REJECTION ISN'T NECESSARILY BAD

This isn't Manny (see May 15, 2006, post). I found this little guy or woman, for I'm not an expert at gender identification of insects and I don't have my Peterson's Field Guide handy, in my wife's flower bed on the east side of the house. Manny is in an aquarium on my back deck. He's brown, this one's obviously green. If I were to hook them up one would surely kill the other. Manny would probably be the victim. He's smaller--a real eating machine though. I fed him four flies the other day. My neighbors still see me running around outside with a butterfly net. Where there's dog shit, there's flies.

And where there's a story of mine, there's usually disappointment. I received a rejection e-mail from Jennifer Pieroni of Quick Fiction today. They specialize in Flash Fiction, Sudden Fiction, and Short-Shorts. Cool little literary mag. I cannot let rejection get in the way of my passion.

This post reminds me of Don Shea's flash fiction story "True Love," about a man and a woman finding each other at an entomology conference. They have dinner together and go to her hotel room afterward. In the bedroom scene the apprehensive man (both are naked at this point) tells her about the female praying mantis's mating habits. Her response is classic and worth quoting verbatim: "The female empid fly also has a nasty habit of eating the male when he approaches her during mating season. To divert her from this purpose, the male typically finds a morsel of food and wraps it elaborately in a silk balloon formed by his glandular secretions. The time it takes the female to unwrap his gift is often long enough for him to copulate successfully and escape unscathed. But in one empid species, whether through cleverness, laziness, or just bad faith, the male fails to put any food inside the balloon. The female is hoodwinked into copulation with an empty promise."

I need to rethink my plan for my short story. Do I send it out again, rework it, or shelve it for now? I say rework it, put more food into it.