I can’t in good conscience sit here behind my WordPress console and let this issue go by without at least posting my opinion of it.

Something has started to decay in this country. There is a festering rot here that is slowly and inexorably creeping toward something more terrible than most people can imagine.  Our culture of complacency is breeding attitudes that are eerily similar to those of the pre-Nazi-Germany attitudes toward Jews. It is becoming culturally and publicly acceptable to exhibit what can only be described as rampant bigotry, hatred, and prejudice fed by fear and ignorance.

First we have the huge debate over whether or not a Mosque can be built near ground zero. The media has, as usual, been doing their part to fan the flames of drama and conflict here. However, this doesn’t mean that the public at large isn’t partly to blame. My issue isn’t with the people who shout at the top of their lungs that terrorists shouldn’t be allowed to build on ground zero. Those people are ignorant, and we (should) all know that. The people I take issue with are those who sit back and do nothing. Dammit people, there is an injustice being done to an entire culture-a thriving religion- and nobody is doing a damn thing. Everyone who lets a co-worker bemoan the “terrorists” who are building “on ground zero” (the location is actually a few blocks away) should be ashamed of themselves. Whenever someone standing near you makes some offhand remark that takes the entirety of the world’s people who practice any form of Islam and lumps them together as a stereotype and treats them as something at which a finger can be pointed – you should be ashamed of yourself for allowing that remark to go unchallenged.

The general public in Nazi Germany didn’t just wake up one morning and decide that they were going to hate Jews, and those who did align themselves against the Jews – many didn’t even realize that what they were doing was hate. A slow, steady, relentless campaign of propaganda, fear-mongering, and public manipulation over the course of years slowly but surely changed the public’s attitudes toward the Jews. Lies, deceit, and the equivalent of media blitzes gradually turned normal, everyday housewives into people who feared that exposure to a Jew could contaminate their drinking water or put their children at risk. Why did all of this work? Because not enough people did anything, not enough people complained. I’m not saying it could have been avoided, my point is that complacency breeds this kind of horror.

This country, despite the praise people love to sing about it, has had its own dark past involving hatred, bigotry, racism, and worse. This country enslaved Africans. This country gathered up every Japanese person they could find, regardless of whether or not they were a US Citizen, and threw them in camps during the war.

And now, this country is actually debating whether or not it’s own citizens should be allowed to exercise their freedom of religion. Religious freedom is one of the founding tenets of this country. It is what has made this country appeal to generations of immigrants. It is one of the freedoms our soldiers fight for.

In the news today, complacency is everywhere. People who damn well should know better are staying quiet for fear of the backlash of having said something that might be construed as politically incorrect. People who know better are not putting their feet down and telling the ignorant bigots where to stick their hatred. Worse, for fear of public outcry, the people in a position to renew firm stances against these kinds of prejudices do nothing or even consider repealing parts of the constitution in order to revoke basic freedoms (the right of a baby born in this country to automatically be born a citizen…)

The main purpose of studying history is to learn from it. We study history so that we can become a better people, so that we can be more enlightened and learn from our mistakes. What we’re in the midst of doing now is repeating some of the worst mistakes in history. Our complacency is allowing hate groups to influence the public, allowing prejudice to influence law, allowing fear to drive policy.

If we, as a nation, let the minister in Florida and his congregation of bigots burn Qur’ans on September 11th, then we are allowing them to be no better than the people who flew planes into the World Trade Center on that same day. Flame me all you want, but the same kind of religious zealotry and hatred and xenophobia that drove those men to hijack those planes is absolutely no different than the kind of religious zealotry that can drive a congregation to publicly burn the holy book of another religion. If we, as a nation, let them do that without letting the world know we don’t agree, then the radical Islamic terrorists will just be able to point and say “Look, look at what the infidels do to our religion!” Just as an aside here – you know who else had public book burnings, right? Yeah, Hitler.

So. Who do you want to be? Do you want to be disliked because of what you believe in, or do you want to be liked because of the group you mindlessly follow? Do you want to be proud of who you are and taking a stand against hate, or will you be weak and just let fear, ignorance, hatred, and bigotry run rampant through this country, through your workplace, through your home?

