Behold, a Geeky Horse or Ponies and Demons

Well, I took some time off. The publication of my first story was a big deal, and I celebrated by slacking off for a bit. Actually, if you account for all the time I've been slacking lately, I was celebrating that particular victory long before I earned it. But now I'm back and writing again. I'm back on the horse, as it were.

Yup, it's that kind of horse. (From Hark! A Vagrant)

In the interval I spent not writing I got back to my nerdy roots. I attended Motor City Comic Con. I started Playing Magic: The Gathering again, a game I've not played since I was fourteen. I even purchased a few comics at the local comics store, Nerdageddon. Now granted, this is a thing I've been wanting to do for myself for awhile. Get back to basics. Embrace the geek in me. But I also did it for my son, an indoor kid in the making.

We drove all over our local area hunting for a comics store. Unfortunately, there seem to have been several that opened and closed, and searching online in my phone didn't always yield the most up-to-date results. When we found the aptly named Nerdageddon, it was the fourth place we had driven to looking for a comics store. It's a great store, but seems like it's fairly new. I hope it has legs and will be around for some time.

I let my son pick out a comic book for himself. He's expressed interest in them, and we have such a hard time getting him to read, that if there is something he actually wants to read, we're all about it. He settled on an issue of his favorite superhero, (and I have no idea how he even knows about him) everyone's favorite merc with a mouth, Deadpool.

Yup. That Deadpool.

Now, my son is ten. I don't want to be a prude and stifle my son's interests, nor do I want him saying and doing inappropriate things (especially in front of his mother). So I leafed through the issue he had, and it seemed all right. I got it for him, and I even got one for myself. I picked up the second issue of a comic title that I read back when I read comics. I got the reboot of Ghost Rider.

Now it's been a number of years since I actually read comics. The Deadpool one was enjoyable. It was violent, sure, but in a fun campy kind of way. Deadpool is the consummate wise-ass, and he's metatextual and breaks the fourth wall. I get it, and it's great. The Ghost Rider reboot however, eh... not so much. Now I need to go to my mom's house and dig out my old collection to be sure, but I don't remember it being so dry, so formulaic.

I didn't intend for this to be a comic review, but I guess that's what it is.

The Ghost Rider that I read was the Spirit of Vengeance. He went after despicable, depraved human beings and dispensed lethal justice. He tangled with a few other Marvel heroes who take exception to homicide no matter what the cause. He's the antihero writ large. I mean come on, he's an actual demon who reaps evil souls. He's a supernatural Punisher. Plus his head is a flaming skull. How cool is that?

The new Ghost Rider seems to have a beef with the local drug cartel. Plus the villain in the issue I read was some sort of pharmaceutical engineer who developed a Jekyll/Hyde drug that turns people into bloodthirsty monsters. He actually called himself Hyde.

I was not engaged in this story right away. It would take a couple more issues to hook me, I think, storywise. What really turned me off though was the artwork. The Ghost Rider I remember was gritty and dark. This new incarnation is almost cartoony in its use of color and exaggerated anatomy. I just... it didn't do anything for me. Take a look at a comparison.

The Ghost Rider I remember and love.

VS

Some kind of... Robot... Skeleton?

He drives a muscle car now. Ok, I guess I can live with that. The motorcycle is a standard of the character, but whatever, we're trying to break new ground here, I get it. Cars are still cool. But what is he? Is he a robot? Is he a ghost? Is he somehow both? I don't... He's totally torching the interior of that car by the way. No way that upholstery is original.

If he is a ghost that looks like a bare human skull, it's a pretty messed up skull. Then again, take a look at the people in this thing.

AHGAD a monster! Oh... wait no, that's just his little brother.

The people look all rubbery and cartoony. It's just... maybe comics have passed me by. Maybe I'm a dinosaur. I don't know. Maybe this is a torch I need to pass on to my son and leave well enough alone. I'll go back to my mom's and get my old books and read them again, and rage all over again when they split the story arc into half a dozen new titles that you have to follow or you have no damn idea what' happening. Yeah. That's what made me quit reading them in the first place.

