I noticed that it has been over a month since I last posted. I know that disappoints the one or, well, the one of you that might look here for something every now and again. Never fear, I have something to post.
I hate to admit it. However, I pretty much stopped writing over the holidays. A good many factors contributed to my lack of effort in writing the novel and my short stories. I put all of those reasons into a little brown paper bag, set them on my neighbors front porch, lit them on fire and ding-dong-ditched. Now, that felt better. Unfortunately, my neighbor wasn’t home. When the fire trucks pulled away, the front side of his house was all crispy. He wanted to paint it anyway.
On a lighter note, I got my first couple of rejections for short stories that I had submitted for publication. No surprise really. The first rejection came from an ultra-short story, 250 words, I wrote called Dueling Pies. I submitted it to the wrong place. The story didn’t fit the publication. Honestly, I am not sure where that story should be published. I would think a nice little magazine loosely related to food might do. I will think on it a little more and try again elsewhere. The second rejection didn’t surprise me either. I tried to cram Tin Roof into a thousand words. I am grateful for the feedback that came with the rejection. Although I didn’t understand one of the comments completely. I had attempted to put together something a little Rod Serling’ish. Unfortunately, I might have to agree on the comments. It came across a little cliché. I still like the story. However, it does need improvement.
The confusing comment I got stated “… the writing style consisting of short, standard sentences was tiresome after the fairly long first paragraph…” I am not sure what that means. Granted the first sentence consisted of only seven words. The second contained twenty-five. The average word count per sentence in the first paragraph is 12.79. The Lexical Density is over 75% with a Gunning-Fog index of 5.6 or 7.0, depending on the algorithm used. That means there is a higher percentage of content words over functional words while maintaining easy readability. Now, those are just algorithms used to help analyze the lexical nature of text. No one expects those to rival a person reading it for themselves. In retrospect, I should break the first paragraph into multiple paragraphs. The sentence length issue might really be a feel for the length of the first paragraph, which is a bit long for the story.
I think that it was awesome that I got comments with the rejection. I hope to get more like that in the future. It made me look at the text and the story in a different way. I don’t think any of us could expect to please every reader all the time. We just need to place our stories so that the readers who will enjoy them can find them.
Keep writing and reading. After my little hiatus, I am writing again.