Neil Serven

Duotrope announces that, as of January 1, 2013, their site will be accessible via paid subscription only.

For over seven years, Duotrope has tried to make ends meet by asking those who use the website or subscribe to our newsletter to contribute a small amount. Unfortunately, only about 10% of those who have used our services have ever contributed, and we haven’t met any of our monthly goals since 2007. Quite simply, we can no longer afford to run Duotrope this way.

None of this comes as much surprise, as the donation reports continually warned us that the site was in the red.

What is unfortunate, however, is that it appears only one pricing plan will be available: $60 for one year or $5 per month. (They are also offering gift certificates.) There is no bare-bones option (with just the submissions tracker, for example), nor do I think it is possible to pay in installments the way you can when you pledge to NPR. Perhaps that will change as the model adjusts.

A bigger question is how this will affect the statistics on the site. A paid-only model would seem likely to reduce the number of site users, and ideally the statistics are more accurate when the sample is larger. If the new model reduces the number of users who share their data, then the accuracy of the statistics is more likely to be compromised, and isn’t that part of the product we are being asked to pay for?

The administrators attempted to address this question in a Facebook post:

A note on our statistics: We at Duotrope are aware of how important our statistical data is to a large number of our users. We plan on carefully tracking the impact our new pay model has on this data, and we will continue to work at keeping the statistics relevant and useful. Based on our internal numbers and analysis of individual user statistics, we believe the accuracy of our data will actually improve in the long run. This was a significant factor when making the decision to go paid.

It will be interesting to see where this goes. As I have admitted before, I am a bit of a Duotrope addict (which has not helped my writing any, by the way). In the past I have contributed about $20 per year, on average, and I certainly will find a way to pay more if that’s what it takes.

Meanwhile, the admins are recommending that users who do not plan on subscribing by January 1 should back up their data by exporting it to Excel.

The Best American Essays 2012, David Brooks, editor. Picked up in the same swoop as the BASS (covered below), and only because while browsing I happened to flip right to Geoffrey Bent’s essay, “Edward Hopper and the Geometry of Despair,” from Boulevard.

Hopper was perhaps my first “favorite” painter, as in the first one whose works I tried to train myself to recognize on sight, and who I regularly sought out whenever I was at a museum. I’m not sure what, in retrospect, struck me about them—the blurry, unreactive faces; the Gothamy scenes of boulevards unpopulated by traffic—but I suspect I may have found comfort and accessibility in their recognizable milieus: bars, drug stores, movie houses. Hopper places his subjects in scenes that invite interaction and then, like doll house figures, doesn’t let them interact. Bent devotes his essay to, among other things, the function of spatial composition in creating this effect of emotional isolation:

The architectural patterns in Hopper’s work do more than give it a compositional elegance; they confine the people that inhabit them. Hopper embeds his figures in a relentless grid of rectangles and squares. Bold vertical and horizontal lines slice away huge chunks of any scene. The artist’s men and women seem resigned to their compromised space, but not trapped by it; rather the grid is an outer expression of the attitudes they harbor within.

Bent’s essay ended up being my favorite piece in the collection. A lot of illness (mental and physical) and death runs through the rest of it. It sort of made me miss David Foster Wallace (who is eulogized as part of Jonathan Franzen’s essay “Carried Away”).

The Best American Short Stories 2012, Tom Perrotta, editor. Wasn’t there a time when the stories in the BASS collection were not always alphabetical by author? This is apparently the hard-and-fast rule now at Houghton Mifflin. Depending on your perspective, it either enhances the individual merits of each story or causes it to step on the toes of its arbitrarily assigned neighbor. Until these things are purchased on iTunes, there is something to be said for the identity of the complete product. (When Walter Mosley chose the stories in 2003, either he or some keen editorial assistant mischievously ordered them reverse-alphabetically by author.) I only bring this up because the order impacted my enjoyment of this year’s collection. Two of my favorite stories were the first two: Carol Anshaw’s “The Last Speaker of the Language” and Taylor Antrim’s “Pilgrim Life.”