Are you a complacent citizen or a real American?

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What if the story is actually bad?

What do you do then? The first thing that I must admit is that I am a novel writer. When I get stories in my mind they are huge, sprawling stories that can span generations or at the very least, multiple books in a series. This brings me to rule #1 for writing a bad short story:

Rule #1 : Make it Epic.

If you want to absolutely, positively ruin your chances of having your short story published, then go right ahead and make it epic. Without a doubt, this is the rule that I violate most. I violate it before I even sit down to type. The short story in my mind is a scene or a chapter from some epic confrontation or vast story with hundreds of tendrils of plot and intrigue. I’m not ashamed to admit this – this is how I think as a novel writer. The problem with thinking like a novel writer is you’re going to come up with crappy short story ideas. My solution to this is to take the epic topic I’m thinking about and run it through the following filter: “What would Edgar Allan Poe do with this?” If the answer is chuck it, then heed that advice.

Rule #2 : Don’t Have A Point

This one is also particularly nasty for any budding, hopeful short story writer. If you want your story to fall flat (and there’s a reason I use the word flat), then make sure it doesn’t have a point. Leave your reader saying, “Great narrative, but, what’s the point? Why did I just read that?” The thing that drives a truly tight, crisp, powerful short story is a clear sense of purpose. Even if you don’t want you reader to know your purpose, you must have one. Your purpose can be as simple as “I want them to get to the last page and gasp when they see my surprise ending!” or as complex as wanting them to feel compelled to do something to save the environment once they’ve finished your story. Bottom line is that any editor, whether they can express this to you or not, will reject a short story that is not driven by singular purpose. Oh yeah, I’m guilty of this one.

Try out this little self-help test: If your short story started out with you saying (aloud or to your mind) to yourself, “Wow, this would make for a fantastic scene!” Then you could be in trouble. Short stories are not scenes and should never be thought of as such. Yes, I’m guilty of that as well.

Rule #3: Don’t Care About Exposition

This one is actually really important and can often take the most time and effort to get right for a given story. If you don’t particularly care about exposition or spend any effort thinking about the pacing, order, and amount of exposition in your story, then feel free to wallow in the rejection letters. (This may be getting tiresome, but yes, I’m guilty of this as well).

If you front-load your story with exposition and spend the first two pages with narrative explanation about what’s going on and identifying your non-epic purpose, you may have satisfied rules 1 and 2, but you’ve ignored rule 3. People who pick up a novel typically have a pre-conceived notion that it could take them as long as 50 to 100 pages (depending on the length of the novel) to become truly engrossed. With a short story you do not have that luxury. The reader will only give you a few paragraphs to hook their attention, not pages.

Likewise, if you spend no time at all on exposition and leave the reader absolutely clueless until the very end, they will have no concept of your purpose. They won’t know why you brought them along on this journey through your story and will be left feeling very unsatisfied… no matter what the ending, it will be anti-climactic because a confused reader is incapable of experiencing suspenseful build-up to a conclusion.

The hard part, of course, is to make sure you put just enough exposition to let the reader know enough about what’s going on to give them context so that as more information is revealed and action occurs, they’re following you on your trip through the story, eager to reach the end… rather than being pulled along clueless on a leash just to get to the end.

Rule #4: Don’t Revise

In your quest to build the world’s worst short story, you have decided to follow rule #4 and skip the revision process altogether. Sure, you might have edited a few paragraphs here and there, possibly cleaned up some awkward wording, but otherwise once you’d spewed your first draft, you were just polishing the edges.

This is one of the worst things you can do. The information that comes out of your head on the first draft is raw, unrefined, stream of consciousness. In this form, you haven’t considered that characters are talking about things they might not yet have encountered, you haven’t made sure that each character has a unique, appropriate voice, and you certainly haven’t made sure that the pacing of the story speeds up when it should and slows down when it should.

To do this kind of revision, I will gather feedback on the stream of consciousness draft (to which I often refer as “plot vomit”) from others and myself. I will get all the notes on all the issues people have had with it and print this draft out. Then, I will read this over so that I can remember most, if not all, of the editorial comments. Then, and this is important, I delete the first draft. Every word. Gone. I then start typing it over from scratch. I keep in mind all the comments I had, but at the same time, I’m keeping a thought toward refining the stuff I originally spewed.

