Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Hope. Damnable hope.

For most of my life, this has been my Achilles Heel. I simply cannot stop hoping. For things to turn around. For things to get better. For luck to change.

Four years ago (!!) I wrote “The Book of Solomon,” a short story, and started sending it out to markets. After a year an a half of submit-reject-rewrite-resubmit, I called it a day and put the story in the trunk.

Except I didn’t.

First, that story was my toehold in the historical timeline for my current work-in-progress, so it’s always been there, in the back of my mind, waiting to be used in a larger context. Regular readers might remember a bit of a kerfuffle when the characters in the book began to assert themselves, and the story I’d intended to fold into the larger novel got the dreaded “your services are no longer required” message.

But also, I never really put anything in the trunk, that drawer where old, unsaleable stories go to moulder. My “trunk” is not a terminus. It is a limbo, a purgatory of prose where my hoarding tendencies store every nascent idea and unwieldy intention, sure that someday, some day, I’ll find its proper use and it will burst into magnificent bloom.

So when my characters decided that “The Book of Solomon” did not, in fact, have a place in the novel—a turn of events that, for normal writers, would be the knell of trunk-bound doom—I decided instead to give it another rewrite and send it out, again.

Rewriting a story that’s been rewritten at least five times before may seem a fool’s task to some, but if I re-read a piece and see something to fix, that means I’ve learned something new. In this case, I found several elements that needed tidying up (verb tense, continuity, flashback transitions, etc.), so out came the red pencil and the result was a stronger piece.

In my previous marketing effort, I’d run through most of the paying markets for literary and historical fiction, so I looked around for smaller periodicals. I found two—one paying some, one paying little—that had upcoming issues with themes I felt the story fit pretty well. Fifty-four days ago, I submitted the rewritten version to both.

Today, one of them said “Accepted.”

But there was a caveat. The editors weren’t sure that the story adequately carried the title (“The Book of Solomon”), with its allusion to the “Song of Solomon,” and wondered if I was open to a change in title.

Now, I have had bad luck with editorial title changes. With my novel The Cry of the Wind (Book IV in The Fallen Cloud Saga), the title was embedded in the plot, but the title was deemed “too depressing” by bean-counters and renamed as From the Heart of the Storm, an irrelevant and unwieldy title I still thoroughly detest. In this story’s case, however, the title wasn’t crucial, wasn’t an integral part of the piece as a whole, so while I defended it to the editors (at their request), I also let them know that if my reasoning wasn’t sufficient to convince them, I was sure we could find a suitable alternative.

Well, it turns out that my reasoning was sufficient, and the story will appear as “The Book of Solomon” in Issue #7 of The Timberline Review, due out (I think) in August or so.

I won’t get rich off this story’s publication—par for the course for short fiction—but its a good publication, with quality stories in previous issues, and I’ll be proud to have my work share space with what I’m sure are some excellent tales.

Onward.

k