Do you remember those peddlers-of-all-things that were often depicted in movies of a bygone era, the guys who had a ramshackle cart tipping to the side with a boggling bounty of goods? These were the sellers of battered pots, a hank of yarn, a chisel, some kind of tonic nostrum that couldn’t cure a statue, and maybe hidden under a blanket, a barrel of home brew that would melt that statue down? You know, the folks that would travel from town to town selling bits and pieces, trading tales and then move on? Yeah, those guys.

I feel a little like one of those guys today, because I’m traveling through the ether to offer you Flowering and Other Stories, a freshly published collection of my short fiction. The metaphor isn’t exactly accurate, because though the book is chockablock full of tales of different shapes and sizes, both tinsnips and horse halters, there is some thematic unity among the mongrels. Essentially, these are stories about people in some kind of trouble—with society, with each other, with their very selves. Tensions in love, tensions in personal ambition, tensions in all the colors of the emotional quilts we wear through our days. For every breakthrough, a breakdown.

So, this collection is a cart with a horse, but it’s drawn by conflict—both hobbled and exalted by those things that make us human. It’s available through all the usual suspects, such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and on the Kindle; a bit later on the Nook. (The official release for print is May 22, so it won’t ship until then; the Kindling is available now.)

And if you do grab one, and feel inspired enough to write an online review, I’ll steer my cart your direction and darn (never damn) your socks for free. If I can just find that thread…

Let’s imagine you were hungry for some syllables, so you walked over to your yard’s word tree. Word tree fruit always hangs in clusters of three, so you pick a triad with your left, and one with your right. You gobble the first cluster, discovering only after you chew that those three words were “rectal,” “putrefy” and “termagant.” Spitting the half-eaten leavings of those words onto the ground, you pop the other bunch in: they are “shimmer,” “honey” and “moonlight.” You chew with appreciation, because we taste words by their sounds. The sounds of the first bunch were sour, and those of the second sweet.

Sleazoid Tactic #1
Hah! You word-hungry hounds are probably hankering for the continuation of this fascinating tale, aren’t you? Aren’t you? (For the sake of my rhetorical flourish here, just say “yes!”) But instead of feeding you your nourishing bowl of words (with skim milk), I’m going to send you where the article is published in full: the grand confines of Upmarket magazine.

Sleazoid Tactic #2
And just to show that one insult can be quickly followed by another, I’ll pronounce one of those sad phrases that’s now part of our commercial culture: if you like the article, click on that cussed Like button on that Upmarket page, and I will feel a special tingle.

Or you can ignore this article and go ahead and finally clean the grout lines of your tile shower with bleach and a toothbrush like you’d been putting off for the last seven years. It’s up to you, but don’t say I didn’t give you a choice.

I occasionally write for Squidoo, Seth Godin’s ” … platform that gives people a simple way to organize their interests online ….” Squidoo recently began publishing a series of online magazines that cover a range of pursuits, such as crafts, eating healthily, holidays, and business. I had an article recently published in Upmarket, the business publication, called How Pedaling Your Bike Is Actually Pedaling Your Mind. Perhaps that sounds like it should be in the Dubious Metaphors magazine, but they haven’t put that one together yet.

But I’m not here today to argue whether pedaling your mind is self-abuse or psychic stimulation; I’m here to talk about the power of connection, and to try and not get all gooey about it, because when I go gooey, it’s paper-towel-in-triplicate time. The reason I wrote anything for Squidoo in the first place is because I’m a member of Seth Godin’s Triiibes network, a online playpen of successful solopreneurs, new-media mavens, generous gurus of ethical marketing, and outlier lunatics who stumbled in from the pool hall, where they play Bach harmonica fugues for tips. (Note: I am an agent for the outlier harmonica fugue-ists, if you want to talk licensing.)

You can read a lot of circulating cynical comments about the questionable quality of online relationships, and how much of online congress is people trying to sell their self-printed posters of baby harp seals being threatened by real estate agents, but there’s a counterpoint to that: I know that some of the connections are real—and warm. For instance, though I’ve never met Megan Elizabeth Morris, I’ve gotten to know her through her posts on Triiibes as smart, soulful, and witty, and as an indefatigable idea-powerhouse. As Head Solicitor and Sifter of Submissions for the new Squidoo magazines, she invited folks on Triiibes to submit pieces for consideration.