After this new revision, I’ll repeat the process until I really like the way the story feels and flows. Then I will go back and line-by-line, word-by-word, edit the craft of the story – revise sentence structure, change word usage, find synonyms, remove cliches, etc.

So, if you take these four rules and apply them to your own short story writing, you might produce great narratives, but you will not produce great short stories. I’d been going along producing halfway decent narratives that often made the short list, but after having a good friend of mine take a critical eye to my most recent story, I have a new appreciation for the amount of effort that goes into writing a truly good story. Not only that, but the story with which I am nearly finished is easily one of the best I’ve ever written precisely because I avoided the pitfalls outlined in this post.

Certainly there are thousands of other pieces of advice that writers can give about making better short stories, but avoiding the pitfalls in this post helped me write some of my best short stories ever.

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Yesterday I found out that a short story that I’d submitted to a fantasy magazine had been rejected. As with virtually all rejections, there was no associated list of reasons why the piece had been rejected.  There are a couple things that writers typically feel when they get these letters that I want to write about:

First, don’t blame the publication. I know we’ve all heard stories about how ridiculously famous authors have had their books rejected and most of us have heard the stories about how, to see what would happen, people submitted a NY times bestseller to a publishing firm and it got rejected. Say what you will about the system or the man or whatever, but they’re just doing their jobs. The system isn’t there to coddle you, stroke your ego, or put you down humanely. It’s there to make money. Bottom line: if they don’t think your story/book/poetry/whatever will sell money, you get rejected. Writer self-help step #1: Accept this fact. It will never change.

Second: the Kick in the Face. If you have read this blog before, you may have seen this post I wrote previously about handling rejection like a true writer. I’m going to say something that a lot of the writing self-help books don’t say. When you get that rejection, you’re going to be pissed off. You’re going to be mad and you absolutely, positively will feel like giving up. Writers, when we get these rejection letters, will say and feel all kinds of  crazy stuff ranging from “my writing sucks” to “nobody’s ever going to publish my stories” to the absolute worst of them all:

Why do I even bother writing if nobody’s going to publish my work?

This is where the kick to the face comes in. It’s perfectly fine to feel these things and you should feel them – let yourself go through the range of anger, sadness, and dejection that comes with that rejection letter. Then kick yourself in the face. Slap yourself out if it. Realize that all of that crap is just that, crap. You write because you’re a writer and if you do it long enough and hone your craft enough, you will eventually find some success. You may not get on the NY times bestseller list, but there will be small victories.

If you can’t slap yourself out of it, then get a friend to kick you in the face. Last night I was babbling on about how I was going to give up writing and I quit and life sucks and why should I bother yadda yadda yadda. A friend of mine slapped me in the face and told me to knock it off (you know who you are…thank you!). What I intend to do is write tonight… write until I can’t take it anymore.

What I failed to remember, and what we may need friends to kick into our thick heads (hard!), is that we write because that’s who we are. We write because we tell stories, and we gain some satisfaction from telling and honing a story. Publication is secondary to writing, and every writer gets rejected.

So I’m taking my own advice: sucking it up, getting back on the horse, and moving on from yet another rejection and realizing that friends who can slap you around a little bit after a rejection are probably more valuable than friends who can proofread your stuff before the rejection.

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But, we also have the kind of dreams that plague us throughout the day; dreams that comfort us like a warm blanket when we go to sleep at night, and dreams that keep our minds racing while we drive to work, while we eat a sandwich, and pretty much while we do anything. These dreams are literally the stuff of legend. These dreams are the scenes, dramas, and epics that are begging to be written and to be told from start to finish.

What’s interesting here is that there is no magic fairy dust, no faith, no religion, no lucky roll of the dice that will, on its own, make our dreams come true. The only thing standing between us and the realization of our dreams is work. That’s it. Putting one foot in front of the other, tapping one key after another. Certainly we could all use a little luck to help us along, but if we’re still sitting at home in front of a blank screen and 700 pages of unwritten manuscript remain jammed inside our head, no amount of luck will get our story published. What will get our story published, what will pull our dreams from out of reach and into the palm of our hands is nothing more than raw, hard work. Persistence and patience don’t hurt either.

