kaleidotrope

A journey into a wondrous land of imagination

I was woken up this morning, a little before 8 o’clock, by a Verizon technician. (And a barking dog, who was not amused by the ringing front doorbell.) This was a different guy than on Tuesday, and he wasn’t here very long, just long enough to make a this-is-not-at-all-a-sales-pitch-but-obviously-it-is for FIOS, and then to poke around in the backyard and make the repairs when I told him we weren’t interested. (And we’re not. We already pay for cable and internet, and it’s questionable whether FIOS would even work properly in our area. I suspect Verizon only offers it because it’s much cheaper — for them — than repairing the existing copper lines.) What he did today is apparently not a permanent fix — big surprise there — but we do at the very least finally have a dial tone again.

I spent most of the rest of the day replying to Kaleidotrope submissions. Anyone who suggests that editors take some kind of delight from sending rejection letters obviously hasn’t spent the afternoon sending out close too one hundred of them. I’m now reasonably caught up with the submissions from January, aside from a few acceptances, but I’m starting to field queries from people inquiring after their stories and poems. The sooner I can dive into February and March, the better.

While I drafted rejection letters, I watched several episodes of the old Twilight Zone. It’s nothing short of amazing how well some of the episodes still hold up, despite having long entered the realm of pop culture cliche and parody.

And I watched Into the Woods, a performance by the original Broadway cast. My boss and I saw a poster for a local production on our trip to Connecticut this past week, and she made it sound really incredibly interesting. And it is, genuinely great theater, by turns darkly disturbing and laugh-out-loud funny.

And that was, whadyacallit it, Saturday.

Neither too fast nor too furious

A quiet, uneventful Saturday. I mowed the front and back lawns and read some Kaleidotrope submissions. The goal is to finish all of January’s submissions by the end of April, all of February’s by the end of May, and March’s by the end of June. Which will be just in time for the zine to re-open to submissions in July. I don’t know if the number of submissions I get increased, or if I just fell really far behind — I think maybe a combination of the two — but I am kind of far behind. I’m kind of at the point where only two types of stories interest me: the kind that gives me a reason to quit reading right away, and the kind that never gives me a reason to quit reading.

I ended the evening by watching Fast Five. I’ve never seen any of the other four Fast & Furious movies, so I was occasionally lost (or just tuned out) when characters and back stories were introduced. But the movie was a surprising amount of fun. As I said on Twitter, it’s pretty much the unthinking man’s Ocean’s 11.

Saturday

I didn’t read a lot of Kaleidotrope submissions today, it’s true, but I read several, including every one that’s been queried about in the past couple of weeks. Now that just leaves several hundred more.

At least I got to read it while sitting on the back porch sipping iced tea. The weather was quite lovely today, warm and sunny, with just enough of a breeze. The way things have been going, it will probably be twenty or thirty degrees colder again by Monday, but it was nice while it lasted.

Easter parade

I went into Manhattan last night, with my parents, sister, and my sister’s husband, for dinner and a Broadway show. We saw Nice Work If You Can Get It, starring Matthew Broderick, which is still in previews. It was pleasant enough, good fun if not particularly memorable, and if Broderick himself was maybe a little stiff — my sister thought he was “clunky,” which I think is a little unfair, if not completely inaccurate — the show was entertaining. It’s a jukebox musical of Gershwin tunes, some of them awkwardly shoehorned into a silly, paper-thin story — and not all them, I’d wager, either of the Gershwins’ best — but most of the cast (including, for the most part, Broderick) is game, and I think we all had a good time.

Of course, when we arrived in the city, we discovered that the restaurant where we’d had our reservation was closed for the holiday weekend. There was a sign on the door, apologizing for the inconvenience and redirecting us to one of their other restaurants around the corner, but it was still something of a shock. We’d discover today that they’d sent an e-mail (complete with a 30%-off coupon) to apologize and let us know, but in the end it worked out okay. I still prefer the first restaurant to the second, but we had a nice meal nonetheless. (I had roasted duck breast to start — creamy lentils, duck confit, sherry caramel — and then suckling pig — with bacon onion marmalade and toasted almonds. Although the goat cheesecake with sherry poached pears for dessert was probably the best part of my dinner.)

Anyway, that was yesterday. We got home late, after midnight, so I didn’t post anything here about it. Today, we didn’t do much of anything. I did the crossword puzzle, watched Community, went with my sister and her husband to buy Easter plants for my mother, and probably ate a little too much candy. No writing group again this week, because of the Easter holiday, but hopefully we’ll start meeting up again next week.

In the meantime, I still have a lot of Kaleidotrope submissions to get through. I’m starting to get queries — rightly so — asking about submissions I may not have even had a chance to read yet. It’s not quite at the point where I’m seriously thinking about hiring on a slush reader — what guidelines would I give them? — but it is a little overwhelming.

At least I’m temporarily closed to submissions, so I can get something of a reprieve. Meanwhile, the latest issue is still there for your reading pleasure… Just saying.

Happy Easter! (Or Passover, or Sunday, or whatever.)

“Let us be crooked, but never common.”

Isn’t March supposed to be “in like a lion, out like a lamb”? It was nasty and cold today, colder than I think it was a month ago, and definitely not very lamb-like.

I spent a couple of hours this afternoon attending an Eagle Scout court of honor with my father. These are always a little awkward for me, since I don’t really know anybody there — my father’s been involved in the troop and local district considerably longer than I ever was — but I go to show support and because I think my father appreciates it. And this one was actually pretty nice, and nowhere near as awkward as the first one I went to, when I wound up feeling like an interloper up on stage. And they had a really nice spread of food afterward, so it really wasn’t so bad.

I spent the rest of the afternoon working on the Spring 2012 issue of Kaleidotrope, which is now live. It’s another interesting mix, and I hope some of you will take the time to read some of the stories and maybe even comment with your thoughts.

And then I rounded out the evening by watching The Lady Eve, a screwball comedy from Preston Sturges starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. It was a little silly and convoluted even by those standards, but good fun nevertheless.

And that was my cold and nasty, but not too shabby, Saturday.