Jealousy, Rejection & the Flowering Bamboo of Mizoram

There are days when a rejection letter in your email seems superfluous and other days when it matters.  Intentionally having sent out two query letters just before Thanksgiving, I told myself the editors hadn't answered because they were probably too busy.  Of course, I also assumed if I didn't receive an answer by tomorrow, I wouldn't hear anything at all.

Anyone who has submitted their work knows that not every editor has the good manners to reply to a query letter.  Some would even defend this practice by claiming,  "I never requested an unsolicited article or short story, so why should I have to waste time with them?"

The worst thing, of course, is to get your manuscript back in the mail marked, 'Return to sender', and know that it wasn't even opened.  Email has helped eliminate the cost of postage both ways at least, but there is even less chance their curiosity might be peaked.

To those heartless editors I respond, this is rude and cruel.  We writers are out there honing our skills and exposing our souls.  The least you could do is properly reject us.  Even children understand it is poor manners not to acknowledge the person who is trying to communicate, even if it means to run away as fast as one can.

This afternoon I got a brief, "Sorry, it's not right for HGNW."  At least she said 'sorry', but it was still disappointing.  I had hoped she would put a postscript on there such as, "Have you tried Leo over at Atomic Sunshine?" Or maybe, "I couldn't use it, but I think the idea is great.  Have you got something in the "..." area?  Loved your writing style.  There must be something of yours we can publish and for which we will gladly pay."

How could an article about eating bugs not be right for a home and garden section?  Okay, so maybe I was reaching a bit, but their magazine is so boring, I thought they would jump at the chance.  My thanks? I got a slap in the face when I was merely trying to help them. 

Okay, so the non-masochists of the world would not have submitted an article to an editor about  insect cuisine with both culinary and capture techniques just before a national holiday that featured food, but must I always be so calculating?  

When I made my own version of Turkey Tettrazini tonight - hoping not to be able to recognize any leftovers individually -  as yummy as it was?  I would have gone with mealworm fritters, but the bait shop wasn't open. (If you think this is funny, see my Gather article, "Chapulines a la Mexicana".)

Okay, maybe I don't even know where a bait shop is, but that email sure was a Zen-basher.  I wasn't really prepared for a rejection until tomorrow.  Who answers their work email on Sunday, for heavensakes?

And then if I mention that I make my living as a loan officer for residential mortgages, you can imagine I wasn't looking forward to Monday anyway.  You can probably guess how that's been going lately.  Financial credit markets ricocheting off the boardroom walls around the world create just a bit of stress and uncertainty on the people in the industry.  Unfortunately, as I am self-employed there is no such thing as unemployment insurance.  Yeah, nobody can lay me off.:)

This afternoon I finished a book called Wild Fire. I would recommend it only if you like the concept of nuclear armageddon and a neo-con fanatic who wants to nuke Los Angeles and San Francisco.  Why do this?  So that the automatic weapons system would then annihilate the Muslim world.  Supposedly we would automatically retaliate and ask questions later. 

I probably would have liked the book more if he didn't throw in something in the prologue about what was real and not real in the book.  He claimed the auto-retaliation wasn't anything he could confirm but if it wasn't real it should be.  That was so Cold War it gave me the creeps.

As I thought about this author's dialogue, which was annoying at best, I thought I could do better.  His narrator is the protagonist who is of course married to a hot, hot, smart FBI lady who tolerates his stupid jokes and his constant breaking the rules like some adolescent.  By the third chapter I was skimming past anything he said to her, as I wanted to slap him for dorky humor that was just plain geeky dumb.  I kept thinking the author must have bounced these jokes off his adolescent son or some other friend he pays to think he is very clever.

No, I am not jealous.  I just thought that the book was annoying, although I admit I read it through to the end.  All right, the protagonist shared one of the phobias I have.  He's afraid of bears, but since he'd never actually had an interaction with one - and I have - it seemed a bit much for a macho guy to spread that rumor around and so clearly expose this weakness.  But even this link disappointed. Not one bear appeared in 710 pages.

Oh, I know, it's easy to be a critic on a Monday morning, but the whole time I kept asking myself why I got a 'Sorry, it's not right' and he got on the New York Times Bestseller List.  

But the pity pot is uncomfortable for too long, so I started reading an article in Vanity Fair about the Indian state of Mizoram, and an impending plague.  In case you've never heard of Mizoram, it is squeezed between Myanmar and Bangladesh in the northeastern corner of India.  Their economy is largely dependent on the bamboo that grows prolifically throughout the state and covers 30% of its 8142 square miles.

Sadly for the locals, one species of bamboo, Melocanna baccifera (called mau or mautak by the locals), will flower at essentially the same time every forty-eight years.  The last huge flowering was in 1959 and caused famine and plague for the people.  It appears that when the bamboo flowers, it produces an avocado-like fruit that drops.  The jungle rats and other scavengers eat this fruit (including the stink bugs that become fat and oily and a local delicacy), breed, and overrun the entire state.  

It seems insane that a rat population could affect an area so negatively, but as it is such an important crop and local building material and food source, when the rats overrun the towns they also get into the rice fields, the grain that is stored, food stuffs, and carry disease, etc.  Although India is trying to gear up, there is the additional complication that the Mizos are Tibeto-Burman genetically and culturally, and there may be less cooperation and understanding between the government and them.

90% of the current day Mizos have converted to Christianity courtesy of the seeds sown by two Baptist missionaries from Wales which also makes them a little different from the average Indian. 

No one really understands why bamboos have such a long period before flowering and why they seem to flower by alarm clock, but some bamboos take over a hundred years to reach this point.  The species in Mizoram, however, after its 48 year lifespan is complete, will die.  This is the other element that adds to the famine experienced during the mautam (massive bamboo flowering).

All right, so I am grateful that I live in the good ole USA, but that wasn't the end of my emotional suicide by literary article or book.  Not to make light of anyone else's misery, but my own problems were looking pretty good.  Then again, I didn't want to weaken and eat some leftover pumpkin pie, so I sought to distract myself further with one of my son's books from college.

I grabbed a book that looked interesting, a translation of The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio.  It wasn't a full translation, but has twenty-one of the hundred novelle that comprise this masterpiece.  I started reading the author's prologue and realized it was written in the thirteenth century focusing on stories told by a group of seven women and three men forced to be together because of the bubonic plague.

You know what?  I put down the book, took off my glasses and decided to make myself some chai and watch television.  I cannot deal with anymore tragedy, rejection, thoughts of obliteration or plague tonight.   I just want to watch a good show, entertain myself and... wait... did that writer's strike already filter down to the shows I like?  Damn... nothing but re-runs. 

I'm going to bed.