It is gratifying to see so many small-press journals represented in these pages. There were quite a few stories I had read before, almost all from the New Yorker, and while some were a joy to reread (George Saunders’ “Tenth of December”), others made me wonder what I was missing. The collection gives us a heavy dose of perspective on adult-child relationships, many of them bunched by alphabetical serendipity at the end of the book—other than the Saunders, there is Mike Meginnis’s “Navigators,” Taiye Selasi’s “The Sex Lives of African Girls,” Sharon Solwitz’s “Alive,” and Kate Walbert’s “M & M World.”

Writing about children is tricky. Their restricted vocabularies and open sense of wonder at the banal make them too easy to turn into caricatures. There is also the problem of projection—the temptation to turn them into adults. You want them to live comfortably within their own logic, without being stupid.

In Meginnis’s story, a father and son (the boy is Joshua; the father is referred to as “his father,” placing Joshua as the moral center) spend their days almost exclusively playing an 80s-era NES video game, the kind that requires you to draw maps of the layouts. Given that video games operate on their own currency, they are not an easy thing to render in prose, but Meginnis pulls it off:

You always started outside the throne room no matter how much farther you explored. The hall outside was like a decayed palace, hung with rotting standards, walls collapsing, suits of armor disassembled and scattered over the floor, brown with rust. The stern guards at the door to the throne room were responsible for preventing the rot from coming inside, in addition to keeping you out. Of course, much of this was open to interpretation, rendered in simple arrangements of squares.

As the men dig deeper into the game, reality goes to seed: bills do not get paid, utilities get turned off. Dinner is microwaved grilled cheese. Shortcuts are arranged so the game can continue. The shadow of a long-lost mother, whom one presumes would not allow such things to happen, looms over the story.

I grew up playing games like the one Meginnis describes. He nails down the chief aspect to their allure—the chance to replace muddy, real-world problems with scripted problems that have clean, digital solutions. But I also knew of households with absent mothers, the kind that had CD-ROMs and hunting magazines stacked across the dining room table and cereal boxes spilled over on the living room carpet, and it is in these observances of decay out of the corners of Josh’s eyes, and the hesitation to speak up to the adult eschewing responsibility, that the story rang most true to me.

The Pinch, Fall 2011. One odd thing about this fine journal from the University of Memphis is that it is printed entirely on glossy stock, even the pages that are just text. I don’t know of many journals of this cut that do that. What I like about The Pinch is that it does not hold back on the visual art; there is a fine selection here, my favorites being a quartet by Margaret Morrison. I only wish the magazine told us the medium in which the original works were produced.

Popular culture runs as a heavy thread through the stories here. There are references to Evel Knievel, Silver Spoons, the models in Soloflex ads, comic books both real and fictional, Denzel Washington, and Mountain Dew. There is also a story in which Val Kilmer is a significant character, with a background and everything, including a father about to be married. I am not sure when the story is supposed to be set, but according to Pickaweedia, Kilmer’s actual father died while Kilmer was filming Tombstone (1993). It turns out that the actor, in the conceit of the story, “lives in Boise part-time” and hates baseball, which may or may not be really true. He befriends our protagonists as they help him look for a party. One of them calls him “Val Top-Gun-Weird-Science-I-am-Jim-Morrison Kilmer” even though Kilmer wasn’t in Weird Science, he was in Real Genius. I can’t tell if this is supposed to be the character’s mistake that makes him endearing, or if it’s a genuine, sloppy mistake on the part of the author (and the editor who never caught it). Such is the danger when you incorporate real-life personalities in your stories; how much is the reader supposed to suspend disbelief and let the fiction of the narrative not be affected by the facts of the players as we know them? (The only other prominent example I can think of is J.D. Salinger appearing as a character in Shoeless Joe.)

Aside from that, I am 1/4 of the way through Richard Brody’s extensive biography of Jean-Luc Godard, which I imagine I will write about next month.

I will admit I was getting hopeful. Recent Duotrope responses from a journal out of Tennessee:

23-day form rejection on November 16.
28-day form rejection on November 16.
41-day form rejection on November 16.
21-day form rejection on November 15.
41-day rejection from on November 14.
33-day rewrite request on November 13.
38-day form rejection on November 13.
41-day personal rejection on November 13.

Number of days my submission was out: 65. And then a form rejection on November 19.

Even better, from a journal out of Virginia:

9-day rejection on November 17.
17-day form rejection on November 17.

