Drinking Silver Oak on a school night

When friends showed up with a 2001 Silver Oak Cabernet I knew this would be a great night for a Monday. I worked until 6:30 at the office and rushed home to begin cooking before our friends arrived at 7. The menu: mangrove snapper (I caught them chumming and fishing poagie chunks near a natural gas rig in 104 feet of water 18 miles southwest of the lighthouse at Dauphin Island) pan seared and topped with a crab meat and wine reduction sauce, garlic beans, cheese grits, and a salad of tomato/avocado/vidalia onion drowned in Ken's Italian dressing. A great Southern meal. Of course, we drank the Silver Oak before the meal. Silver Oak 1982 was the wine Reagan served the Queen--at least that's what my college roommate Larry told me. Larry presented us with a bottle of '82 Silver Oak in 1992 as a tenth anniversary present, which I've kept stored away in the cellar for this year--25th anniversary. I put my I-Pod playlist titled PS High School, full of songs from 1970-71 or so, as background tonight. It starts with a little Junior Walker and the All-Stars, with A Whiter Shade of Pale playing now. So what does this have to do with the book. Not a damn thing, other than to say that life goes on, book or no book. And sometimes the writing life takes a backseat. But not for long, and the alarm will be set for 6 a.m to get back on a couple of edits. Today I emailed back and forth a couple of times with the publisher David and editor Henry O ( I simply cannot resist calling Henry Henry O, for obvious reasons), forwarding them a nice email I received from a great writer who says he's eager to write a blurb for the book. Next up: cover designs and final details worked out on the contract. Fun stuff. My 13-year-old lab is looking over at me letting me know I've kept her up past her bedtime. Jerry Butler just came on the playlist...Later.

Rejected with grace by The Louisville Review

The dreaded thin SASE arrived in the mail this morning. The Louisville Review ( http://www.spalding.edu/louisvillereview/default.htm ) has gracefully said no to a recent story. I'm disappointed, of course, but have no one but myself to blame this time. It was the last story that was under consideration for publication by a literary magazine prior to the collection being published in April next year. Silas House, faculty guest editor, was kind enough to write that this was "Some really good writing" but he immediately followed that welcome comment with a suggestion for "pruning" and determined the story to be "a bit overwritten." I first became aware of Mr. House through his work in the first volume or two of Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe, where my fiction was first accepted for publication. His novels have received incredible praise and are worth a look if you don't know his work.

I took the liberty of sharing this personal note because the time Mr. House took to respond with a hand-written note will pay off for me, and for that I owe him a genuine thank you. So, Mr. House, "Thank You." I'm not being sarcastic, I mean it. Having edited two magazines, I know the difficulty of taking time to jot even a note or two to a hopeful writer. It's impractical to do so with every submission, but it means the world to the writer. Now, I'll be buoyed by what I'll consider a near-miss in a magazine for which I have great respect. And I'll be dragging out that story with my pruning shears in hand, for this editor knows his stuff if he edits as he writes. Hold on a second, while I open that story file and take a quick read...

..okay, he's probably right. The first paragraph alone had three or four extra adjectives. I'll take out the shears later today cut the story from 2200 words to something under 2000 and see how it reads. The story (A Death in the Family) follows a grown daughter watching her mother linger on her deathbed, providing the daughter too much time to ponder her own failures and consider her own death. Below is an excerpt (pre-pruning of course):

I’m not distraught that my mother is dying. She is 93, after all, and has suffered few hardships in her life, growing up in a family of means. No, I’m sad because I know my last memories won’t be about hugs, parting words of love, or encouragement to carry on as the one she always knew would accomplish great things. I see no such future, rather an end not unlike what I see before me. I can foresee no entry into the elite group of women who have so influenced our family, position gained not so much by accomplishment as by longevity.
My mental video will replay her relentless begging to let her die. Or something meaningless, such as her story of the bowl of coins her mother kept near the door during the Depression for men who came knocking at the big house offering to rake leaves or clean gutters. Or the look of contempt she flashes me in her rare lucid moments. Of course, that’s on top of reminding me daily in those last weeks when we actually carried on conversations, before the last stroke, of my three failed marriages.
And there’s the other subject Mother finds worth her time: my child who has nothing but venom for me. The child without memory of the long nights I held her tight and rocked her to sleep when her daddy didn’t come home. My child who chooses instead to remember only that last year she lived with me, when my best friends were vodka and television movies until 4 a.m. When she fed herself cereal and walked to school, afraid to ride with me in my car with dents down the entire passenger side from mailboxes placed too close to the street.

By the time you see the entire story, let's hope it has shed its dead limbs. See ya next time around.....