Random Rejection: The Missouri Review

In keeping with the I can’t believe I ever submitted to them theme of my last random rejection, this morning I reached into my vast file of “go away scum” letters and pulled out a rejection from The Missouri Review:

The Early Years: Rabbit’s Journal

A couple of weeks ago I posted a scan of an old story I wrote for school when I was a kid of somewhere between six and ten (depending on who you believe).  That turned out to be pretty popular, so I requested more scans from my suppliers of embarrassing material from my younger days (i.e., my parents).  Behold:  Rabbit’s Journal.

Review: “Elizabethtown”

Well, the soundtrack was pretty good.

Gina reminded me that in my desire to be pithy I left off my rating scheme, so here it is: Elizabethtown put my wife to sleep in about an hour and a half. This does not mean that she liked it; she just kept shaking her head and muttering and making unfavorable comparisons to some of her other “favorite” movies such as August Rush and Hope Floats and giving me sidelong glances and saying “How did you pick this, again?”

Random Rejection: The New Yorker

Before I came to realize that my style and subject matter were both completely unsuited for The New Yorker, I actually tried getting published there once or twice.  No surprise:  Rejected.

Arte y Pico

The Finicky Penguin has given me the Arte y Pico award.

A Portrait of the Artist as a (Very) Young Man

So my parents like to find old examples of things I wrote when I was a kid and send them to me, just to remind me that I, too, was once a child.  I thought it might be interesting to post one or two of them.  With that in mind, I present my classic tale of horror and suspense, “The Great Beast Invasion”.  If we assume that the date in the story is about when the story was written (which it probably is, given that kids are pretty much creatures of the “now” — just like dogs!), then I would’ve been six when I scribbled down this masterpiece.

Review: “MirrorMask”

This weekend’s Netflix selection was MirrorMask.  As you can see from the sidebar, Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite writers (love American Gods, love Stardust, love Neverwhere), so I was quite looking forward to this film.  After seeing it, I would characterize it as Labyrinth (the movie) meets “Obsidian” (the video game) with a dash of Legend, filtered through an acid trip.

MirrorMask follows the adventures of Helena, who awakens in the middle of the night to find herself in a parallel world where everyone wears a mask, and a “City of Light” is threatened by shadows from the neighboring “City of Darkness”.  After being mistaken for a pilfering Princess, Helena ends up volunteering to find a stolen charm (which nobody has ever seen) to restore the balance between light and darkness.  Her quest is threatened by various odd-looking shadows, hungry human-faced kitties, and a sidekick named Valentine who seems to be even more useless than Hoggle of Labyrinth fame.

The film has a distinct and arresting visual style, but (unusually for Gaiman) the plot is rather slow and muddled, and at some point the weird-looking creatures and settings became a distraction.  Also, the fact that most of the secondary characters are saddled with masks (and relatively inane dialog; just about everything out of Valentine’s mouth is of the “we’re doomed” or “this is hopeless” variety) made it difficult to empathize with them.  (Perhaps it was more the dialog than the masks, because I didn’t have any trouble at all empathizing with Hud, the fellow behind the camera in Cloverfield, who almost never appeared on-screen.)  Anyway, despite these issues, MirrorMask still held my attention for much of its running time; even Gaiman’s throwaway ideas are often better than the central conceits of other writers’ work.  In particular, this film boasts the creepiest version of the old song “Close To You” that I’ve ever seen or heard.

MirrorMask put my wife to sleep in about an hour and a half, which isn’t bad; I think it was the visuals that kept her awake that long.  At one point, she remarked that it looked like a video game (see “Obsidian”, above).  Labyrinth is one of her favorite films, though, so MirrorMask didn’t quite measure up.  (When I told her it to wake up because MirrorMask was almost over, she said, “It should’ve been over fifteen minutes ago.”)

Dragon Stones Now On Amazon, B&N

Today, during my semi-monthly auto-Googling, I discovered that Dragon Stones has made its way out to Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and the like.  Interestingly enough, Long Before Dawn hasn’t reached those outlets yet, but it is available from online bookstores in the U.K.  Go figure.  Perhaps the British are more amenable than the Americans to proper vampire stories, where the vampires are monsters.

Anyway, for all my legions of fans out there who have just been waiting to be able to purchase my two latest books from somewhere other than Lulu.com (you know who you are), your wish has been granted!  You can get Dragon Stones from Amazon.com or BN.com, and Long Before Dawn from Blackwell Online and WHSmith in the U.K.  Both should be available elsewhere as well.