A couple of years ago, I remember saying to myself that I’d never be published. I kept telling myself that I wasn’t good enough to be a published author and that my stuff sucked. My dream of being a real writer remained just that, a dream. Then I changed my dream of being a writer into a goal. I worked and I wrote. I wrote some more. Then I wrote some more. I now have over 14 computer programming books published and I’ve got a short story published in a real, actual, on-paper anthology.

Dreams are things we have that will never happen. Goals are real, tangible things we can put effort toward.

Another dream I’ve had since the day I got my driver’s license was to own a fun, sporty car. In the past I’ve just never had enough money saved up or I’ve needed to drive practical cars or minivans or whatever. As long as I kept that dream as a dream and convinced myself it would never happen, it never happened.

A couple of weeks ago, I walked into a BMW dealership and I special ordered a green BMW 328i xDrive and it will be put on a ship leaving Germany sometime next week. The combination of handling, sporty feel, comfort, reliability and style are unmatched by any of the other cars I test drove.

BMW 328xi in Tasman Green

Instead of pining over what I didn’t have, I visualized what I wanted. I pictured myself sitting behind the wheel of the car I wanted most in the world (within reason… no amount of positive visualization is going to give me enough money to buy a Bugati Veyron ) and I worked toward that goal. It took a lot of scrimping, saving, penny-pinching and skipping on other big-ticket purchases I might’ve made, but I made it. My dream car arrives in a few weeks and I fully expect to be driving this vehicle when my first fantasy book is published. That’s not a dream, that’s my goal and it’s a goal that I work toward every day.

So, while I may not have advice that I can impart on the step-by-step process you need to follow in order to get published, I do know a little something about making stuff happen. Want to be a published writer? Take all that time you spending wishing and write. Take the rest of your spare time and write. Take the spare time you don’t have and make it spare and take writing classes and join a writing group. Get all the guides on how to get published and how to write query letters and hone your craft. Work. Put one foot in front of the other and tap one key after the other. Don’t sit around waiting for divine intervention because your own intervention is what’s going to set things in motion.

Nothing would please me more than to see a bunch of comments on the bottom of this blog post rattling off dream after dream that you folks made come true. Dreams aren’t mythical, intangible pink unicorns. They’re goals you can make happen.

While you’re at it, make sure your characters have dreams. At the very core of a good novel is a protagonist who has dreams and an antagonist that wants to thwart them. Use the feelings you have while trying to reach your goals to make your characters and their struggles to fulfill their dreams more realistic.

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I’m not apologizing, my absence actually has relevance and meaning to the life of a writer. My life as of late has been very chaotic. I’ve had ups, downs, big ups, and big downs, all within an extremely short period of time up to and including considering a potential job change, considering moving, beginning divorce proceedings, and much, much more. Even though my divorce probably ranks at the top of the worlds most amicable divorces ever, its still a huge source of stress, anxiety, and most of all – change.

As I floated around on the top of the waves, nearly drowning from having swallowed so much stress I got to thinking about how long it had been since I actually sat down and wrote anything. I don’t mean having written anything good, profound, or meaningful. I mean, how long it had been since I’d written anything. I hadn’t blogged, hadn’t written in a journal, and certainly hadn’t been working on my fantasy novel.

So, I slapped myself in the face and said to myself:

One thing that writers must do is write. Thinking, plotting, scheming, dreaming – all useful but mean nothing without actually sitting down and writing.

If I’m not writing, I’m not a writer. That’s the short and long of it right here. So, I sat down and started writing. Since then, I’ve finished a short story that I’ve sent out for consideration by a popular fantasy magazine (will know in about 6 weeks if they liked it) and I’m nearly done with another short story that I’m submitting to an anthology. Once done with those, I’m going to dive back into the fantasy novel.

The point I want to make here is I hit rock bottom. I was wallowing in self-pity and I was coming up with every excuse in the book to stop writing. Since I’ve started writing again, I’m a happier person. The moral of the story is if you want to be a writer – the one thing you must do above all else is write. Its about time I followed my own advice.