11-day form rejection on November 16.
9-day form rejection on November 16.

11-day form rejection on November 16.
12-day rejection on November 16.
14-day form rejection on November 16.
15-day form rejection on November 16.
16-day form rejection on November 16.
17-day form rejection on November 16.
17-day form rejection on November 16.
14-day form rejection on November 13.
19-day form rejection on November 13.
18-day personal rejection on November 12.
19-day form rejection on November 12.
20-day rejection on November 12.
19-day rejection on November 10.

17-day personal rejection on November 9.
23-day rejection on November 9.

17-day form rejection on November 6.
17-day form rejection on November 6.
18-day form rejection on November 6.
19-day rejection on November 5.
21-day form rejection on November 5.
33-day form rejection on November 5.
14-day form rejection on November 4.
20-day form rejection on November 4.
20-day form rejection on November 4.
21-day form rejection on November 4.
24-day form rejection on November 4.
25-day form rejection on November 4.
25-day form rejection on November 4.
25-day form rejection on November 4.
26-day form rejection on November 4.
29-day rejection on November 4.
29-day form rejection on November 4.

29-day form rejection on November 4.
29-day rejection on November 4.
30-day form rejection on November 4.
31-day rejection on November 4.
32-day form rejection on November 4.
32-day form rejection on November 4.
34-day form rejection on November 4.

Form rejected today, November 20. Days out: 50.

Was it being strongly considered, to be held as long as it was while all these others were rejected, some within two weeks? Did it make it to a later round? Or was it sitting in someone’s inbox all that time?

It doesn’t look any different in the box score. And I have come to terms with the fact that the story needs to go back to the drawing board.

But I am dying to know what its chances were.

Belated congratulations to the winners of this year’s National Book Awards, including Louise Erdrich and Katherine Boo:

A clearly delighted and surprised Erdrich, who’s part Ojibwe, spoke in her tribal tongue and then switched to English as she dedicated her fiction award to “the grace and endurance of native people.”

Via David Daley at Salon, Philip Roth tells a French magazine that he has written his last book.

Roth said that at 74, realizing he was running out of years, he reread all his favorite novels, and then reread all his books in reverse chronological order. “I wanted to see if I had wasted my time writing,” he said. “And I thought it was rather successful. At the end of his life, the boxer Joe Louis said: ‘I did the best I could with what I had.’ This is exactly what I would say of my work: I did the best I could with what I had.”

Good for him for deciding to go out on his own terms. We who are struggling to write our first stories tend to regard foolishly the writer’s hunger, as though scratching the itch should not bring anything but a worse itch. (Personally, I think it’s really depressing when a writer departs this mortal coil and leaves behind half-finished work, which the writer’s editor then tries to cobble together into something that can be upsold as a mark of punctuation on the writer’s career, as well as appease the completists.)

The good news for us is now we have a chance to catch up to him, in terms of output.

Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen, by Mark Rudd. A memoir from the man on whom Mark Slackmeyer from Doonesbury is supposedly based, and identified in more than one review as the guy who was not Bill Ayers. While serving as chairman of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, Rudd led the occupation of five campus buildings in protest of school policies that supported U.S. imperialism, and then, once expelled, played a leading role in the Days of Rage in Chicago in October 1969. Pressure from the Maoist Progressive Labor Party caused the organization to splinter, and it was under Rudd’s leadership of the Weatherman faction that the focus shifted from peaceful protest to acts of violence up to and including a string of nonlethal bombings. An accidental explosion of bomb-making materials resulted in the deaths of three SDS members in a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970, upon which Rudd went into hiding, living a quiet life in New Mexico until 1977, when he turned himself in.

Unlike most memoirs, the book does not linger in spots for the author to congratulate himself (though Rudd does like to brag about his freewheeling sexual adventures more than we need to hear), nor does he skip over instances of poor judgment. Coming from a background of privilege, Rudd checks in at key points with his parents, who can only respond with befuddlement, unconditional love, cash donations, and free food. As SDS goes from a conscientious crusader of justice to an organization more bent on careless showboating, Rudd, ostensibly for the benefit of current and future activists, tries to put his finger on the point where he and his fellow revolutionaries lost their way. It is hard not to notice that the only time the word terrorism appears in the book is in reference to another group that became infamous for its rash acts of expression: the Symbionese Liberation Army.

