2012-03-11 - 1:25 p.m.
It strikes me that this business of sending out pieces of writing, or even whole books, to these magazines and journals and web sites and agents and editors is very much akin to an unrequited love. You wake up every morning, check your email, to find only junk and kind--but-not-the-point messages from friends about bits of their lives that are most definitely Not About Writing.
And then you say, stop it, you slap yourself on the wrist, and command yourself to take a walk or be nice to your friends or do something else.
But, then, that night, you check the email again and there's still nothing, only cruel silence. And then you check it again, and it's an email from a good journal in the Midwest, and it's a letter saying, "We thank you for your submission..." and you don't need to read any more because you know it's a form rejection, the kind they send out to everyone.
I want to scream sometimes, at the silence, and the unrequited-ness. The moments of beauty, the paragraphs of crystal-clear beauty, they come, too, like four-leaf clovers, or like shooting stars.
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