Alan Beard's site

This isn't a blog really, just a record of all rejections I receive with editorial comment (when there is one) and my comment. Might not be a good idea but useful for my records and maybe of interest to others. I also put occasional entries on what I'm reading, my PLR statement etc..

Story: Little Chef

Mag: flashquake

Editorial comment:

Thank you for your interest in flashquake. Our decisions were difficult, but we have decided not to use your submission(s). We have included below our editors' comments on your work; we hope you find them useful. Please note that we are closed to submissions until December 1, when our Spring issue reading period opens.

Alan Beard

fiction

Little Chef

Editor 5 Vote: No

Ed. 5 Comments: I couldn't sympathize with any of the

characters and the final line seemed a little too pat for the story, as if the whole story had been written just to deliver that one line.

Editor 6 Vote: No

Ed. 6 Comments We've seen a thousand variations on this

theme, and while this one is well written, it's not far different.

My comment:

bollocks. I don't normally get depressed but this week the three rejections seem to have really hurt. I want to go and lie down somewhere and emerge a new shiny person, or better still for one or two stories to be accepted. That would cheer me up.

Story: River walk

Mag: Fish Short Story Competition 2009/10

Editorial comment:

My comment:

I was getting excited about this because it made the longlist, but the shortlist was published today and I'm not on it. Depressed.

Story: The Heebie Jeebies

Mag: The Sunday Times 2010 Short Story Award

Editorial Comment: nowt

My comment:

This is rejection by default: I'm not on the longlist of 20. My namesake Richard Beard is though, and he works here (at Birmingham City University) as Director of the National Writing Academy. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for him, although another writer I 'know' (in the virtual world) is also on list: Kay Sexton, so I'll keep my other fingers crossed  for her too.

Story: Separate Things - now called Staff Development

Mag: The Collagist

Editorial comment:

Dear Alan,

Thank you for your interest in The Collagist and for the opportunity to read your work. Unfortunately, we are unable to use the fiction you submitted. We wish you the best of luck in placing it elsewhere and hope you’ll consider us again in the future.

Sincerely,

Matt Bell

Editor

The Collagist

My comment: grrr-eat.

I had my Public Lending Right statement yesterday and I am now £1.45 richer. Nobody took 'Doreen' out, but a few took 'Going th Distance' out. My PLR gets less and less each year. To be expected I suppose.

Story: man in the pub

Mag: Flashshot

Editorial comment:

Alan,

Loved the imagery in this one but I needed something to happen. Sorry.

GW

Editor/Publisher: G. W. Thomas

RAGE m a c h i n e Magazine

http://www.gwthomas.org/ragemagindex.htm

My comment:

sometimes in stories nothing happens, or not much, and I don't mind. Especially 100 word or less stories (this was 97 words). I suppose I'm unusual.

Story: Separate Things

Mag: Glimmertrain Family Matters Competition

Editorial comment: zilch

My comment:

Rejection by default. Wasn't even on the shortlist. Give it another going over over Christmas and send it out again. (rolls up sleeves).

As before I have put all the books I've read this year, usually with star rating and reviews on Goodreads.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/698826-alan?shelf=read-in-2009

Many of the books this year were recommended by fellow goodreadians, and it's been a fantastic year of new discoveries.

My top ten - a diifficult choice with so many good books are as follows:

Number one easily is How I Came to Know Fish by Ota Pavel. Utterly fantastic collection of stories, subtle and full of character.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/57342097

The runners-up:

George & Rue by George Elliot Clarke (novel): http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1193672.George_Rue

Going Native by Richard Wright (novel): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/62313001

Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan (stories): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/53936937

Heartland by Anthony Cartwright (novel): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/53325478

The Civilized Tribes: New & Selected Stories by Jerry Bumpus: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/45939383

Country of the Grand by Gerard Donovan (stories): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/45539298

Not a Chance by Jessica Treat (stories):  http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/45118233

Night Train by Lise Erdrich (stories): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/40748810

The Witnesses are Gone by Joel Lane (novel); http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/55666892

Story:  River Walk

Mag: grasslimb

Editorial comment:

Thank you for submitting your work to Grasslimb Journal.

Although your work came close in selection, we have decided not to use it in Grasslimb. As usual with such 'rejections', it's not intended as a message that your work is poorly written; on the contrary, this is well-written work, under challenging competition. I wish you the best of luck placing your work elsewhere. We hope you'll consider submitting work to Grasslimb again in the future.