More Baths Less Talking, Nick Hornby. As much as I enjoy The Believer, a single issue costs $8.00 and around here you have to go down to Northampton if you want to buy a copy, and then there’s no guarantee that half the issue won’t be taken up by some delightfully arcane subject, say, a critical review of the films of Gus Van Sant. So when another collection of Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns is released, I pick it up and dash through it. Economic concerns, micro and macro, are on Hornby’s mind this time around, if the books selected are any indication, and though my memory is probably off, I don’t recall him being so strict in his allegiance to authors from the British Isles in his earlier collections. Parts of the first two columns are devoted to David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, followed up by Colum McCann, Colm Toibin, Muriel Spark, John Lanchester, and both Our Mutual Friend and Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens.

Among books he covers that I happen to have read are Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, which we both love(d), and Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: a Life of Montaigne, which Hornby adores and I despised (it felt to me full of restatements of the obvious, like a book report on the Essais stretched out to meet a minimum length). Perhaps it reads differently across the pond.

As with the previous collections, More Baths is put out by Believer Books, and, in an endearing nod to old mass-market paperbacks, there is a cutout order form for the magazine at the end. I am tempted to wait twenty years, and if The Believer is out of print or produced in some new innovative format by then,  mail it out with a check and see what happens.

The Pat Hobby Stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The problem with reading Fitzgerald is that you want everything he has written to be as fluid and timeless as his best work. This is impossible for any writer, but in his case the gap yawns. Gatsby is written by a different person, with different motivations, from This Side of Paradise (so choppy it would be unpublishable today) and Tender Is the Night.

These stories were written toward the end of his life, when Fitzgerald was strapped for cash and relevance. Had they been executed with care, they might have had something unique and valuable to say about the burgeoning American motion-picture industry, about evolving standards for what constitutes fame and success and struggle, and about Manifest Destiny and the American West. But the protagonist has to be made a caricature—the down-on-his-luck screenwriter aging out of his industry—and the supporting cast is all ditzy women and huffy men on deadlines.

Arnold Gingrich’s introduction, from 1962 (my Scribner paperback edition is from 1995), documents the correspondence between Fitzgerald and Gingrich, the editor of Esquire, where most of the stories were submitted and published. Fitzgerald’s end of the conversation hints as to how his investment the project rose and sank:

• Enclosed is a copy of “Teamed with Genius” revised. Do you think the Pat stories would be effective if published in one issue, or would that be against your budget system? I mean it would only be worth doing as a feature.
• The following sounds crazy but I picked up the second Pat Hobby story and liked it so well that I thought I’d make that one a little better also. I hope it’s not too late to use this version.
• Pay for this what you like. It’s not up to the last story—yet it belongs to the series.
• At the same time I wish you’d drop me a general opinion about whether you think Pat has run his course or not.
• On your advice I am going on with the Hobby stories for at least two more. This is an in and outer, but I think certainly as good as the last.
• I am sorry you can’t pay more for the Pat stories. I’ve gotten so interested in them that I feel a great deal is going into them.

Gulf Coast, Summer/Fall 2012. This beautifully produced journal from the University of Houston clocks in at 264 pages of eclectic variety; given that it only sells for $10, I have to think they’re hemorrhaging money down there. The highlight of the issue is a roundtable discussion on the role of humor in fiction, led by editor Zachary Martin with contributors Sam Lipsyte, Steve Almond, Deb Olin Unferth, Elisa Albert, Brock Clarke, and John McNally. (The beginning of the discussion can be read here.)

Almond gets to the heart of things quickly:

 The basic misunderstanding Brock mentions begins way back with Aristotle, the idea that the comic and tragic modes are somehow separate and opposed. That’s complete nonsense. The comic impulse arises directly from feelings that are inherently tragic: sorrow, shame, disappointment, moral outrage, and so on. Humor is how we contend with the bad data, always has been, from Aristophanes right up to Jon Stewart. […]
For me, the key distinction is whether the funny stuff is there to force us to face otherwise unbearable feelings, or whether it’s just an advertisement for the writer’s wit. My favorite writers, many of them crammed into this roundtable clown car, are funny not because they’re trying to be, but because they face the dark shit. They get to the truth quicker than I can, by more transgressive paths and with more forgiveness.

