Opps and Exhaustion; "His Stop's 28th Street" by Michael Buozis
Whew.
As I'm getting close to the release party I'm looking around for escape. As in vacation. And not seeing an escape route. Yet. Instead, I keep finding opps for promoting Able to... that need forms filled out and whatnot.
Clearly, I can't take advantage of every opportunity and clearly I need to get some rest soon. But it's exciting. At least I'm excited. Even as I put my tired body down each night, my mind races, trying to find ways to do everything I see I want to do to promote this book.
I love this book. It deserves readers.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Michael Buozis' "His Stop's 28th Street" has a fun story to tell behind the story. You see, I initially rejected it.
When I got Michael's story of a subway conversation between a young man and a frog, I really liked it. It was quirky, fun, had something to say as well. I was also wrapped up in my criteria of completing the phrase, "able to _______." Able to talk to frogs? Well, in the context of the story, that didn't seem relegated to Martin, the human half of the duo. So I sort of got stuck there and sent out my rejection letters. On many of them, I hand-wrote comments, as I did on Michael's. I don't remember exactly what I said in the handwritten notes, but I think I mostly said, "good work, doesn't fit."
A few days later, I got an e-mail from Michael, thanking me for the personal comments and wishing me well with my project. I thought that was nice and made me look at the story again.
Maybe I had read all the stories too close together. Maybe I had let myself get into that place of trying so hard to make everything fit in a box I couldn't see outside it (despite my hedging a bit on "Blues in the Rafters"). Maybe I just needed some time to step back from the hard work of passing judgment on other writers' work (an exercise in bad karma for a writer). But in that blinding flash sort of moment, it hit me--it wasn't the human who had super-powers in this story. Able to talk to humans. Able to do accounting! Maybe not super-powers for a human, but for a frog, Ithink this counts. After all, the comics had Krypto the Superdog and Ace the Bathound. I could easily justify including it in the collection from that point of view.
So I e-mailed Michael back, apologized for my limited vision, and asked if he would still like to be a part of this project. Lucky for me, he did.
I've sort of covered a lot about the story above, but to add a bit more, what I love about this story is that in the middle of the clever repartee and ridiculous images of a frog on a subway seat, you have a subtle exploration of a lonely man's search for connection. It's a search Martin may not have even realized he was on.
Some writers obsessively keep every rejection letter they get and other's discard them as quickly as possible. I have no idea what Michael's practice is with these things, but there's a part of me that hopes that he kept that letter and will frame it next to a picture of the book with his name on the cover.
As I'm getting close to the release party I'm looking around for escape. As in vacation. And not seeing an escape route. Yet. Instead, I keep finding opps for promoting Able to... that need forms filled out and whatnot.
Clearly, I can't take advantage of every opportunity and clearly I need to get some rest soon. But it's exciting. At least I'm excited. Even as I put my tired body down each night, my mind races, trying to find ways to do everything I see I want to do to promote this book.
I love this book. It deserves readers.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Michael Buozis' "His Stop's 28th Street" has a fun story to tell behind the story. You see, I initially rejected it.
When I got Michael's story of a subway conversation between a young man and a frog, I really liked it. It was quirky, fun, had something to say as well. I was also wrapped up in my criteria of completing the phrase, "able to _______." Able to talk to frogs? Well, in the context of the story, that didn't seem relegated to Martin, the human half of the duo. So I sort of got stuck there and sent out my rejection letters. On many of them, I hand-wrote comments, as I did on Michael's. I don't remember exactly what I said in the handwritten notes, but I think I mostly said, "good work, doesn't fit."
A few days later, I got an e-mail from Michael, thanking me for the personal comments and wishing me well with my project. I thought that was nice and made me look at the story again.
Maybe I had read all the stories too close together. Maybe I had let myself get into that place of trying so hard to make everything fit in a box I couldn't see outside it (despite my hedging a bit on "Blues in the Rafters"). Maybe I just needed some time to step back from the hard work of passing judgment on other writers' work (an exercise in bad karma for a writer). But in that blinding flash sort of moment, it hit me--it wasn't the human who had super-powers in this story. Able to talk to humans. Able to do accounting! Maybe not super-powers for a human, but for a frog, Ithink this counts. After all, the comics had Krypto the Superdog and Ace the Bathound. I could easily justify including it in the collection from that point of view.
So I e-mailed Michael back, apologized for my limited vision, and asked if he would still like to be a part of this project. Lucky for me, he did.
I've sort of covered a lot about the story above, but to add a bit more, what I love about this story is that in the middle of the clever repartee and ridiculous images of a frog on a subway seat, you have a subtle exploration of a lonely man's search for connection. It's a search Martin may not have even realized he was on.
Some writers obsessively keep every rejection letter they get and other's discard them as quickly as possible. I have no idea what Michael's practice is with these things, but there's a part of me that hopes that he kept that letter and will frame it next to a picture of the book with his name on the cover.
posted by Neil Ellis Orts at 10:12 AM
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