frosty
It was a misty Manitoba morning¹, but then the clouds cleared about 11 AM and the sun came out. I grabbed my camera and headed out at noon to see what I could see.
Taken out my upstairs window 
Taken out my upstairs window 
On the side of 50th Street 
I do like that sky 
Which of these three do you prefer? I can’t choose.
Focus on the fencepost 
Focus on the trees 
Focus on the foreground grasses
¹ I honestly thought that was the name of the song, but I was wrong.
Memories of JJ, 9: The Beard
Having noticed the auspicious anniversary, I was thinking a bit about Dad. I thought I’d told this story already, but I couldn’t find it in a search of my site. Maybe it was just in my eulogy.
For most of my life, Dad had a beard. If you dig out the really old SRCI yearbooks, you can find photos of him clean-shaven. I think he grew the beard in about 1980 or so, and he must have liked the way it looked because he kept it for a long, long time.
He told me once that his plan was to win the lottery, do all the necessary publicity, cash the cheque, then shave his beard off and become invisibly rich.
It was a solid plan, too. If you saw a photo of him pre-beard next to one of him with the beard, you might be hard-pressed to say the two photos were the same person. JJ : Beard :: Superman : glasses.
Then one year, when he was working up in Lac Brochet, he and Mom came out of the north for the summer and… he was clean-shaven.
The first thing I asked him, when I saw him, was, “Is there something I should know?”