Online Exchange of the Not-Dry-Business Variety
But because she is Megan, and because any exchanges with her have much more than dry business in them, she has been particularly encouraging to me about submitting a series of pieces, and getting my stuff up and read. I cannot refuse a person who can sing operatically in Welsh, so I’m trying. Another Groove Child of Cyberspheric Connection is Jodi Kaplan, who has been working a bit with Megan in herding the cats of Triiibes Squidoo-ing. Jodi is another Triiibes marvel, a person who has consistently offered her broad and pointed knowledge of marketing and copywriting done rightly (and by rightly, I mean effectively and with integrity) to the people on Triiibes, and to her clients and blog readers.

Just out of the blue, Jodi recently profiled me on Squidoo in this Are Professional Writers Worth It? post. What’s she getting out of that? Nuttin. Other than the sweet glow you get when you do a pal a good turn. My point—and though my hair is covering it up, I’m getting to it—is that I can list a whole bushel of connections I’ve made like this on Triiibes and other networks, where just hanging out and golfing ideas around can crack the walls between people. Even though I’ve only known some of these folks in the ether (though some have even come to my house, where I’ve collected their DNA and am making a golem who will help with the vacuuming), I know that they are real. And real good. So, yeah, online connections can be trivial tripe, but they can also be genuine gold.

By the way Jodi, you ended that profile by wondering about the full story of what happened in Micronesia. Well, the full story will come (I have to carefully align all my lies), but Traveler’s Tales just published another part of the story: Read about the 5-dollar bell pepper, and weep, weep for the children. (Or the cereal eaters—good God, the infamy!)

A couple of weeks ago, my girlfriend and I were invited to spend the night at a house on the Big Sur coast, a house that my girlfriend’s sister was considering buying a shared ownership in. It’s a modest home, bringing to mind a style of California hippie houses of the 70s, with funky, unpretentious charm. That comfortable worn-in feeling is both inside and outside the grounds of the home. And then there’s the view.

The view, of which the photo above only provides a rather shabby sense of its actual grandeur, is sublime. That’s the view you see if you step out the door of the house and move just a bit up the driveway. So, every time I stepped out of that house, my mind shot down that cliff in a delirious riot of color, light, sound and scent. From the cliff, you can hear the ocean whump though the blowholes below, you can hear the trill and squawk of birdsong, you can smell pine and sun-warmed grasses.

Though Big Sur is less than 90 minutes from my house and I too live in a coastal California community, Big Sur is vastly different. It is visually dazzling, with great, craggy cliffs that plunge to a sea crashing on foaming rocks. Even with somewhat recent fires, there are thick forests with trails that lead to rolling waterfalls. There are places like the Henry Miller library, with its eccentric art work in the tree-splashed front yard, the eclectic and thoughtful book collection, the free coffee and ping-pong, the absolute “hang out and read a while” feeling of the place. And, while being cautious of stereotyping the locals, Big Sur folks seem friendly in a way that doesn’t seem affected.

Place Is a State in Your Reader’s Mind
When you are writing about a specific place, you need to open a big window—or step down a short driveway—to the view of that place. But that view must let your reader crunch the gravel underfoot, let them remark on the unusual number of  people who have crew cuts, let them peruse a menu that has hush puppies rather than french fries. I’m working on a novel right now whose setting is mainly the San Francisco of the late 80s, and mostly Market Street downtown. The bike messengers, women in fashionable outfits, ragged homeless and lost tourists of Market Street look, sound and smell different from the people I saw roaming Key West a couple of months ago.

Today I went hiking in the redwoods near my house. The redwoods smell different from the pines of Big Sur, they throw the light in a different way from their branches. If you pay real attention to small details that can capture the essence of a place, or distinguish it enough so the reader says, “Ah, so that’s what Big Sur is like,” you’ve gained ground on capturing their imagination too. Or if you can lie skillfully enough to describe the taste of place so that there aren’t false notes in the rendering, even if you’ve never been to that place before, the writing, and the world of imagination it creates, can still hold together.

Oh, about that share in the house: the other partial owners came back, after an absence of some time, to consider whether they really wanted to sell. They came on a beautiful weekend; they decided they couldn’t give it up. Damn.