Or maybe I'll just keep writing my own stories.

It's Here!

The latest edition of New Realm magazine is out now, featuring a short story by yours truly.

And it looks freaking fantastic.

Just had to flop a new post up here to geek out about it. Thanks to everyone who inspired/supported/cheerlead me in the past, as well as New Realm for liking my crazy ramblings enough to publish them. GAH! I'm so blown away. Hopefully I'll get more stuff out there and it will feel this good every time.

It Happened

One of my stories got accepted.

My reaction. True story.

Needless to say I'm pretty excited. I had faith in this story, and I knew it would end up somewhere. The publication is New Realm at Fictionmagazines.com. 

When I know what issue it is slated to be in I will post it up here. I am super SUPER excited to have found a home for a story that I created from nothing. I still kind of don't believe it. It's almost unreal. 

I guess I don't have a lot more to write about it for now. Maybe more when it sinks in. 

Audi5000.

All of the Musics

I've been given an assignment.

At my Sister Blog, the aptly named Starpoop and Cheese, my sister blogger (slogger?) wrote a poignant ramble about music, and called upon myself and a few others to put voice to our musical history, or roadmap or whatever. I think that's what she said. I'm not so good with the words.

Be right back...

OK, I went and read it again and it just says "write a music post". So, that's it. It's open to interpretation. I guess I invented that other stuff myself.

Music has been really important to me in that, I just like music all right? Get off my back. I don't feel like I can wax poetic about the way that Ween's "Push th' Little Daisies" got me through some hard times, man. I don't have the emotional vocabulary to explain what it all meant to me. I really just pretty much liked music.

It totally did, though.

 I think my musical taste was all about eclecticism. I prided myself in how "weird" my taste in music was. Not that I was into anything really avant-garde, although Mr. Bungle can be pretty strange when they want to be. I just had a very wide variety of tastes that generally excluded whatever was "pop" music.

This started when I was in my formative years in grade school. When my friends were listening to Vanilla Ice and Bell Biv Devoe (or alternatively Poison and Def Leppard) I was listening to the Beatles, The Four Seasons (whatever records [yes, records] my parents had lying around) as well as classical music (the first Compact Disc I ever owned was Beethoven) and some neo-alternative from They Might Be Giants, REM, Talking Heads, and Primus. This last set of music was weird. It was my kind of weird. It had nerdy, complex, or downright strange lyrics, (Les Claypool, I'm lookin' at you) and almost as strange music. I guess I didn't want to be pigeonholed into being the guy who listens to [insert genre tag] music, so I gravitated toward music that was impossible to define by its genre.

No, it's supposed to sound like that... really.

And I wore t-shirts to proclaim it. I wanted to be undefinable, but be as loud as I could about it. In an ironic twist, all the music I loved got lumped together in what was now called "Alternative" and I myself got lumped in with the "Alternative" crowd. I remember very clearly someone asking me "So what do you listen to". Not wanting to say something categorical like "Rap" or "Metal" I described what bands I listened to, and she said "Oh, you're one of those alternative kids."

I guess so?

In my attempt to be different and follow my own path, I fell into another. At the time, that was when alternative was good. Kurt Cobain was "still alive" (Yes, I know that's a Pearl Jam Song, haha. I make joke.) and "alternative" was in its early ascent to the mainstream. This is when I made connections to bands that I still love to this day; bands like Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Alice in Chains, Dinosaur Jr, to name a few. The one that I love most of all though is Smashing Pumpkins. I remember where I was. I remember where I bought the album. I remember sitting on the floor in front of the CD player at my friend Mike's house the first time I listened to Siamese Dream and it totally blew me away.

Best track 1 ever.

This is my desert island album. It is (almost) flawless start to finish. Anyway, from there Alternative as a whole fell into complacency and eventually irrelevance. Too many imitators, too many Eddie V wannabes (and I don't mean VanHalen). By the time Nu Metal came on the scene, I was looking for something new. what I found was Ska.

