Yesterday I received a useful rejection from "Postcards From Hell" for "Crepusculum". I had to laugh - because, staring at the rejection, I had to finally admit that I CANNOT WRITE FLASH! And the irony is that writing "Brimstone Orange" was no indication that I could write good flash fiction. If anything, it was a very large sign that I can't write it, that I'm terrible at it.* I've attempted flash before, but not because I enjoy the form - I sort of hate it - but because my first sale was flash. In writing more of the same, I was only attempting to repeat my success, and nothing else. The rejection was correct.

Ah ego, when will you ever learn? Not soon, it seems. :)

I also violated my most sacred personal rule in writing - I wrote something that had no personal resonance with me. I had no emotional connection to any one of those 500 words, and therein lies more irony, because I based the story on a childhood event that was quite emotionally traumatic to me. But I couldn't fully capture that in 500 words, so I went for pretty, poetic images instead - a sloppy and superficial tactic which the rejection rightly called me out on.

Rather than continue to send "Crepusculum" out again, I'm going to work on it this weekend, fleshing it out into the emotionally devastating story I know it can be. It doesn't need to be some 9,000 word mini-epic, but I think there's something in the story that needs 2-3000 words in order to really live.

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* "Brimstone Orange" makes absolutely no sense at all - there's no real story there, just a lot of "cool" images and ideas all jumbled together. During Clarion, at my one-on-one session with Michael Swanwick, he began to give me a very detailed analysis of what was wrong with it, and how I might fix it so that it could be published. I told him it had already been published, at which point he made a face, dropped the paper to the table and said, "well, it's too late now." LOL! But, he was right. :(