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First, the reason why many of you are probably reading this: the eReader experience. The iPad is the single best looking and feeling electronic book reading device I have ever encountered. This includes using PCs to read books, the Kindle (which I finally got to play with last month!), and the Nook. There’s a button on the device that lets you lock the screen orientation so you can read in single-page mode even while lying down on a couch, etc. The screen is positively brilliant and the page-turning experience is great too. The buying experience is seamless and even faster than the Kindle for downloads. I love how full-color book covers show up in a screen that literally looks like a bookshelf. My only complaint about the book reading experience is you need to avoid high-glare situations because unlike e-Ink, you have trouble seeing the iPad screen in high intensity sunlight.

The battery life on this device is insanely good. I have played high-resolution fast-paced driving games for hours, read books, read e-mails, taken notes in meetings, and watched Netflix movies and then forgot to charge the device for two days and still picked it up to find it at 40%. In fact, I’ve never even seen my iPad go below 20% and I am really, really bad about plugging it in at night.

Netflix. If you have an iPad, you absolutely, positively need a Netflix subscription. Being able to kick back and watch episodes of the A-Team on my incredibly bright 10″ screen with the headphones on – priceless.

Evernote. Evernote for the iPad is an incredible piece of software. I have actually started taking the iPad to my meetings at work. It’s roughly the same size and only a pinch heavier than the notebook I normally take to my meetings. I flip the case into “angled typing” mode, open a new note in Evernote and take notes during the meeting. By the time I get back to my desk, Evernote has already synchronized my note via the cloud and it’s sitting on my work desktop and will be available the next time I turn on my home PC or Mac.

Games and Education. I’ve discovered some educational games that I plan on having my daughter play. I picked up a Modern Warfare game that is ridiculous in the level of enjoyment and only has minor touch-related annoyances. I’ve got a racing game for the pad that is SO much fun because the added weight and size of the pad gives me far better accelerometer-based steering accuracy than phone-based driving games.

As I mentioned before, the new interface for reading and composing e-mails is outstanding. The book reading experience is incredible. I’ve actually integrated this device into my daily routine at work as well as at home and, having it by my side has actually caused me to turn on my laptop MUCH less in the last month. In fact, my small laptop has only been turned on twice, both of those times just to get to local files.

If you are considering getting an iPad, don’t listen to people who have only used it once or twice. It felt strange and awkward when I first got it. After two weeks, I was truly loving it. After four weeks, I absolutely, positively cannot live without this device. It is as much a part of my life now as eating and breathing. It is also the invaluable device for capturing writing ideas while on the go – far easier than doing it using the phone or a laptop.

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I got up from my desk, and got about halfway to the kitchen when it hit me. It wasn’t the typical “I just got an idea for how I want to work the next scene” idea – those are fairly subtle and I file them away in Evernote on my iPhone so I don’t lose them. This idea, however, appeared before me and bashed me in the face with a Louisville Slugger.

To set the stage here, I’ve finished the outlining (word doc, index cards, and a table full of sticky notes) for my fantasy novel. I’ve written Act I, and am about 30,000 words into the book as a whole. When I’ve had a chance to write, I’ve typically been able to nail a 3k+ scene during that session. I have committed to this novel and I’m in no way feeling frustrated with it and have no desire to give it up.

The idea that hit me is truly unique. I spent several days googling and searching book store keywords for anything that resembled what I wanted to do – nothing. This new idea is not fantasy, but set in current times and will probably have a faster pace. It is also part of a genre for which more agents accept queries, that prints more books, that has a vastly higher readership.

So the dilemma : This story is now haunting me. During the day, the time my brain normally spends thinking about my fantasy novel is now mostly consumed by this new idea. This idea is far more character-driven and doesn’t in any way resemble the “epic fantasy” of my current project.

I have been told many times that dropping a WIP in the middle to pick up another one is one thing that separates published writers from “aspiring” writers. That said, this idea is haunting me and I’m not sure how to get that out of my head.

