It is quite possible you can learn something from feedback accompanying a rejection. I’m sure someone has. A recent rejection of a story of mine was accompanied by feedback from two of the slush readers for the magazine:
“… really strong narrative voice and prose control. … it’s all developed and described quite well”
and
“This piece is unfocused and almost stream of consciousness and difficult to get a sense of what it’s about”
Guess what I learned? Flip a coin.
Very sorry to read of Peter Corris‘s death today. It has been a while since I read any of Cliff Hardy’s adventures, but I read a lot of Corris in the past. Unlike me, he was not Sydney born, but in his Hardy detective stories, he exposed many sides of Sydney to me that I have never experienced (thank goodness, I am more than happy for those adventures to be restricted to the pages of a book!). I recall in the late 80s and 90s reading his novels where he was venturing beyond Hardy, both in standalone stories and in creating other running characters, and being aware of him as a writer trying to carve a career and try different things. And now I am at the age where having witnessed such things, I also see the careers come to an end and the writer die, so a mild Sydney winter day just grew a little bleaker.
You can check out my latest published story, “Miracle cure”, at Liquid Imagination – just click on the link.
(Sitting at home just now with my new friend, Gastroenteritis, but I’ll put up with the illness in preference to a miracle cure like this one … stomach, I have cared for you so well all these years, and this is how you betray me?)
