...for those of you who are sick of how very athletics-centered I get this time of year. Plus, I don't want to jinx the you-know-whos in the you-know-what.

I'm into week three of the editing life. Writing rejection letters is both easier and harder than I thought it would be. Part of the reason for this is that our managing editor, in her infinite wisdom (you know, just in case she googled me and found this site -- Hi, Whitney! -- and no, I did not just say Hi to myself.), has requested that we give each writer a reason why their story isn't accepted for publication. So when the reason is something obvious, like I saw the "twist" at the end coming from a mile away or I get one of those stories in which the writer tries to demonstrate their erudition by using three four-syllable adjectives for every noun, it's not too hard for me to tell them that. Thanks to SLC, I've learned how to give criticism in person to people who are going to critique my stuff the next week; you learn the right mix of tact and honesty fairly easily. The hard part is when I read through a story and the first criticism that pops into my head is "this is boring." Because then I have to figure out why it's boring. And that's when I kind of wish we had a template rejection letter. Still, I really wish more journals did this (ahem, Glimmer Train) as I know I'd have appreciated someone telling me they had difficulty understanding my characters' motivations instead of "it was a good read -- but we're still not going to publish it." It also makes me a bit more sympathetic to the people who read (and reject) my stuff, since it really does depend on what kind of mood you're in/whether you've already read six stories in second person that day/if the three pieces read just before this were really good or really bad. And I know I've probably rejected some things that will get accepted somewhere else -- I just didn't like them, for whatever reason.

I'm going to do National Novel Writing Month again in November, so watch for the running word count total to make its reappearance. This year, the goal is to finish the novel I started last year, or at least get another huge chunk of the first draft completed. So after this month's sports-obsession is done, you get a month of me obsession about writing! Won't that be fun!