The mail began like any other.
Dear Stuart,
Thank you for the opportunity to read Munch’s Piano…
A bit of basic politeness at the start. Much nicer than cramming the bad news into the first sentence.
It’s a beautifully written story…
A snippet of positive feedback. Standard technique. Nice of them, to think of letting the poor writer down gently.
I’ve been reading and rereading it…
Here comes the ‘but’.
I’d love to accept it for publication.
Really? As you can tell, it’s taken some effort to acknowledge the truth. I’m actually getting something published for the first time. My short story, Munch’s Piano will be in Fictive Dream this month, and never was the name of a literary magazine more appropriate: getting my work in front of an audience has been a distant-seeming dream since I started my writing journey, four long years ago.
In that time, I’ve written two novels, assembled some incredible feedback and an even more incredible group of critique partners (a.k.a. my writing circle or, put simply, my writing friends). Now working on a third novel and a mushrooming collection of short stories, every time I get that gut-feel inspiration that tells me a new idea is worth pursuing, I’m struck by the same thought: maybe this will be it. The one that gets me published.
It’s never true, until it is. Spending a chilly Wednesday evening at a ski lodge in Norway last February, looking out of the window at the impossibly distant stars and — this is me, I’m afraid — being struck with a free-fall feeling of insignificance when more rational people would simply put on an extra pair of socks and enjoy some cocoa, I had the same thought. The one that’s twinned with: I am a pathetic piece of dust on a tiny dot of a planet in a cold universe that doesn’t care. And I’ll never get published. Two for the price of one, you might say. And, being me, I couldn’t help wondering what others would have done with that feeling, looking at those same stars.
Edvard Munch, for example. Despite all his successes, one gets the impression he never quite got away from that feeling. The idea that our lives are just a shadow, an echo of some vibrant reality glimpsed, but never grasped. That real life is something seen in the mirror, but never lived. That there must be more than this.
One thought leads to another. There’s an echo of this thought in Munch’s work — in The Scream, most obviously — but never that definite statement. Always something left unsaid. What if this was an idea he couldn’t render in painting? How else would he approach it?
A few days later, we head back to Oslo and a pre-arranged rendezvous with the forbidding concrete monolith of the Munch Museum, and what do I find but… his piano. Sometimes, you have to wonder if there might actually be an intelligent force behind the universe.
So that’s it. Several months of drafting, re-drafting, critiquing, crying, drafting again, submitting, and a lot of sweaty-palmed email-checking later, here it is. Munch’s Piano will be published in Fictive Dream on July 28th. But don’t worry about the date — I’ll spam you with a ton of posts, links and tweets as the time approaches.
Ahh. This must be what real life is like.
Dare to dream, buddy!
Congratulations. Fabulous news!