Feel Goods!

One of the worst parts about editing for a fiction magazine is sending out rejections.

Well, I lie. I can't say it's ALWAYS the worst. Sometimes I really enjoy it. But only rarely. Only when a writer clearly disregards all guidelines of decorum and street smarts. When self-proclaimed experienced writers are snooty, thinking they're too important to follow our submission guidelines, or making sure I understand just how important they are.

But most writers aren't like that.

At FFO we go through a great deal of extra work to provide friendly, positive, helpful rejections--especially to those writers who make it past our first round of the selection process. I collect, save, and send comments form our editorial team about their stories, for which most are very appreciative.

Some even blog about how appreciative they are. I LOVE those kind of writers. They make me see how worthwhile the effort is.

Like this guy. Jay Garmon.

http://www.jaygarmon.net/2009/11/short-story-crimes-against-science.html

Thanks, Jay!!

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Articles for Writers

Great article from Writer Beware's Victoria Strauss on, well, articles!

Articles for Writers

The Ant & the Grasshopper

Remember that timeless fable? Remember the lesson it teaches? That lesson is as timeless and true today as it ever was. Or is it?

Here's a retelling for modern times:

The ant works
hard in the withering heat and the rain all
summer long, building his house and laying up
supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper
thinks the ant is a fool
and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.


Come winter, the shivering
grasshopper calls a
press conference and demands to know why the
ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold
and starving.

CBS, NBC , PBS, CNN, and ABC
show up to
provide pictures of the shivering
grasshopper next to a
video of the ant in his
comfortable home with a table filled with food.


America
is stunned by the sharp contrast.


How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this
poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on
Oprah with the grasshopper
and everybody cries when they sing, 'It's Not Easy
Being Green.'


ACORN stages a
demonstration in front of the ant's house
where the news stations film the group singing,
“We shall overcome.”
Then Rev. Jeremiah Wright has the
group kneel down to pray to God for the
grasshopper's sake.


President Obama
condemns the ant and blames President
Bush, President Reagan, Christopher Columbus,
and the Pope for the grasshopper's plight.

Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid
exclaim in an interview with
Larry King
that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the
grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the
ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, the EEOC
drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act
retroactive to the beginning of the summer.


The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate
number of green bugs
and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive
taxes, his home is confiscated by the
Government Green Czar and given to the
grasshopper.


The story ends as we see the grasshopper
and his free-loading friends finishing up the last
bits of the ant’s food
while the government house he is in, which, as
you recall, just happens to be the ant's
old house, crumbles around them because the
grasshopper doesn't maintain it.

The ant has
disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again.


The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident, and
the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders
who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and
once peaceful, neighborhood.

The entire Nation collapses
bringing the rest of the free world with it.



MORAL OF THE STORY:
Be careful how you vote in
2010.

Poetic Justice for Stimulus Opponents

Heard on the news today that Ford, who did NOT take stimulus money, is on track to the black. They've pulled themselves up by the bootstraps, all on their own, and are FAR ahead on the road to recovery of Chrysler and GM, whose efforts to revitalize have been crippled by the heavy hand of self-imposed government enslavement.

Ford took a lot of criticism at the time.

Now they're proving, again, I might add (Ford refused government help during the Great Depression as well), that the American Way is NOT the government's way.