Awhile back, I wrote a short story that I really believe in. In grad school, my thesis adviser blithely told me that it would get published.

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “It has been rejected a lot.”

“How many times?” he said.

“I’m not sure. 20 times?”

“Well, keep going,” he said. “I’m sure you will get it published. It’s a good story.”

A couple of days ago, I counted how many times that short story has been rejected. The answer? 54 times.

Now, this is a good story, if I do say so myself. Everyone who reads it likes it. It even made one person cry–in a good way. And yet, it has been rejected 54 times.

When I say that writing is harder than I ever thought it would be going in, this is what I mean. Yes, I expect stories to get rejected. But when you know, know, that something you wrote is good, and it is still rejected this many times, you start to get a sense of how hard writing actually is. This is not a career for people who aren’t really stubborn and who don’t really love writing and reading.

However, seeing that number hasn’t been all bad. After moping for awhile, I took stock of all the short stories I had finished and considered publishable (there were many more I consider unpublishable). The number was pathetically small–something like 5 stories.

Then I looked at the number of short stories I had started and hadn’t finished. There were dozens of them. Maybe more.

It put things into perspective for me: Maybe I have focused too much on this one story. Maybe I need to finish more stories, enough to fill a collection. And then wait to see if those are rejected 54 times each.

So far I am liking Flight of the Conchords on HBO.

The plot: Two guys from New Zealand are in a band in New York. In between their adventures, they sing songs and imagine they are in music videos.

I thought I would try selling a little bit of my jewelry and other craft/art projects, so I opened an Etsy account. So far I’ve put up two necklaces and a pair of earrings. Here’s the earrings, to give you an idea:

Don’t they look like something Carmen Miranda would have worn? You can check out my Etsy store here.

For our fifth anniversary, Kyle and I spent the night in San Francisco so that we could go to French restaurant Fleur de Lys and then to the opera. Neither of us had had a meal quite that fancy in a restaurant owned by a chef who is on TV a lot before, and I had only been to one opera a long time ago, and have been wanting to go again to see if I like it.

We were the first people at Fleur de Lys. Normally this would bother me, but I knew the place would be filling up quickly, so I decided to enjoy having five or six waiters focusing just on me for the time being. The restaurant is decorated so that it’s like you are in a tent from Arabian Nights, with drapery gathered at a point in the center of the ceiling. We sat in the middle of a room by a big vase of flowers. Our waiter was not stuck up. The music was kind of New Age-y, but I didn’t really mind.

As the evening went on, I was glad Kyle insisted on wearing his suit to dinner. We were easily the youngest people in the place, and everyone was wearing evening clothes and even fur jackets. The opera was the same way, so if we hadn’t dressed up as much as we did, I would have felt uncomfortable. As it was, I felt like I fit right in.

We got the four-course meal with wine pairing. That is: One appetizer, one half-fish course, one half-meat course, and a dessert. We had:

• Amuse Bouche: Pureed eggplant topped with a roasted parsley cream–smooth and cold, a good palate cleanser
• Amuse Bouche 2: A creamy cold soup served in an eggshell that had been hollowed out and dipped in poppy seeds. You sipped the soup with a straw. I loved the presentation.

Appetizer:


• Me: Foie gras two ways. One, the foie gras was cut up in a tiny casserole dish with shitake mushrooms and fingerling potatoes. It was delicious. The other way was a little “burger” of seared duck and foie gras on a brioche bun. The bun overpowered the foie gras–in fact, all I tasted was bun. It was not very good, and I didn’t finish it. However, the other was so good, and I appreciated the presentation of both so much, that it didn’t bother me.
• Kyle: Chops and saddle of rabbit with a bean salad. As usual, Kyle picked better and had the most delicious combination of fresh beans–possibly edamame–in an incredible sauce, topped with rabbit medallions. On the side were tiny rabbit chops in a reduction sauce beside a corn flan that melted in your mouth with creaminess. Score one for Kyle.

Fish:


• Me: A single scallop crusted in hazelnuts, sitting on a bed of spinach. It was surrounded with pear tomatoes and tiny, amazing, truffle gnocchi. Wonderful. The textures in particular were complimentary–crunchy nuts, smooth scallop and spinach, etc. But my favorite was the gnocchi. They made the dish for me.
• Kyle: Something to do with salmon and pistachio nuts. His wine was a nice buttery chardonnay that I was envious of.

Meat:


• Me: Filet mignon with endives, oven-roasted pears, and a turnip gratin, all in a wine reduction sauce with pecans. I was in a very traditional mood. The meat was perfect, and the sauce was incredible, especially with the pecans. The white thing that was supposed to be a pear horrified me for awhile. I kept tasting it, wondering what they did to that pear to make it so bitter. Was it black pepper? Then I realized it was the endive, and it all slid into place in my mind. I don’t know where the pear was–maybe in the orange turnip gratin thing on the edge of my plate, which tasted too much like sharp cheddar cheese, and interrupted the flow of the dish for me.
• Kyle: Buffalo in a port reduction sauce. Very delicious. His sauce was slightly better, I think. But he didn’t have pecans.