I'm referring to what is known as 3rd wave ska. I won't get into it, but basically this isn't the jazz ska, it's the punk-infused version. The curious can read more here. These bands were Reel Big Fish, The Suicide Machines, and the big one, Operation Ivy. If there is a desert island where you get to pick more than one CD, book, movie, what have you, Operation Ivy's Energy will sit right beside Siamese Dream. This album... my speakers never seem to be able to go loud enough for it.

Hard to pick one when they're all so good.

This was the last time I really let myself be defined by a genre. I went through a phase where I thought I was a punk. I wasn't punk. I went to a State College in Michigan. I've never even set foot on a skateboard or smoked a cigarette. It worked out fine because ska died in the late 90's about as quick as it hit mainstream. That's fine, because a lot of it was silly and superficial.

There isn't enough room in this blog for the rest of it all. I've since become a ravenous music explorer. I love falling down the wormhole of niche subgenres. To pick through all the bands that formed the Black Metal movement in Norway. To find the nuances that made shoegaze music what it was, and how it influenced other bands. To give some bands a spin that people take for granted like Rush or Kansas. To listen to the kings and queens of Motown, your Stevie Wonders, and your Diana Rosses...

My latest new album purchases? Journey - Evolution (Don't judge me. Listen to Steve Perry and tell me the man isn't incredible) Mazzy Star - So Tonight That I might See because I neglected them in the 90's and wow, this is dreamy floaty shoegaze and it's great. Almost better than Jesus and Mary Chain. And lastly, Chvrches, because one has to stay relevant. I'm kidding, I only get music because I genuinely enjoy listening to it, and Chvrches is some solid pop.  Does it speak to me on some kind of emotional or spiritual level? Frankly, I don't really know, and I don't really care. I only know that it makes me feel. I learned some time ago that you can't let what you listen to define you. I learned that earnestness is cooler than being part of a scene. But I don't really know what cool is anyway, so nevermind.

I leave you with my favorite song from Ke$ha, because I think she gets a bad rap and I actually like her music. It' fun and honest and sweary and dancey and awesome.

Maybe more about music in another entry later, but this is a decent overview.

Oh, one more thing. I don't like Jazz or County. I neither understand nor appreciate the aesthetic of either, even though I recognize that musicians are all talented no mater what they play. Just... play it somewhere else.

The Hobbit Desolation of Smaug: Review

I originally wrote this after the film debuted in theaters. I had a lot of strong feelings about it, both good and bad, and was compelled to write them down. I recently bought the DVD of the movie, because I'm a sucker and I can't help myself. Now on with the review.

Elves. Fuck yeah.

Let me start off by saying that I am glad, so glad, that there are people out there such as Peter Jackson and the folks at the Weta Workshop just to name a few who have put so much time and energy and creativity into making films out of the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. I have loved these stories for most of my life, and to see them given the attention they deserve on the big screen is a wonder. I don’t know that anyone else could have done as well to bring these stories to life as they did.

That said, despite how much I love The Hobbit, and want to love these movies, There are a lot of things wrong with this one. There are also a lot of things that I love, but let’s start with what I didn’t. I'm going to be echoing phrases like "in the book it was like this," or "the book didn't have that." I know that this is a different medium and that certain license must be taken. With that said, this is one of my favorite books ever, and I can't help but compare them. So take that with a grain of salt.

What I didn’t like:

Gandalf

Yes, Gandalf. Gandalf is Gandalf. He’s a great character, and well played by Sir Ian. But in the book, he’s no more really than an advisor to the Dwarves. He helps them out of a few scrapes and then takes off for business elsewhere and is gone for a good portion of the story. This is supposed to be a story about Bilbo, you know... THE HOBBIT. He’s our main protagonist. Whatever wizarding Gandalf is doing in parts unknown is not really our concern, but boy is he wizarding his butt off in this film. In all the LotR trilogy films we didn’t see him wizarding this hard. 