I may have to look back again, but I don’t think the name Mark Twain ever comes up in the discussion. (Will Rogers does.)

Speaking of humor, there’s also a funny story by Kevin Wilson called “Hunger Strike,” about a trio of students who take to fasting to protest a favorite professor’s firing by the university, a wry comment on lukewarm activism by the otherwise unengaged.

Good luck out there to all the folks giving NaNoWriMo another go.

I took a crack at it a while back when it was in its second or third year and I wasn’t doing much other writing. Made it to about 16,000 words, I want to say, before I got too self-conscious to move forward. I ended up getting into an argument with my protagonist, only because that amused me more than writing the story.

It’s just not suited to the way I work. I need voice to propel the story forward, and voice is not shaped by spilling words with no discretion onto the page. If anything, quite often it is shaped by what is left unsaid.

Karen Russell, from the New Yorker’s Science Fiction issue (June 4 & 11; subscription only):

In the early nineties, Pizza Hut sponsors Book It!, to promote reading. For every ten books you read, you get a certificate for a free, one-topping pizza. At the end of each month, you come home from Mrs. Sicius’s fifth-grade class and slam down the Book It! certificate in front of your parents like a hunter dropping a deer carcass on the kitchen table. Book that, Family! We are eating tonight!

It turns out that there is no greater pleasure than reading for pizza. No longer do you feel guilty about eschewing the “real” world for these fantasy zones. Now you have an unassailable, American motivation; you’re a breadwinner. Literally. It’s November. Since September, you’ve earned forty dollars’ worth of garlic bread for the family.

…

At Pizza Hut, your younger siblings drink fountain soda from red cups, bite into cartoon-yellow mozzarella. Sit back with your arms folded. “Get a refill, Dad!” you encourage, like some magnanimous king. Everything is going aces until the waitress, who, like a raccoon, combines indifference and nosiness, flips through the Book It! certificate.

1. “The Sword of Shanarra.”
2. “The Wishsong of Shanarra.”
3. “The Elfstones of Shanarra.”

“Last month, she read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ you mom says, then hustles you toward the car.

So it’s at the U.S. 1 Pizza Hut, in Kendall, Florida, under the neon-pink sconces, that you first encounter the adults’ distinction between “literature” and “genre.”

I don’t think I ever got free pizza for reading, but I did often have to read x number of books within a certain period (and, of course, write reports: Title, Author, Summary, Opinion), and instead of reading serial genre novels, my strategy was to read from my stash of reliables multiple years in a row and hope the teachers wouldn’t confer and find out I was double-dipping. Titles off the top of my head: Aldo Applesauce; the ubiquitous Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (and its sequel, Superfudge); Alvin Fernald, TV Anchorman. And Short Season, about a kid on a Little League team who is left to his own devices when his brother walks off the team. The goofy National Lampoon’s Vacation-inspired Hooples on the Highway. And I remember coming across a weird library-bound edition of something called Sheriff Stonehead and the Teenage Termites, but that was probably over my head and I was never really able to get what it was about. Plus a lot of Hardy Boys (the original editions with actual detective work; not the later rehash where they killed off Chet’s girlfriend in a terrorist car bombing–I mean, Jesus Christ, I’m eleven) and Bobbsey Twins crap.

Russell’s delightful sidebar is one of several notes of nostalgia in the issue, along with Colson Whitehead’s remembrance of spending his after-school hours watching bad horror movies on Betamax with his brother (no subscription required).

P.S.: GalleyCat’s Jason Boog notes that “Pizza Hut still hosts the reading contest with some new media twists.”

At his blog, Tom McAllister writes on the experience of having one’s work rejected and having to be the one who does the rejecting:

So, what’s the right way to tell someone their work isn’t good enough? Is it the euphemism-soaked, everyone-gets-a-trophy keep on truckin style of bland encouragement? Is it a generic, totally impersonal response that betrays nothing beyond the bare facts (you will not be published today, and also here’s how to subscribe to our journal)? Is it something performative that is a little bit potentially mean-spirited but also engages with the text in the way we all say we want people to engage with our writing? Is it a picture of a sad puppy and a bowl of ice cream?