Dessert:


• Me: Fresh Berry French-word-that-starts-with-a-G. I was served a plate that looked like a tiny funhouse of shapes and colors. There was a triangular coconut popsicle, a tube of pineapple custard topped with a raspberry, a dollop of chocolate mousse, a flat pastry covered with berries and the most amazing whip cream. (I always say you can tell a restaurant by the quality of their bread and their whip cream). It was so much fun and every bit of it was delicious.
• Kyle: Gran Marnier soufflé. Yeah, well, okay, but did he get a coconut popsicle?

By the time we ate all this, we were getting late to the opera. We hurried outside and found there was another couple waiting for a cab. I was getting nervous because if you are late to the opera, they don’t let you in, and it’s hard to get a cab in San Francisco. But then it turned out that the other couple was going to the opera too, so they let us ride along with them in their limo. I had never been in a limo before! It is a very long car.

We saw Don Giovanni by San Francisco Opera. I was excited for a chance to use my opera glasses, but they were unnecessary because they have screens that let you see everything happening on stage. I found that while I don’t like listening to most opera music, I like seeing it performed. It is, after all, meant to tell a story with actors, and it is far more interesting when you are following along with that story.

But while listening to people sing Mozart is wonderful, the plot of Don Giovanni? Pretty darn bad. It rambles and leaves loose ends and throws in a ghost at the end for lack of a better way to wrap things up. Who am I to criticize what some have called the most perfect opera ever? A cheeky young thing. Go to the opera and see for yourself.

Because I can:

Enough short stories to fill a collection
A sundress
New placemats
Weird paintings with talking animals
A mushroom quiche
Fingerless gloves
A collage or shadow box
A silver wire necklace
Sausage and pepper pizza
A hat
Lists, lists, lists
A novel.

One thing I don’t understand: people who say marriage is work. My marriage is anything but work. Being married to Kyle is a constant source of joy and happiness in my life. It has been five years now, and I have to say–fastest five years of my life! Time flies when you’re having fun.

Kyle and I in the snow in Kentucky two years or so ago.

Fiction is weird. It leads you down paths of thought you hadn’t anticipated going down. This is often exciting, but it can also be troubling when you want your work to feel real to the reader. The substance of fiction is in the details. If you want your fiction to hold weight, you have to get those details right.

The answer, of course, is research. You look up the details and fold them into the fiction in some non-plagiarized form. For example, before writing my current novel, I researched the California Gold Rush and the history of famous cults and Utopian communities. That’s all well and good, because there’s lots of information on those two things. It’s the obscure questions that leave me hanging. Too often, there simply isn’t all that much information about the things I want to know about.

Some questions I have Googled lately:

And etc.

I’m not saying there are no answers to these questions. I’m saying the Internet is not prepared to answer them! And I really don’t want to shift through endless books to find out the answers. But in the end, that’s probably what I’ll end up doing–or else cut the scene. Or … guess.

I guess I am still naive about the book industry, because this surprised me. The The London Times has an article talking about what large bookstores (in this case Waterstone in England) charge publishers to put books in the front section of the stores.

The reader may imagine that merit alone has inspired the country’s largest book chain to champion the volume now resting in their hands. The truth is a little less romantic.

In a confidential letter to publishers seen by The Times, Waterstone’s has set out what it expects them to pay if they want their books to be well promoted in its network of more than 300 stores this Christmas.

The most expensive package, available for only six books and designed to “maximise the potential of the biggest titles for Christmas”, costs £45,000 per title.

That’s right, they charge to put a book out on the tables in front–and if a publisher doesn’t want to do it, the store reduces its order of the book and practically refuses to carry it.

Anthony Cheetham, the chairman of Quercus books, a small independent publisher, said: “It’s not a system you can opt out of. If Smith’s offer you one of these slots and you say no, their order doesn’t go down from 1,000 copies to 500 copies. It goes down to 20 copies.”

You might think that if you buy the book recommended by the staff or by school children, you are getting some sort of authentic representation of a book people like. The answer is, sort of.

At Borders, bookshop staff vote to decide the book of the month, while schools are polled to find the children’s book of the month. But the publishers still have to pay an undisclosed fee for the chosen book to be awarded the accolade.

This is so creepy to me. As much as my local independent chain Copperfield’s lets me down by rarely having what I want, I doubt this kind of thing goes on. At least, I hope not. Maybe I should ask.

What Waterstone charges for the honor of putting a book on a table:

The other week I played hooky and went to the zoo. It was fun. There was almost no one there and I got close to the animals. I liked the owl that swiveled its head to stare at me and the monkeys with handlebar mustaches, but best of all were the flamingos.

I had no idea that flamingos were so weird. They snort like pigs. They stand in hostile groups and then start fighting over nothing, their long necks twisting around like snakes. Their eyes are scaly and yellow. They aren’t pink so much as orange.

The signs said that scientists aren’t sure why flamingos stand on one leg. Most likely is has something to do with preserving body heat. In any case, they were so strange, I could have watched them for hours.

They were starting to fight here.

What if Harry Potter ended the way The Sopranos did? Click here to find out. Complete with audio.