Trying to place an article about a man who drives nails into his scrotum is a challenge. You have to find a publication that is appropriately (or inappropriately) edgy, but as a writer with an interest in circulating ideas, not so obscure as to not have an audience. And also as a writer interested in circulating cash, you would want compensation, even for a piece that might need to have dark curtains pulled over its stage.

These concerns came to mind the other day when I received a rejection notice for my memoir-style article about a night in San Francisco long ago. I’d attended what I thought was going to be a tattooing display and discussion, but its main event was an S&M demo, where aside from the scrotal crucifixion mentioned above, the artist in question sewed up his testicles over his penis with dental floss, much like a woeful pig in a blanket. Live, naked, onstage, much to my appalled eyes.

The Taste of Rejection
Where I’m going with this is not into any discussion of better choices among an evening’s entertainment (my article does that), but rather the various flavors of writer’s rejections, and how those taste on a writer’s tongue. The image for this post is a shot of my rejection folder, in all its glory. It is two inches high, and weighs almost two pounds. You might think that by my keeping that folder, I have a different—but just as pointed—sense of masochism as my pal with the pliant scrotum. By no means. That pile of “nos” is just a thing writers can step on to be a bit higher on their way to “yes.”

Looking over my hummock of rejections, you can see traces of their evolution over time. Sure, most of them are form letters of the “Dear Author, because of the number of submissions we receive, we regret that we are unable to respond personally ….” variety. But for those publications from twenty years ago where the editorial assistants or (victory!) the editors themselves spent some effort to tell the writer just why something didn’t fit the publication, the “no, buts” are longer and more developed extenuations. In the main, the handwritten rejections from the last few years are brief and pointed. They reflect more of today’s hurried and “next!” pace.

In fact, the letters themselves these days are so much more often little strips of paper, a slight ribbon that perhaps rejects a little more softly, because the “we regret” isn’t followed by the full page’s damning white space of emptiness. And as the evolution of electronic publishing is pushing paper aside, physical rejection letters are fewer seen. The ease of an electronic “no” is hastening their demise. Speaking of demise, I hadn’t gone through my reject slips for years, but in doing so, saw that many of the magazines I’d tried so fervidly to enter have shut their doors for good. Little solace, that.

Aiming High Keeps Your Head Up
But it was fun to flip through my collection, and note my ambition. There’s a partially handwritten, partially printed (from a dot-matrix printer, oh my!) sheet from 1988 on what I pushed that year: Articles to Atlantic, Esquire, Paris Review, Harper’s, Playboy and a host of smaller publications. None of those titans bit into what I was serving, but there was consolation in getting “an intriguing idea” from a Harper’s editorial assistant, and a “It’s a good one” from Esquire. A long handwritten response from a Travel and Leisure managing editor in 1992 detailing alternate publications that might accept my piece that he graciously declined. Even the form salutation from the Utne Reader: “Dear intrepid writer:”

So many of the letters are undated and don’t specifically mention the rejected article or story, so I have no idea what these limbo letters refer to, just a vagabond “no” telling me at some point I mailed, I waited, I hoped, and it was for naught. But clasping hands with those closed hands in my “no” pile are a number of yesses—the extended correspondence I had with Peter Sussman, a San Francisco Chronicle editor, much of it handwritten, about an article of mine he published about my much more extended correspondence with the Jack Daniel’s Distillery. A series of letters from Lynn Ferrin, the late editor of Motorland magazine (precursor to Via) who had been trying to locate me—pre-email address—in the midst of a couple of moves. Regarding my piece on driving cross-country trying to locate a good cup of coffee, she told me, “Out of the piles of unreadable pap that come over the transom every day, by dump truck, suddenly there’s something that stirs my coffee….”

Onward!
Here’s my message: keep sending your stuff out. I’ve had articles accepted for publication that were years old, that were sent out 10 times. My rejection folder weighs two pounds, but that’s considerably less than the weight of the 200+ magazines, newspapers or books that accepted and published pieces of mine. The reject folder is just a reminder that you have to do the work, and keep doing it. I’ll pass on the advice of Howard Junker, the longtime, former editor of ZYZZYVA magazine, whose typed signature in his rejection letter is preceded by, “Keep the faith.” And whose handwritten note reads: “Onward!”

Onward indeed. Now, what editor is likely to go for that scrotum piece?