on the shelves (or not): Loops #1

The first issue of Loops magazine is out. It includes new fiction by Chris Killen, whom, after reading The Bird Room, has become my latest literary crush. His story is titled "Paul Simon Gives Chevy Chase The Finger". Here's a bit from an extract in their website:

Paul Simon picks up a controller and presses a button, and the Yo La Tengo best-of CD Prisoners of Love starts playing throughout the house. Paul Simon sits on the salmon-coloured leather chair and listens to Yo La Tengo and closes his eyes as his cornflakes become soggy. Paul Simon wishes he could somehow saw himself free from the rest of his life, and go into a flotation tank and just listen to Yo La Tengo forever. He would eat using a tube and soup, maybe.

My current broke-ness* prevents me from picking up a copy right now. So my game plan these days is reading the whole issue standing up at HMV. This has started (yesterday, HMV at Covent Garden). You can also find Richard Milward's "Drugby Union" in it. Richard Milward is too young to have published two books and though I enjoyed Apples a lot I think I hate Richard Milward for being too damn young. Or maybe I just hate myself for not having two books published and poor Richard Milward has done nothing to deserve my hatred. Also, I must remember I liked people from Middlesborough because Mendieta played there for about five years.

If you can buy Loops #1, do so. It's edited by Domino Records and they produce Eugene McGuinness so even if record companies are always evil at least Domino's evilness has brought Eugene McGuinness to the world. Eugene is a force of Good. In any case, the magazine is fun to read.

* my current pathetic monies situation will become worse if I get selected to do this course. I would use that year to write a novel about britpop called "Song nº2" possibly. Or chick lit fiction. Or my planned series of YA novels about steampunk and Jack the Ripper and aliens in Victorian sewers and alchemists and Fredrich Engels. One of those three. Or not.

on rejection

There's this wonderful thing Jac Jemc does in her journal: she posts about every rejection he gets about any of her poems or stories. It is intensely healing to read about those things. Writers sometimes feel very alone about this sort of thing, we often think we are the only writers in the universe to ever get rejected. I enjoy other people's misery stories as much as I enjoy their triumph stories. Both are inspirational in their own way.

I had a job interview today.

I really wanted that job. It's a job at the theatre. And- Oh boy, I was going to say "theatre is my thing" but it's more really a matter of theatre being the thing that I want to be my thing.

Well, needless to say -if you take a hint from the title of this entry- I did quite badly in the interview. I did horridly. Comically so. I should make a short film about the kind of incompetence I displayed today.

What is more, this week I got a neat letter from Ambit saying they weren't interested in my story. Thank you but no, thank you.

Writers are a funny lot. On one hand we tend to be quite ego-bound, quite tough in our arrogance to believe that we have something to add to the history of literature (that we have something to say and all those trite lines, etc). On the other hand the level and frequency of our exposure to REJECTION is amazing. There must be something masochistic about us. Even then most detached author has to admit that something quite secret and private goes into writing and piece and then to send it out in the world and have someone you've never met say "bleh, I don't like it" (& send you a letter about how they don't like it), wow, it's really a grim prospect. Why do we keep doing this?

So I got rejected by Ambit. And I obviously didn't win the Mslexia short story contest with my Shakesperean tale. Or the Bristol Prize. And I'm obviously not going to win the ABCtales contest with my shitty, juvenile story. And the Bush won't produce my plays. So yeah, rejection is in the air this summer.

Sometimes I worry I am not edgy enough. I look at the writers I admire, the writers getting published frequently are either on the side of weird, dark, or extremely experimental. I think I stick too closely to traditional forms (I'd like to blow them from the inside, like Sarah Kane blew half of Blasted). I wish I were weirder, darker or more experimental.

I also wish I was Samuel Beckett.

Actually I mainly wish I was Sam Beckett.

So today's theme is rejection. It always hurts, even (specially?) when we say it doesn't. I felt monumentally shitty after doing so bad in the job interview. And as I often do when I feel less than brilliant I walked into a bookstore. Surround myself with books, that soothes the pain somehow. That sounds really esoteric and wanky. Sounding like a pretentious 14-year-old was my main trouble in the interview. I have to look into it. Anyway-

This afternoon I sat down at Foyles and I picked up a copy of Chris Killen's "The Bird Room". I never put it back. I took it home.