Once I started sending my work out to journals, one thing became apparent quickly: there is a currency to the kinds of rejections you receive. No one is going to tell you why your story works or why it doesn’t, but the rejections that come back with more than just the standard boilerplate send a tacit signal: this sort of interested at least one of us. I still contend that the best rejection I ever got from a market was a preprinted colored slip on which the editor had scrawled in black pen: “This was close, Neil. Try us again soon.” Indeed, that story got accepted a couple of weeks later by a print journal I admired.

In September I sent out a story I in which I had a great deal of confidence to a good number of highly competitive journals, and one by one the rejections have come back, nothing beyond a form rejection, ice cold. I am up to ten, with one “very impressed by your writing,” but even that is a form rejection, and now I’m starting to wish I hadn’t sent it out to as many places as I did. It could say more about my choice of markets or about the quality of the story, but in the end it’s probably a little of both. The fact that it was so easy to write may have meant that it was too easy to write.

McAllister also addresses the part that nobody ever talks about:

There are so many journals out there. There are terrible journals with low standards, journals who will accept eighty percent of the work submitted to them. I could send my stories and essays to those places, could even benefit from being published in those awful journals that nobody reads, because they would become another line on my CV and make me slightly more employable from a University’s perspective. But that would be pitiful and that would be sad, and that would deny my primary reason for submitting, which is the ego.

To be published in a journal, particularly the spatial confines of a print journal, is to be admitted to a club of limited occupancy, one to which many others have been denied entry. The rejection slip is the stubborn bouncer at the door who won’t listen to your appeals—dude, I know the owner, I’m on the list. The more challenging the market—the more elite the club, essentially—the more such an inclusion feels like an accomplishment. You made it in with the in crowd. We don’t just want to see our stories published in journals. We want them to belong there.

Still working on Harper’ses and New Yorkers from June, back when the election was still talked about in abstractions and the weather was getting warmer. I particularly don’t expect much out of Harper’s these days, especially in the fiction department, so Karl Taro Greenfeld’s “Fun Won,” from the June issue, was a pleasant surprise:

You should see who my friends married in the Nineties. It wasn’t like now, when girls are marrying, like, handsome, mixed-race guys with good hair who ride bicycles. Do you know what men were like in New York in the Nineties? White and boring. They had real jobs—lawyers, architects, doctors. And they were dull. I had girlfriends I used to get stoned with every night and do blow with at Limelight and who would even suck some guy with dreadlocks at Robots, but who ended up marrying, like, an IT guy from Boston. Pretty girls who would go from dating an English junkie to a Long Island accountant. Those seemed like the only choices back then. Now you have these hybrids. I don’t know what guys do anymore, but it seems like when I meet a man in his twenties or thirties, he does something in online advertising or marketing but is more defined by his hobby of riding fixed-gear bicycles or some intense and very particular food enthusiasm.

Greenfeld gives a convincing first-person voice to a young female narrator living at a time “when you could still dream of being a writer, when writing for magazines and then writing books and all of that added up to a good life.” The time, of course, is the Nineties, and she’s a Conde Nast Senior Editor with a taste for the herb, a brother with an ample supply, a co-worker who knows a good deal of famous people (Jean-Paul Gaultier, Naomi Campbell, Giuseppe Cipriani), and a wealthy sort-of-boyfriend who converts old buildings into condominiums. The bubble of Everything Going Right allows the characters to bounce and careen without consequence through the evening, which includes a written-off dinner at Cipriani’s restaurant (a perfect opportunity to use the passive voice, as one just happens to be on the receiving end of things one cannot control):

Six plates of egg-noodle pasta with a light sauce of cream and caviar were brought over, and Giuseppe shaved generous slices of truffle onto each of our plates. Two bottles of Barbaresco appeared, and then another two, and once we had eaten, whatever anxiety or incipient paranoia I had felt seemed miraculously lifted.

The story reminded me of much of what I liked about A Visit to the Goon Squad (which, I am ashamed to admit, I remember very little about other than that I loved it). “Fun Won” is apparently an excerpt from Greenfeld’s novel Triburbia, which was released in August and is now on my Amazon Wish List.