Wizard harder, nerd.

He even has a showdown with Sauron himself, which he loses, and since I know what happens after the Hobbit, is not suspenseful at all. I kept waiting for Radagast the smelly to come running back against Gandalf’s orders because that guy is a loose cannon, isn’t he? But no, because that would have been interesting, and therefore has no place in this filler material. I suppose all of this Dol Guldur stuff was added to tie in to the larger Lord of the Rings narrative, but it doesn’t need to. It could all be summed up by Gandalf at the end when he reappears, as it was in the book. That would work just as well. I think it’s even more interesting and suspenseful to have Gandalf just be gone on some nondescript wizardy thing, and not quite know where or when he’ll pop up next.

Beorn

It’s great that they included Beorn. He’s an interesting character and I like him in the book, but he doesn’t really do anything here except harbor the party for a night and push them out the next day in a kind of dickish way. This all could have been cut the same way Tom Bombadil was cut from the Fellowship of the Ring film. I mean, if they were going to include him, they could have at least had him do something interesting. They spend enough time adding stuff that wasn’t in the book, why abbreviate Beorn so much?

Orcs, orcs, everywhere

I understand the addition of Azog, the pale orc. It is good to have a face for your antagonist, especially if it’s all scarred and mean looking. They did this pretty effectively in the LotR trilogy, having certain orcs stand out to serve as mini-antagonists, like that one guy with elephantitis of the face, but I am getting a little tired of the involvement of orcs in this story, one that isn’t even really about them. 

I am not an animal!

They chase the dwarves in their barrels, they raid Laketown, they are all over the Dol Guldur scenes, and all they really accomplish is giving Legolas increasingly interesting ways of killing them. There was almost no orc involvement in the source material save the goblins in Goblin Town, and the army that rises at the climax. Too much. Just too much senseless orc death for a story about a Hobbit and a dragon.

Elf class division

Did we really need a love triangle in this movie? Now, being a Tolkien nerd, I understand the different subdivisions of elves. I understand that Thranduil is of a different sort than the Sylvan elves who have been in Mirkwood (or Greenwood the Great) since forever, basically, but Thranduil and Tauriel’s addressing of it in regards to her being a suitable mate for Legolas left a bad taste in my mouth. Elf racism doesn’t fit in the Hobbit. Leave that for when they make three even more bloated movies about the Silmarils (heaven forbid). They had to manufacture tension somehow, I guess, but I disagree with every part of this. Which brings us to...

Interracial Dating

Why are Kili, the hot dwarf and Tauriel the elf making eyes at each other? Again, I ask, did we really need a love triangle in this movie? Did we really need to make up a reason for some elves to come to Laketown and fight orcs that shouldn’t have been there in the first place? I don’t like that there are hot beardless dwarves, and I don’t like an elf making goo-goo eyes at one of them.

Nope.

Spiders and Barrel Fighting

In the book, the dwarves are pretty much at Bilbo’s mercy. He saves their asses again and again using his wits and the ring. He single-handedly takes down the spiders while the dwarves can barely move from the venom, and when they are captured by the elves, he loads them into barrels (sealed barrels) and floats them down the river while they hide inside and try not to drown. In this film, they are saved from spiders not just by Bilbo, but by the elves, and only after kicking some spider butts themselves. Then with the barrels, they are only chest-deep in the things and hacking away at orcs the whole time, not to mention some very improbable barrel physics and more help from the elves. This pretty much robs Bilbo of his heroism from the book. He is forced to take on the role of hero, however reluctantly, and proves his worthiness in much more profound ways, not by hacking everything to bits or making holes in them with arrows, but by being brave and resourceful and clever. This makes Thorin’s turn on him that much more powerful later in the story, and Thorin’s ultimate acceptance that much more heartwrenching. If you are going to make changes, at least have them make sense. I expect this sort of thing from Michael Bay, but not from Peter Jackson.