Valerie Polichar

Editor, Grasslimb

editor@grasslimb.com

My comment:

forgot I sent it there - sent it in May.

Story:  Hook to Tinkerbell

Mag: Word Riot

Editorial comment:

Alan,

Thank you for sending your work to Word Riot. We've read it carefully. Unfortunately, we didn't feel it was quite right for us.

If you have something else you think is right for our magazine, please feel free to try us again in the future.

My best,

Jackie Corley

Publisher, Word Riot

http://www.wordriot.org

My comment:

One of the fastest replies ever - less than a day! Althought the story is under 300 words.

a change from rejections. Had a nice review on amazon, which balances out the crap one I had in September (see below):

5.0 out of 5 stars

Street Opera, 3 Nov 2009

By Abailart "Chris" (Liverpool, UK) - See all my reviews

Taking Doreen Out of the Sky

I can't imagine this remaining out of print. I am lucky enough to have procured a secondhand copy on amazon. Count yourself lucky if you get to own a copy too.

All the stories in this collection focus on lives the shape of roads and council estates in the English Midlands. One story, Cheer Up Lucky Lips Forever, involves the narrator's train journey interrupted: he leans from a window to stare through a fog into his memories made physically real by coincidence, the same house that centres his train of thoughts. The same device of Larkin in I remember, I remember and the resonance of that poem's last line, its realisation that `Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'

The memories and desires of nowhere people (nowhere because everywhere) are embodied in superbly crafted short `short stories', sparing, stripped to the bone language - most difficult to achieve the rhythms, cadences and imagery of theme and mood using the simplest vocabulary. The composer Schoenberg once remarked that there are `still many good tunes to be written in C major': Beard has gone further than good tunes to create something like street opera, bare skeletal structures to hold great passions. It's another mark of the craftsmanship that the stories are deftly controlled by accidentals and transpositions from major to minor.

On;y a purblind reader could fail to see that Beard's characters are people first, and that from the bare sketching of their essential outlines how immediate is the recognition of the basic foibles, contradictions, passions and moralities of all classes of people. Outwardly `Shameless' territtory or of some award-winning television documentary looking down on the lives of the ghettoised and exotically awful, the stories in this collection are generous in spirit and guide the view upwards. A generous writer, of course, includes humour and playfulness, and these are evident throughout.

There is one motif that weaves through the stories, a theme almost. It is about the secret places behind the weary urban greyness. Often, some woods or hills or trees, some hint of a border beyond towards which in memory or presence confused desire gropes; then there are somewheres/nowheres like where "they stashed the dustbins, a corner of multi-drainpipes and clogged drain and nicked into the building like a wound." (in Dad, Mum, Paula and Tom). These wonderful stories are doubly rewarding in the pleasure they give and the startle into our own time and memories.

You can read the first story in the collection, Saturday in the `Sac, on Alan Beard's website (www.alanbeard.net/). Then go and buy the book.

...thanks Abailart! Lovely review.

Story:  Separate Things

Mag:  Bridport Competition

Editorial comment: nil

My comment:

Rejection by default, would have heard by now had i won/been placed.

Not a rejection. On facebook I was tagged to name 15 books that would always stick with me in fifteenminutes. Interesting exercise and of course you miss out so many. But here's what I put down:

Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends, including me because I'm interested in seeing what books my friends choose. 

James Joyce - Ulysses

Beckett - the Trilogy

Nabokov - Lolita

Henry Green - Living

Henry Green - Concluding

Raymond Carver - What We Talk About When We talk About Love

Richard Ford - Rock Springs

Babel - Red Cavalry

Doris Lessing - To Room Nineteen

Grace Paley - Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

Alice Munro - Lives of Girls and Women

Otto Pavel - How I Came to Know Fish

Chekov - Lady with the Lapdog

Diane Williams - Excitability

Uwem Akpan - Say You're One of Them.

10 books of stories of course. The last two are current faves and not sure they'll stand the test of time.

Story: Background Noise

Mag: The Collagist

Editorial comment:

Dear Alan,

Thank you for your interest in The Collagist and for the opportunity to read your work. Unfortunately, we are unable to use the fiction you submitted. We wish you the best of luck in placing it elsewhere and hope you’ll consider us again in the future.

Sincerely,

Matt Bell

Editor

The Collagist http://www.thecollagist.com/

My comment:

Although I would have liked to get into The Collagist (a new mag from Dzanc Books), this story and 'The Heebie-Jeebies' have been accepted  by East of the Web. I even have my own page!