On ghosts

So here’s the thing. 

I think it is just true that I’m still cutting my teeth as a literary writer and that this rejection phase is a necessary one.  I think I’ve come to terms (as much as anyone can) that having been in a sense a child prodigy at one point in my life but not having made it over the fence in the critical years to be a “young rising star” (because my life was falling apart due to multiple and abuse issues, and also general torpor laziness and lack of anything to say underneath the adolescent pyrotechnics) means that I just have to slog it out with my own lousy writing and get better, and write more and submit more, and be essentially a midlist emerging fiction writer.  Someone who will probably get there eventually (and maybe I still harbour some illusions that “getting there” might entail a bit more than a $500 advance and a lot of remaindered copies, for some novel or collection, some day) but who is not going to be, you know, that guy that got published in the New Yorker, Zoetrope, and Harper’s all at once.  (I heart him regardless of his success! :)) 

So I can really affably and truly say that really, this rejection thing is part of the process.

And yet this is the third serious rejection of this particular story, and one came with an offer into a programme.  And I am halfway convinced that the reason there’s always someone at the table who says “what the fuck? I can’t believe you liked it” (in some sensible editorial way) is because this story has ghosts in it, and it never really makes it clear whether they’re literal or not. And not in a Turn of the Screw way either. It’s essentially um – floaty, the story starts off brutally realistic and then gradually wanders off into something like the astral mists. Deliberately. And although I can only speak as the ego who has to send it out again next week, I think it works well enough that if there weren’t always someone who really prefers gritty urban stuff, my story might have made it over the fence already. It may be a story that does its story well, it’s just that its story is weird.

(Of course this may just be because I feel a bit that way myself, about me. Confusion between art and self; never a good sign!)

Which is not relevant except my novel does the same at about the 2/3 point, and then it sort of twists back at the end – that is, it ends on an entirely realistic note and the wander off into the grey space between metaphor and reality can be read as a character’s breakdown. Or not. And it freaks me out a little bit to realize that a) I seem to have genred myself a little already, within the ‘lit fiction’ umbrella and that would be magic realism – not the vampire hunting housewife kind but its snooty cousin.  And b) that if I’m right (please God, perhaps I might be wrong?) it may be even more of a struggle to get it read.

Which is all pretty much just monkey mind driving me to give up and wrapping my ego in cotton wool before pounding it with a mallet over and over, but, you know.  I thought perhaps some creative angst would be a welcome break for you readers. So there it is.

Signing off!