Adding and Editing

As you might have guessed by now, I tend to have a problem with things being different than the book. That is true to some extent. I don’t necessarily have a problem with any and every divergence from the source material. I understand that this is an adaptation, and certain poetic license is going to be taken. I understand that Tolkien is not the greatest storyteller, and he tends to get bogged down in the details, though in this case, the Hobbit is pretty tight for the most part. I understand that certain things have to be cut or tweaked for the sake of the medium. Again, I have no problem with any of these changes if they make sense. The problem I have is with the addition of things that don’t add to the story, that take away from the point of the original, and that make the thing frustrating to watch. I’m specifically addressing the intercutting of Gandalf’s side quest with that of the dwarves. Every time I feel like I’m settling in with the dwarves we have to cut away to Gandalf. It’s awkward and jarring and it takes me out of the story. It’s also unnecessary. I want to see the film recut without Gandalf’s stuff. Someone get on that.

Ring Anxiety

Bilbo seems to understand that the Ring is corrupting him and is reluctant to use it. This is as unnecessary as the Dol Guldur subplot. The Ring isn’t central to the story. There is no reason Bilbo shouldn’t be using it whenever it suits him. This completely invalidates Bilbo’s casual use of the ring at his birthday and his general lack of concern for it later in life. If anything, he should be loving using it because that’s how the ring works. It practically begs to be put on. This also messes up Bilbo and Smaug’s encounter because Smaug could see him the whole time and would most likely have killed him on sight. Which finally brings us to...

Smaug and Dwarves

Bilbo goes in the door, chats with Smaug, pisses him off, and retreats just in time to not get burned to a crisp. That’s all we needed. In an already bloated film, did we really need another highly improbable action setpiece inside Erebor? Forges, waterwheels, molten gold surfing, gold coated dragons, it’s all so over the top that there is no tension whatsoever. This whole sequence is unnecessary.

Now, while there are a lot of problems in this film, these being the major ones (I could go on and on and nitpick every detail, but there aren’t enough hours in the day) there are some things that I liked. I did still enjoy this movie for the most part, and here’s why.

What I did like:

Bilbo (Martin Freeman)

Martin Freeman’s Bilbo is wonderful. In fact everything Martin Freeman does is wonderful. Bilbo is delivered so perfectly and with such nuance. I don’t have enough good things to say about this Bilbo. It is spot on. This only makes the cheapening of his great deeds as mentioned above that much more egregious. Every moment Bilbo is on screen is magic. MOAR BILBO PLS.

Mirkwood

Mirkwood is fantastic. It reminded me a little of one of my favorite films, Labyrinth. It is creepy, claustrophobic, and disorienting. It is all the things a nasty, dangerous, haunted forest should be. I missed the bit from the novel with the river, where Bombur falls in and forgets everything. Again, with all that is added to this film that is not from the source material, I don’t understand why they had to abbreviate the Mirkwood experience. They could have conceivably made the whole second film about Mirkwood and the elves and Laketown, but this thing is already stretched too big as it is. Like butter scraped over too much bread, as Bilbo might say.

Thranduil+Elvenhome

I love elves. They are one of the things I love most about Tolkien. From the Silmarillion on down to the Return of the King, I am fascinated by them. The Dwarves’ entering Elvenhome was one of the things I was most excited to see, and I was not disappointed. The Mirkwood elves aren’t creepy and melancholic like the Lorien elves, they like to get drunk and party down. I think that Elvenhome was well done, and well designed, and it was great to see. Likewise, Thranduil is well written and well acted, save the bit of elvish class division mentioned above. Having lived for so long has made him a little weird, as one could imagine. He is wise and basically good, but has a cold callousness to him that comes from his long life in seclusion. I even liked the allusion to his previous scrapes with dragons, and thought that was a worthy addition, especially since they somehow resisted the urge to flashback to it. I loved Thranduil, and could have seen more of him, but what we got was plenty.

