Many moons ago I entered a story in the L. Ron Hubbard's Writer of the Future contest, a very prestigious scifi/fantasy short story competition only open to never-published or minimally-published writers (like me!). This was in September, so you can see why I had long since abandoned hope. Another quarter deadline in the contest had come and gone and still I heard nothing, so I began to reconcile myself to the fact that my story must have lost its way en route to LA.
Then yesterday, at long last, the Rejection Letter came! Oh sure, it sounds like a negative thing, but truly it was very, very good. My story had been gone so long because I had made the quarter finals. No, I didn't win, but my first shot out made it into the finals, that can only be a very good sign, I think. I've been thinking of it this way, making the finals in this contest is like making the Olympic team: you have to beat out a heck of a lot of people just to get there. Then you go to Athens and only three of you can win (also the case in this contest).
What I am thinking most fervently is that sometimes the difference between gold medal and no medal is just a few fractions of a second.
Unfortunately this isn't a stopwatch event, and there is no way to ever know specifically what kept my story out of the top three. It was over-long and the ending felt rushed has been my assessment over the past four months that I've had to stew and stew and stew over it (I wanted that story back before the mailman was ten steps away from the house).
I have two stories ready for this quarter, but I have until March to polish them up. And I already know what I want to change with this story before I send it out again, probably to Asimov's magazine, which I quite like.
On an unrelated note, after teaching Oliver his ABC's, Aidan has tried to move on to addition facts. I explained to him yesterday that that was just a bit much for a 3-year-old to grasp, so now he's helping his brother with counting past ten. Oliver can make it to ten in English and Spanish thanks to Dora the Explorer, but the teens are confusing.
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