Jay Lake: Writer

[personal|writing] The joys of getting skunked

and I don’t usually talk about our relationship here in the blogosphere, as such. Mostly such things are of interest primarily to the principals. However, she’s just sold a story, “The Hippie Monster of Eel River”, to the Apex Book Company’s Close Encounters of the Urban Kind anthology, edited by .

Thing is, I got rejected from that anthology. Now, I don’t generally blog about rejections, other than to occasionally note their accumulation. And I still get rejected roughly three times for every sale I make. (Though that statistic decomposes in a more complex fashion than is intuitively obvious — the current terrain of my writing career is a topic for another time.)

But here is an intersection. We are two writers in a passionate relationship, working together (“Rolling Steel“, Our Lady of the Islands, etc.) as well as separately. And my career is far longer established than hers, by simple dint of publication history.

So for to skunk me at a market is a milestone, one which I think deserves to be celebrated. It’s a reminder to both of us of something we already believe down to our bones — that we are equals, partners, working on a par. It’s exciting for me to see her succeed outside of the context of our joint work, and it’s important for her. Best of all, it’s a solid external validation of a truth we’ve long held between us.

Tags: Calendula, Our Lady, Personal, Process, stories, Writing

Posted: 5:03 pm Fri October 02 2009 |

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