We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.

Evangeline Lilly

I’m of two minds on Tauriel. On the one hand, she is a character that did not appear in the book, and as such, everything she participates in is a departure from Tolkien. She features heavily in some of the weakest parts of the film, i.e. the barrel fight, the Laketown skirmish, and Kili’s poisoning and confession of love. That they felt we needed this character at all is frustrating, and the love triangle between Legolas, Kili, and Tauriel is ludicrous. That being said, I could watch Evangeline Lilly shoot orcs in the face for two hours and it would make for a pretty good movie in itself. 

Pew pew pew!

She embodies a Sylvan elf so well, I can almost excuse the love triangle business. Almost. I wish she had been used more effectively, and I hate the feeling in my gut that she will most likely die in the third movie, probably sacrificing herself for Kili. *cry* *Dwarf tears* It’s too bad she didn’t appear in the LotR trilogy, because she fits so well into elf ears.

Bard

I like what they did with Bard. Not much is made of him in the source material. He’s basically just a guard who happens to be a pretty good shot with a bow. I actually like the liberties they took with this character, and with Laketown in general, up until the orcs show up. Bard is the everyman that we can kind of identify with here. I’m interested to see how things shake out for him in the third film.

Smaug

Here we go.

Smaug is, by a fairly wide margin, my very favorite character in all of Tolkien. Even though he only appears for a single conversation with Bilbo before flying into a rage and getting himself killed, he is the biggest presence in the Hobbit, and I don’t mean his physical size. His shadow looms over the whole story up until we meet him in the flesh. Then when we do meet him, he is so delightfully arrogant, selfish, and just plain evil. I love Smaug. He is the perfect Dragon. In the film he is very well realized. The design, the animation, the execution is all well done. Cumberbatch does a great job with the voice, and I guess with the expressions too? Did they motion capture those?  

Blunderbuss Cabbagepatch relaxing on the set.

Anyway, I love Smaug. The whole battle sequence was a bit overdone I think, but holy crap, what an awesome dragon. Again, make a whole movie about Smaug and I would watch the shit out of it. I would take exception to Smaug’s acknowledgement of the ring, but he’s just so awesome I’m willing to let it go.

So summing up, I was kind of disappointed by this one. It was overlong and had too much forced action that didn’t have any suspense to it at all. The abrupt ending was a little jarring, as was a lot of the editing, and it really took me out of Middle Earth, which is where I want to be with these films. I’m afraid that the third one will be anticlimactic. There is so little story left, that it’s going to be all action in the last film, and the action, unfortunately, is where these films seem to suffer. I can see the writing on the wall, Smaug besieges Laketown, somehow narrowly missing everyone we care about in improbable ways, then the battle of five armies, which I’m sure will take up the last 2/3rds of the film, Tauriel will likely die for Kili’s sake, furthering the enmity of the dwarves in Legolas’s eyes, which is not needed at all. Azog and Thorin will showdown and kill each other. I don’t even want to speculate about the battle at Dol Guldur, because it shouldn’t even be here. Probably Galadriel and her people will show up, and maybe even Elrond, but I want no part of it.

I really tried to love it, but it fell somewhat short for me. There is a lot here to love, especially for the uninitiated, but ultimately it feels like they are trying too hard.

Losing the Battle

Writers Write

That's the thing I hear from every blog or how-to or article about writing. How do I become a writer? WRITE.

I consider myself a writer. I certainly don't make money at it, but is that really the litmus test? I have four rejection letters. I'm saving them. I have finished stories. I have (lots of) unfinished stories. I write. I'm a writer. But a lot of times, I don't write anything. Lately I haven't been. There are too many other things to do. There is Netflix. There is Steam. I still haven't finished the Scrivener tutorial. I have a new laptop that still doesn't have my music library set up quite to my liking. Sometimes, it's too hard to sacrifice other things to impale myself upon the empty screen. Sometimes... I even dread it. These other things are excuses.

