Derailed.Figuratively speaking, thank god.

Yesterday the train I was on hit a car.

Or the car t-boned the train. This was how the incident was described by Amtrak.

I am a fearful flyer. I'm often anxious while riding in/driving a car. I like trains. They don't worry me. Even so, I always choose the middle car. Yesterday I was riding in the snack bar car in the dead middle of the train. The car struck just a few feet from where I was sitting. The train lurched and wobbled, the sound of something not meant to be there grinding beneath its wheels. I yelled. The guy standing near the door, waiting to get off yelled even louder. "I think we just hit a car," he said. The snack bar attendant opined that it was something smaller. He was wrong.

The sirens were screaming when we stopped. Just outside the door to the train car a piece of smashed metal sprouted from the train like a deformed wing.

No one on the train was hurt. No one informed us about the person or persons in the car. The sheriff came to investigate. Amtrak employees in the blue trousers and white shirts sledgehammered and crowbarred, trying to remove the piece of car that had welded itself to the train. As time passed it became obvious that I'd miss the event at the bookstore where I was supposed to read my piece recently published in a special post-election anthology put out by the Rattling Wall and Pen Center USA. I considered showing up an hour late and maybe catching a few of the fabulous readers, but the whacking of the undercarriage of the train by the determined man with the sledgehammer was not exactly a confidence builder, so I caught the train back home.

I searched the news all day, wondering about the car. There was nothing but this tweet from Amtrak:

Pacific Surfliner ‏16 hours ago

ALERT: Train 784 now released by police following investigation of vehicle incident. Now 1hr 43 mins late.

That seems like good news. No one died.

Here's the link if you'd like buy the anthology. It looks pretty fabulous.

Only Light Can Do That

Writers, What do you do with your rejection notices?

Last night was the final class of "Submitting to Los Angeles Literary Magazines," a course I took through the UCLA Writer's Program. The teacher was Michelle Meyering, editor of The Rattling Wall, a journal that published an essay of mine last spring. I'd prefer various forms of torture to driving across the pot-holed, broken-streetlight wasteland that the City of Angels has become. I'd prefer being harangued by phone solicitors to paying UCLA's exorbitant $11.00 parking fees (unless you want the close-by parking--that's $18.00.) But, in an effort to organize the practicalities of my writing life, I endured the 90-minute drive and blew $111.00 in addition to the tuition. I'm glad I did.

Until I learned of Michelle's seasonal submission plan, I'd been trolling the usual submission calendars and email subscriptions to find places to submit my work. I read the lists. I made notes. I tried to figure out what to submit where. Tweaked it. Reduced the word count--or not. Tried to make this deadline with one piece, and that one with another, and that one. And seldom did.

It turns out that many literary magazines have similar seasonal submission deadlines, and Michelle scheduled her class to coincide with the April 1st deadline that is on the early end of the spectrum for spring. So last night, after 9 weeks of studying guidelines, interviewing local lit mag editors, working on log lines, short bios, cover letters, and polishing a single submission, we all showed up with stamps and envelopes. This morning Michelle took our work to the post office and mailed it. My essay is now chugging its way to 15 different literary magazines from across the country. This means rejection, of course. And maybe there'll be an acceptance in the somewhere, too. But what I'm happiest about is that I honed in on one piece and sent it out.

I'm done now. I'm going to read. And read. And read. When I'm ready, I'm going to write. Come fall, if I haven't been rendered completely insane by moving and getting my mother across the county and getting us both settled in my new house, I'll polish another piece and send it out.

To everything
there is a season
And a time to every purpose
Under heaven.


Writers, what do you do with your rejections? Keep them? Flush them? Light them on fire?

Silver Lake Jubilee & The Rattling Wall

Hip young beauties gliding like giraffes in their ultra-high platform wedges. Rocker chicks. Rocker guys. Bands I'm too old to have heard of. Even the little children at this event were way cooler than I am.

But I found my tribe as a reader at the PEN/ "Rattling Wall" stage. Yes, some slasher-rock (I have no idea if that's the correct term, but their screeching made me want to cut my wrists) band was wailing away down the block. It didn't seem to matter. Our audience stayed in their seats and at least pretended they could hear. And since they laughed in the right places while I read, I think they actually did have some idea of what I was saying.

The other readers were fabulous, and I took a spot in the audience and listened to them while I devoured a delicious bahn mi and iced Vietnamese coffee. Azarin Sadegh, Lauren Marks, Hafeez Lakhani, Eric Layer (all current PEN Emerging Voices fellows) Monica Carter, Libby Flores, D.J. Pangburn (also in issue #1 of the Rattling Wall.)

As for issue # 1 of "The Rattling Wall," it is far more beautiful than I ever would have imagined. Kudos to the founding editor Michelle Myering, and the featured artist, Albert Reyes. I'm very thrilled to be a part of it.
Here's the link if you want to buy one.  http://www.narrowbooks.com/

I am absolutely in love with the essay by Don Winslow. He made me wonder about all these crazy dreams I have about houses. Maybe what I really need to do is drive.