I have a story under consideration just now at two literary journals. One of them has had it for well over a year. The other began considering it today. It is an important story to me for a variety of reasons and has received a good deal of praise from editors who “nearly” chose to publish it. Those personal rejections came from the more prominent journals. (It is some sort of irony that the journals who publish a larger percentage of submissions reject it quickly compared to the journals that accept only a fraction of one percent of submissions.)

The story matters to me, and that is why I keep sending it out. It is the reason I have restructured the story, changed the point of view, expanded it to over six thousand words and carved it back to barely three thousand. I have revised the story at least every six months for the past fourteen years. That is, I have dozens of drafts, some of them quite dramatically different..

I know when I wrote it because in 2005 I was admitted to an MFA program and this was the story I submitted with my application. It was the story that earned me a place in the program and that gave me my first response in an MFA workshop. I had experienced cruel feedback many times by then in various workshops and classes. I expected it. When the instructor objected to the twist at the end, I rewrote the story to reveal information early. The next editor found I’d tipped my hand too early. I moved things around again.

You get the idea.

A lot of life seems like that. You try to be polite and are accused of failing to address an issue head on. You’re more direct and someone’s feelings are hurt. Can’t you be more subtle? A little too small, too large, too fat, too thin, not beautiful enough, too clever by half. On and on. I get things wrong.

And then there are the people who stand by you and love you no matter what. You make mistakes and speak without thinking, you forget something that is important, or you insist on something that isn’t actually important at all. Or, at least I have done those things. What can I say?

My story is imperfect. My story is imperfect.

Back to work, honing my imperfect self, my imperfect story, the story of my life.