My latest project is something I came into with a lot of enthusiasm. I love new projects, because they're shiny and new. So full of promise. Oh man, this is my best idea yet. But then I settle in. It turns out maybe it doesn't work the way I thought at first. I need to rethink some of this. Then it becomes a chore. It feels like work. I don't really want to tonight. Or the next night. Or the next. Then I dread it. My story has sat alone, unloved. It resents me now. I'll get nowhere.

It's a little like a relationship. At first, you're smitten. The other person can do no wrong. Everything is cute, or brilliant. They are perfect. You are better when you are with them. After awhile though, you notice things. There are imperfections. You're calling me again? What for? I just saw you this afternoon. Do you have to chew like that? Oh... you don't like Star Wars? I think I'm going out with my friends tonight. Yeah, I'll see you tomorrow. Sorry I didn't call. I forgot.

The main difference being that this story isn't another living, breathing person with feelings to consider. It's a collection of words on a page, and you can ignore it with impunity. It won't get mad, or judge, or talk about you behind your back. But it is still there. Alone. Waiting. And you know it's there. You made it. And now you're neglecting it. Playing a ten-year-old video game into the wee hours. Watching cartoons. It notices. It knows.

It's difficult to get over this self-defeating cycle. Thusfar, I haven't succeeded except with short stories. Because they're short, you see. I have yet to complete a longer piece. 8,000 words is my record for a finished story. I don't count my one NaNo "win" because it isn't finished and likely never will be. I need to trudge on through the tough part.

So what do I do? I go online and ramble on about my neglected story guilt. Why? Catharsis? Validation? Madness? Who knows? Who cares? I'm writing something again, even if it's this. Enjoy my neurosis.

Here's my favorite cat gif.

Again!?

Two! Two rejections! [Thunder crashes]

Ah-ah-ahhhh!

So what happened?

Well, this time was the same a the first time. It didn't really sting. "No" is never what you want to hear, but admittedly I aimed pretty high. I fired off a story that I wrote in a couple days to a pretty well-known sci-fi publication. Once again, it was a polite "didn't work for me, but try it out elsewhere" which is a nice sentiment if it isn't a template. I didn't really expect to make it, but it felt like everything clicked with this one and I thought, why not go for it? I'm glad to have gotten some encouragement even in rejection. In my head though, I imagine that some people can be pretty psychotic when they get rejected.

I used to watch American Idol as a guilty pleasure, more so for the freak show that is the first several episodes. I couldn't believe that some of those people could be so deluded that they come completely unglued at being told 'no'. I have since found out that reality shows aren't as real as they pretend to be, (I know, right!?) and they hand-pick the crazies to get them on the air for ratings. I almost feel dirty for having contributed in any capacity. I never did call in to vote though.

No, William. She does not "bang".

Anyway, I imagined the insane response letters that the poor fellow must have gotten over the years. The arguing, the indignation, the (I hesitate to use the term) butthurt. I hate to think it, but I feel like he has to be as diplomatic as possible. Even if he hated my story, (there's no way he would though because it is a work of genius inspired by the Gods themselves) he can't just write a rejection that says, "your story arranged words in such a fashion that caused cancer in myself and everyone here. Please stop writing for the good of yourself and those around you." I'm sure he would have loved to write something like that on at least one occasion, but you can't be like that. It just invites more hate mail. 

This is part of why I don't like sending my stuff to friends for beta reading. With the exception of one or two folks, I know that most of what I'm going to hear is positive, no matter what. "I loved it!" and "Great job!!!!1" are nice to hear, and there's nothing wrong with cheerleading. The problem is that I am looking for what doesn't work. I need to hear the bad or I can't fix it. Now, this man is not an editor. It's not his job to critique my work, just to see if it's right for his magazine (which it totally is, he's just too blind to my genius to realize what a gem he had on his hands). So I don't expect criticism from submitting.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I need a critique partner. Any takers?

I'm totally open to criticism, I swear.