Practical reading
Another aborted book. This time it’s The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek. The first few stories weren’t bad (there was one I remember from Best American Short Stories: “Chopin in Winter,” which is great) but after Chopin it just got very boring and very slow. Makes you wonder if there’s anything to this idea of tension and microtension being so important.
So I stopped reading. But a couple of good things did happen: there is one small piece in the book that really reminded me of one of the very first things I ever wrote (once I considered myself a “writer). I really liked it but never really tried to get it out there in any way. But now I found a small piece that really rings the same kind of bell in my head and inside the book it tells me it was published in Triquarterly, based out of Evanston. So I’m going to clean up the piece and send it in.
This is the way it’s supposed to be done. Not blind, massive submissions but focused, smart submissions.
I’ve written about it before but this is probably the first time I’ve put it into action. We’ll see how it goes.
This “smart way” is also the way you’re supposed to apply for a job, as Trent at The Simple Dollar tells us in his review of What Color is Your Parachute.
