Then he got an idea! An awful idea!

The Grinch got a wonderful, awful idea!

Like most writers of literary fiction, I've had a great deal of trouble getting my short stories published in literary journals. (29 rejections thus far for my various stories, with another 17 looming.) The general idea was to get these stories published in literary journals, start making a name for myself, and then eventually gather them all into a short story collection to be pitched to publishers. