The bitter sting of rejection…
Posted by bencooper | Filed under General, News
Dramatic I know but,yep, that’s right, I’ve finally heard back on a couple of my stories and the outcome was as expected…well not entirely.
I received a very nice email regarding one of my stories from the fiction editor of a ‘zine. He liked the story but felt that a couple of issues needed to be addressed. He offered some advice on what he felt needed to be changed or tightened up and said that if I was willing to attempt a re-write he would strongly consider it for inclusion in his ‘zine.
That buoyed my spirits somewhat. It wasn’t a firm acceptance but the acknowledgement that the story had some merits and could be published felt good. So I’m tackling a re-write at the moment, it’s coming along OK but having to take a back seat to my dissertation and essays for my degree.
Two of the other stories came back rejected. It’s an odd feeling and I went through a strange cycle of emotions.
Firstly a tinge of anger mixed with indignancy…huh so my story’s not good enough for you huh! Well what do you know! This then quickly gave way to a kind of depression…I’m never going to be a writer, who am I kidding? What’s the point of even trying if I can’t place a couple of stories, might as well give up now and save myself some time and disappointment.
This depression phase lasted for a day or two. To try and lift myself out of it I trawled some websites about writing, rejection and success. It made me feel slightly better and some of the advice out there really did give me the strength to get back at it, particularly rules from the late Robert Heinlein ( you can read them here). Having read this page, along with Robert J. Sawyer’s own take on the rules, I decided to have a look at the two rejects.
One of them I can see why it was rejected. It’s an older piece, more than a year old, that I submitted on a creative writing module and earned a 1st for. I hadn’t looked at it since getting it back in the second year, other than a brief check over for any grammar or punctuation cockups before submitting. Having re-read it I can see all the weaknesses in it. Crucially I think I sent it out to the wrong market. I intend to do some serious editing and re-writing on this one and send it to a more appropriate magazine at a later date.
The second one felt stronger to me, a recent effort that I had spent plenty of time on. I read it and re-read it. I had received no advice for this story, just a form rejection – thanks but no thanks. So I decided to follow Heinlein’s fifth rule – get it back out on the market. I hunted around and found a magazine that could be a perfect market for the story and emailed it off to them the very same day.
So it’s been an interesting learning experience. I think I’ve acquitted myself well and definitely feel better for having come out the other side of rejection hell! I can see now that this is going to be a really hard slog, with absolutely no guarantee of any success, but hopefully I can learn from it all and make myself a better writer.
Later,
Ben
Remakes and Battlestar Galactica
Posted by bencooper | Filed under General
Gareth L. Powell recently posted a nice little rant about the trend in Hollywood towards remakes (read it here), specifically in reference to the upcoming Star Trek “reboot”. I have to say I really do agree with him… mostly.
I was appalled to hear that Total Recall will be remade soon, and with an exciting new “twist”. I’m shuddering at the thought. Total Recall, based on Philip K. Dick’s superb short story “We Can Remember it For You, Wholesale”, is one of the greatest slices of sci-fi action ever commited to celluloid. It is very different to Dick’s story in many regards, and those ridiculous fans of literature who insist that film adaptations must be “true” to the original source (I’m thinking of the idiots who were moaning about Tom Bombadil being left out of The LOTR films) probably don’t like it that much. Nonetheless as an action sci-fi film it has it all, plenty of action, a believeable and immersive world and a little bit of depth (courtesy of the original story) about reality, memories etc. It doesn’t need remaking, particularly in the sanitised format of modern action films which lack, for want of a better word, balls.
The tendnecy towards constantly remaking films is a worrying one. As Gareth says in his post, why not invest in good writers, new scripts, start something new. Unfortunately that seems like too much of a gamble for Hollywood, after all if millions of idiots will line up to see a remake of a film, or an adaptation of a musical (not that I’m averse to musicals at all) or even worse the latest travesty in the Scary Movie spin off spoofs, then why bother possibly having a film that tanks at the box office,like Blade Runner or Brazil?
But remakes can be a good thing. No, hear me out please. Despite what I just said.
I’ve recently been watching the remake of Battlestar Galactica and it is awesome. The acting is good, the writing is tight and the characters believable. They are also tackling issues such as human/machine interaction, what is it to be human and other current concerns such as terrorism etc. It is without a doubt the best piece of sci-fi I have seen in some time, particularly TV sci-fi.
Now lets cast our minds back to the original. Yes I’m sure some of you get misty eyed about it but take a good hard look at it. It was a pretty poor Star Wars cash in for 70′s and 80′s TV. The acting was bad, the writing abysmal and the characters flat. Don’t get me wrong I loved it as a kid, but not now. So a remake was no bad thing.
So what about Star Trek. I loved Star Trek too, all of the incarnations were watchable (my favourite was DS9, which often sparks some controversy) and for many of us it was our first introduction to sci-fi. Recently I had a chance to rewatch some. One afternoon dogsitting at my parents house a cable channel had The next Generation, Voyager, DS9 and Enterprise back to back. I settled in for an enjoyable afternoon.
Wrong. The shows have dated very badly. Not only in terms of aesthetics which we can forgive of course but the writing, directing and acting (with a few exceptions) were pretty bad. Also each incarnation seems to have similar episodes and themes. Not a bad thing at all but it really felt weak. My rose tinted spectacles were shattered, luckily they had a two for one offer at SpecSavers so I’m OK for the moment.
So a Star Trek “reboot” could be a good thing, after all it did Batman wonders. Except nothing I’ve seen about this film makes me excited at all.
No thanks. I think I’ll go and watch The Wrath of Khan for the hundredth time, now that’s a classic slice of Trek! I’m also hanging in for a Buck Rogers remake, get rid of all those 70s discos with light up floors that seem to be so common in the 25th century…oh yeah and send Twiki to the trash compactor on the Death Star.
Later,
Ben