My Story and the Pope
December 15, 1998
6:45 a.m.
88 day rejection from Avon's Anthology 48 day rejection from Weird Tales.   It's not every story that gets me thinking about how it might be related to the Pope, you know? But this latest story has been such a wonder that I suppose nothing should really surprise me about it. Hang with me on this one, okay? I promise I'll get somewhere with it. You see, there's this pile of stuff sitting on my desk. No, I'm telling a lie. There are at least four piles of stuff on my desk. There's a stack of press clippings from the WotF thing, and pile of material from when we cleaned up the house (you know, that detritus that you don't want to toss, but that serves no real purpose). There's a pile of old drafts of the story I'm working on, and another pile of Other Writing-Related Junk That Must Be Dealt With. Beyond that I've got a vertical "pile" of rejections waiting to be filed that are shoved up against the computer monitor, a pile of three-and-a-half inch disks that I'm certain must have a couple files a piece on them, and a bunch of paperclips running loose like a heard of zoo animals escaped from their pens. I hate piles. It's fair to say that I'm not a pile person. I think I used to be a pile person. But now they drive me crazy. I even do my best to keep my desk at work as clean as possible. I think you can tell a lot about how things are going for me by how my desk looks while I'm working--kind of like the Vatican when it's looking for a Pope, you know? White smoke, Pope. Black smoke, no Pope. Or is it the other way around? See. I promised you I would get to the Pope, and I do my best to always keep my promises. The signs on my desk are as obvious as the color of the papal smoke. Or if you don't like that, they're as obvious as the nose on my face--which Lisa has always described as "Grand." I'll leave it to you to decide what she means by that. This morning my desktop beacon say that I'm focusing on something important and ignoring everything else. You can tell because the piles haven't really even shifted at all. (Yeah, I know this breaks the Pope paradigm in that my set of signals requires a time-based element to decipher them. You'll just have to deal with that, okay?) When things are clear, it means I'm in control. When things are shifting constantly, that means I'm overworked. But right now they're just slowly piling up. The tension is mounting. More paper piles up to the left. A pair of rejections get added to the vertical stack. Black smoke obsfuscates the area. (Or is it white?) Will there be a Pope tomorrow? Only time will tell.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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"The original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate." François René de Chateaubriand |
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