Earlier today I decided to upgrade my tiny notebooks in which I kept track of all of my story submissions over the years. I had some Office Depot points, so I got a couple of Moleskine notebooks for free. I'll be using those going forward.
But I've been using these things since high school, when I first learned that I could actually make money from writing stories. I'd taken a creative writing class with Mr. Langner. It was a class for seniors, but I took it as a sophomore. They let me in because they saw how serious I was about writing. There were fourteen of us, I think, including my friend Rob Tannahill's sister. At the end of the year Mr. Langner published a booklet with the work we'd created as a result of our time in that class.
He was the one who introduced me to Writer's Market, and up until the internet age I got that book every year and sent thousands of submissions out. He'd photocopied the SF/Fantasy/Horror section and put it in my greedy little hands.
Anyway, almost everyone wrote poems for that booklet. I wrote a story. A very long story, actually. Considering the subject matter, if I had done this as a student today, I'd be on the news as some kind of potential school shooter stopped by a forward thinking teacher. Even by the standards of 1994/95 it was pretty bad.
I'd written a story called "Serial Killer." And you don't have to imagine very much to figure out what it was about. There were a few grisly murders in that one to say nothing of the sexuality involved.
I still have a copy of that one. Two, actually. I'm pretty sure Rob gave me his sister's copy at some point in my life. I eventually expanded it into a novel length work, and it is the one and only novel I've ever written that a Big Five publishing house wanted to see in its entirety. This was back when there were more than five. In case you're wondering, an editor at Random House read my sample chapters and asked to see the rest of the book. I can't tell you how happy that made me feel. I had a chance at the big time!
And then they rejected me. They probably should have. If I remember correctly I was a freshman in college at the time. That book, by the way, will never see the light of day. It's pretty bad, and there's no amount of editing that can fix that.
To think of how different my life could have been!
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