Life in the trenches of literature...
Aug. 30th, 2005 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
felis_ultharusWell, I got my second rejection letter yesterday. It came with commentary, so I suppose that's progress.
I didn't expect to be published in The Antigonish Review on first try. It's the most prestiguous short-story magazine the country has. But I think I was hoping.
They felt that the short format didn't do the story justice. But since they have a 3000-word cap, it wouldn't have been published at all if I'd increased the length. These tiny caps on short-story length are absurd, and are a massive constraint on the kinds of stories a writer can tell.
On that note, I sent my glorified haiku -- I contend 1200 words cannot be considered a short story -- to the Quebec Writers' Federation yesterday. So we'll see about that.
In other news, I've done 20 English-as-a-second-language placement interviews in the last two days, mostly with businesspeople and the odd pharmaceutical lab tech. The funniest response I've received so far is "His friends will not come in his house next Sunday."
Too bad for them.
I didn't expect to be published in The Antigonish Review on first try. It's the most prestiguous short-story magazine the country has. But I think I was hoping.
They felt that the short format didn't do the story justice. But since they have a 3000-word cap, it wouldn't have been published at all if I'd increased the length. These tiny caps on short-story length are absurd, and are a massive constraint on the kinds of stories a writer can tell.
On that note, I sent my glorified haiku -- I contend 1200 words cannot be considered a short story -- to the Quebec Writers' Federation yesterday. So we'll see about that.
In other news, I've done 20 English-as-a-second-language placement interviews in the last two days, mostly with businesspeople and the odd pharmaceutical lab tech. The funniest response I've received so far is "His friends will not come in his house next Sunday."
Too bad for them.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-31 02:01 pm (UTC)As for "to come in", we get preposition errors a lot, and people usually don't know what they're saying.
The weird thing is, we get the same errors in English at the same companies, over and over again. There seems to be an office Français/Frenglish that passes for a real language, and becomes a habit.