How I spent my summer vacation

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 82

Just back from vacation to find an inbox full of submissions. :) Only one month left for this year’s short-short story contest, so don’t tarry.

I brought two novels on the trip, but sadly they were both so bad I couldn’t get past the first 10 pages. There was a time I could slog my way through just about anything, but I just don’t have the patience for reading bad fiction anymore. Makes my skin crawl and my blood pressure go up and puts me in a distinctly unvacationy state of mind.

So we fell back on the ultimate vacation luxury in the evenings: cable TV (we have rabbit ears at home). That was exciting for the first hour, till we realized this particular hotel’s cable package basically consisted of three channels of Showtime, three ESPNs, three CNNs, and the Discovery Channel (which now seems to focus primarily on blowing things up and building things—I didn’t get to see a single cute fuzzy critter). To Brian’s dismay, none of the ESPNs seem to actually show sports anymore but consist of nonstop talking head shows which recycle their content every 30 minutes or so, CNN-style.

We did get to watch baseball on TBS. I don’t follow baseball but found it disconcerting that for four consecutive nights we watched the Giants play the Braves. I felt like we were in a time warp. Barry Bonds didn’t hit a single homer either.

We acted literary just long enough to pay our respects to Thomas Wolfe and William Sydney Porter (better known by his pen name, O. Henry) in the lovely Riverside Cemetery. They both died young, but I found myself even more saddened wondering how their careers would play out if they were writing today.

Most of Porter’s short story markets have dried up, gone under, or no longer pay enough to sustain even someone as prolific as himself. Maybe he would’ve had a career as a TV writer. But c’mon, there’s no way Wolfe’s dense literary prose would be published today. In the immortal words of some anonymous agent with a now-defunct blog, ‘Max Perkins, he dead.’ Hard to find editors willing to take chances now that all the major houses are owned by like four corporations and they don't think twice about firing anyone who doesn't bring in lots of bucks.

Ah well. We’re doing our tiny part to reward excellence in writing and maybe someday the pendulum will swing from the merely marketable back toward art’s favor.