So, if you’ve ever had this problem – you get knee deep into a WIP you love and an idea hits you in the face and won’t leave you alone – what do you do? What techniques have you tried for calming the second idea so you can finish the first or have you actually dropped the first to finish the second?

I would love to hear how other writers handle this situation.

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One of my favorite places to get ideas for characters is Wal-Mart. Now, before you start throwing flames my way, let me say this: I am in no way demeaning that store or the people who frequent it. The reason that I like this particular store is because everyone shops there. If you go to a trendy mall, you’re only going to see a particular type of people at that mall. If you go to a salvation army store, the breadth of economic bracket of the typical consumer there is also going to be limited.

But, at Wal-Mart, you see everybody in one place – everyone from people on food stamps to a guy who drove up in a Benz. You’ll see mentally challenged people there with their case workers, struggling to maintain a hold on their independence and dignity in a world that shuns and degrades them. Single mothers (teenage or otherwise), bachelors, college students, parents with eight kids trying to save a buck here and there on the essentials, and of course, that guy who drove up in the Benz who wants to save a few bucks on the HDTV he’s putting in his 5th guest room.

If you want a reader to be able to sympathize and empathize with your characters, then you need to be able to do the same with actual, living, breathing human beings. People from different walks of life as you, people with problems you can’t possibly imagine, people with advantages you know you’ll never have.

What I’ve found really rewarding is going into a Wal-Mart and just watching, observing. Take a look around you, but not that cursory glance you normally give that is filtered with the blinders of your past experiences and your own preconceptions. Take the blinders off and look around you with fresh, objective eyes: the eyes of a reader waiting to be guided, thrilled, excited.

Take a look at the woman pushing the cart with her kid in it. What do you think her daily life is like? Is she happy? What do you think she daydreams about while she pushes that cart through the grocery aisles? What does she want out of life and what’s preventing her from getting it? Asking yourself these questions and filling them in with complete fiction is a great way to build your characters. If the fictional backstory you build for these people fits what you’re looking at, then it might also fit scenes you write for such characters.

Places like Wal-Mart (as well as thousands of other good places to people-watch) are endless fountains of ideas for characters. So, the next time you’re stuck looking for ideas for new characters or the ones you have lack dimension, then just get in the car and do some character shopping.

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I could sit here, comfortably shielded behind the walls of my blog, and rant and rave about the injustice of it all – how dare they reject my story? What’s wrong with those people? Don’t they know good fiction when they see it? I could do all of those things, but I won’t. I deserved the rejection.

The rejection letter from these folks was nice enough to tell me that my story was both interesting and well-written, but because of the overwhelming response to the call for stories, I just didn’t make the cut. Cue the scene with high-school-me standing on the edge of the soccer field while teams are called, all sad and dejected as I get picked last. So, if my story was both interesting and well-written, then what did I do wrong?

It all comes down to the word interesting. I thought about it and read through my story last night and the reason for the rejection was clear as a bell. I actually told my wife that it probably only made the short list on the merit of the writing, because the plot was absolutely terrible.

Sure, I opened the story with a bang, leaping right into the action. I had very little exposition, only sprinkled into the action in the cleverest of places. The story read quite quickly and, as the letter said, was actually written pretty well. The problem was with the plot. The story is about this woman who, after losing her mentor in an accident, suddenly defies the city leadership to go off and save a group of people she’s never met. She even uses her powers to fight her people just to save the strangers. While there is motivation in the story that makes her actions (mostly) believable and justified, there’s something missing. Can you spot it? Can you say antagonist? I just knew you could…

I went through the story again. The cave-in at the beginning that kills her mentor was random chance, so we can’t blame that on an antagonist. The city leadership is partially there as an antagonist, but they never directly oppose her actions, the protagonist just kind of cuts them off in traffic, as it were. The antagonist(s) would have gone from point A to point B with or without the presence of the protagonist. As we say in the software business, that had a bad smell. The result is a bit of conflict, some (well-written?) action, but again, there’s none of that obvious, crucial opposition that should be there.

