Good weekend, nice rejection, mystery/detective games, etc.

[sarahmichigan]

So I don't talk about it much on LJ, but in addition to my journalistic writings, I also do write fiction and poetry and occasionally submit to literary magazines.

I have a story I particularly like that hasn't found a home, and I sent it to Room magazine in January of 2009. They said on their submissions page that they usually reply in 3-4 months, so after I hadn't heard anything for 7 or 8 months, I sent a follow-up. I got an e-mail back saying (I'm paraphrasing) there'd been an organizational shake-up and some submissions had gotten misplaced in the process and they'd get back to me. So, finally, THIRTEEN months after I submitted the story, I got a rejection letter. But a nice one, at least:

Thank you for submitting your work to Room magazine. While we are unable to accept this particular submission for
publication, we would very much like to see more of your work.

Members of Room?s collective read more than 700 submissions of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction each year, of which about 10% are accepted for publication... All manuscripts are read for quality, and about 30% are then passed on for further consideration... Your submission was one of the 30% that gets passed on to an issue editor. We really liked it, but were ultimately unable to use it in one of our upcoming issues. Please be sure to send us more of your writing.

In other news, we had a nice weekend. I took almost all of Saturday off (other than about 30-40 minutes worth of copy editing) and I had an awesome workout in the pool that left me feeling really limp and relaxed and mellow.

I also did a fair amount of home cooking. Friday night, we made cheesecake brownies. Saturday, I made vegetarian taco salad for lunch and black-eyed-peas and rice for dinner. I kind of melded two recipes into one for the latter, and I definitely think it's a keeper. On Sunday, I had a hankering to make homemade vegetarian lasagna, so I did. I didn't have my recipe for the version where you don't have to cook the noodles in advance, so I winged it and crossed my fingers. It actually turned out quite good, so I was pleased. Now we have a fridge full of leftovers!

On an unrelated note, J. and I have been enjoying some online point-and-click detective/mystery games (not this weekend, but on previous ones where we didn't have much scheduled.). J. always wants to play video games together, but our taste in games is somewhat different and/or we don't have access to ones we would enjoy doing together. So, the mystery games have been a fun compromise.

Here are a few we particularly liked, but I'm open to suggestion if anyone else out there plays them!

Detective Grimoire

Detective Jack French  We only did the first episode on this ( I refuse to use the word "webisode" which I think is an abomination.)

Nick Bounty: A Case of the Crabs

Nick Bounty: The Goat in the Grey Fedora

Also, we looked at a Shakespeare-themed one,  The Seven Noble Kinsmen. It's really beautifully illustrated and looks intriguing, but it was more complicated than what we were looking for. I think you could spend an entire weekend solving it, and we were just looking for something that'd take an hour or two.

Comments

[laughlovelive.livejournal.com]

Do you make "red" veggie lasagna or "white" veggie lasagna?

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

I make red, but I've had the white and like it as well.

[laughlovelive.livejournal.com]

I prefer the white, but rarely make it because I can't seem to make a good white sauce. Probably because I want to make it "healthy" and you are probably supposed to make it with cream and butter and cheese.

[purple-marf.livejournal.com]

Based purely on the titles of those, you might enjoy the screwed-up humor of the Sam & Max games. Puzzles/mystery, with terrible puns.

[custardfairy.livejournal.com]

I miss you guys. Maybe weekend after this one we can do a something? Or at least sometime soon. :)

Thanks for the game links! I *love* those kinds of games! If you want to "try before you buy" Bigfishgames.com has some great ones. They have tons of hidden object games, and the ones in the Mystery Case Files series are my favs.

I also second the Sam & Max suggestion. :)

[losgunna.livejournal.com]

Have you tried Sleuth? Jason and I used to play it a few years ago, before it got so fancy, and loved it! I keep thinking I need to get back into it.

[lorigrrl.livejournal.com]

That's the nicest rejection letter ever. I'm still sorry your work got rejected.

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons I make my living from non-fiction/journalism is that they pay me to do it. It's much easier on the ego than slaving away on a short story and having it rejected repeatedly.

However, my skin is pretty thick after 20+ years of submitting literary works and a 99 percent rejection rate. :) Even really talented authors start out with those kind of rejection rates and probably a 75 percent rejection rate is good for certain fields, depending on how ambitious you are.

If I only submitted to small presses & online presses who pay in contributors copies, I might have a better acceptance rate, but I'm purposely trying to break into decent-paying markets.

Anyway, probably more than you wanted to know- kind of thinking out loud here.