Thursday, March 6, 2014

Another rejection

But a nice one. My story "Foretold" that everyone likes but not enough to buy, went off to the latest Tesseracts submission, after which I forgot about it and went back to struggling with Cost of Silver.

Today I got this in my email:

Thank  you for submitting "Foretold " to Tesseracts: Wrestling with  
Gods.  This topic brought out  many different authors with creative 
scifi/fantasy ideas  on our relationship to faith.  We were 
overwhelmed with the response.  We received many strong stories and 
poems, and there just  wasn't enough space in the anthology for 
everything we liked.  Unfortunately, we were not able to include yours 
in the final  selections. 

We can't stress enough how much we enjoyed your story.  It was 
incredibly well written, with a strong structure.  It almost made it 
in.  We just had trouble separating the elements connected to Greek 
Myth from original fantasy elements.  Stories selected had to be 
strong in both the faith component and the fantasy/sci-fi element. 
 Foretold was on the border. 

We do appreciate the chance to read your  submission and wish you the 
best of luck in placing it elsewhere.  We're confident it will get 
published somewhere. 

In other news, I've been taking an Olympic weightlifting class, and have been enjoying my ability to hoist 50 or so pounds above my head. I'm happy with my deadlift, and feeling more confident with the clean and jerk, but having trouble with the snatch, especially with the overhead squat portion. Front squat, back squat, no problem, but overhead squat, yes problem.
The frustrating part is that my form seems to be pretty good with a dowel, but as soon as a weighted bar or Olympic bar comes in, I can't drop to a full squat, my arms come forward, and it all goes to hell.
Which is oddly analogous to the story rejection - there's nothing actually wrong with it, it just isn't quite right.