It gets worse. I know, I couldn’t believe it either when I read it. I kept asking myself, “What the hell was I thinking?” The confrontation, the climax that is supposed to take the reader out of the middle of the story and throw them, gripping the story with newsprint-covered thumbs, into the ending, was nonexistent. The protagonist runs away from the admittedly deflated antagonists. She gets rescued, and then flees her rescuers when she finds out they want to put her in a lab somewhere. Even here, when given the chance to turn these people into truly confrontational antagonists, I left them flaccid and ineffectual as true sources of opposition.

So my story may have been well-written, but in terms of plot and structure, it was a complete failure. It might have been interesting to follow the protagonist through her various adventures, but it wasn’t compelling. People reading the story didn’t care, they didn’t have an uncontrollable desire to keep turning the pages; that need to see what’s lurking behind the next page because the opposition is doing it’s job – hurling obstacle after obstacle in front of a protagonist about whom the reader truly cares.

Had I to do it all over again (and I will), I would have made the cave-in at the beginning caused by the city leadership, through their own reckless endeavors. When she confronts them about it, she discovers all kinds of horrible things the city’s leaders have been planning to do, including possibly destroying the city itself to satisfy their own greed. She threatens to tell the citizens of the city about what they’re doing, and they throw her in jail. She then escapes and, … you get the idea.

By making it damned obvious, as obvious as a hammer to the face, who the antagonists are, the conflict is easy to spot. By amping up the level of conflict, increasing the danger, the stakes, and the consequences, the reader cares more about the outcome. With all this conflict around the protagonist, I can weave in exposition and character development in how she deals with the obstacles to further draw the reader in, make them care about her and sympathize with her. Had I written the story this way the first time, I still may have been rejected, but the response from the editors might have been that the story was compelling or better but they still didn’t have room.

To me, a rejection isn’t a reason to quit or a reason to wallow in self-pity (though I did that for a couple hours). It’s a reason to look back at the work I produced with a different, more objective eye. I can look at it and see all of its shortcomings as if someone had circled them in yellow highlighter. The next time I write a short story, I will make sure the obstacles are far more hard-hitting, the antagonists are far more antagonistic (har har), and rather than settling for interesting, will strive for can’t put it down.

To finish this up, I’ll quote Thomas Edison:

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work

Think of each rejection not as a rejection, but a little reminder that you can learn from the experience and use it to make your next submission better.

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This book contains a wealth of raw, deadly, zombie excitement and I’m pleased to have my short story, “On the Rocks”, in this collection of tales of the walking dead. I’m not really sure what prompted me to write a zombie story considering the novel I’m working on falls clearly into the fantasy genre. However, when I was a kid and would write short stories for the pure fun of it, without worrying about publishing or agents or editors, the zombie story was a tried and true favorite.

As I sat back and flipped through the book to see how the story turned out in print, it took all of 10 seconds before I started burning the pages with a laser-focused eye of criticism. I noticed every single edit failure. I noticed where I should have changed a phrase, where the dialogue was awkward, where some of the descriptions were just plain absurd. There are also some whitespace problems with the printed edition, and I’m pretty sure they came from my RTF file (yes folks, I hate MS Word as though it is my very own antagonist – always getting between me and my goals!).

The normal, human side of me can look at the story and think, “Say, that’s a pretty cool story about creating zombies with a computer virus!”. However, that part of me is usually very suppressed. I rarely let him come out and play. I’m sure all authors are like this – you spend what seems like an eternity editing a piece, you submit it, and then when you finally get to see it in print, its like someone has taken a big bold highlighter to everything you should have changed before you submitted it.

My personal take-away from this: After I think the piece is ready to submit, I’m going to leave it on disk and walk away for at least three days. Then, I will come back to it and edit it one more time. Then, I will walk away for one more day, then come back and edit it again. Remember, all of these revisions are after I think the piece is print-worthy and has been through the usual multi-round editing phases.

I’m not trying to trash the story, I’m really pleased that it has been published and am excited to produce more short stories for other venues and other genres, but I have learned a valuable lesson that what I think has been edited enough has at least 3 more revisions before it’s ready to be submitted. The other lesson I have learned is that no matter how good my story is, I will always find fault with it and I just need to learn to accept that.

Anyway, I hope you buy the book and enjoy the story!

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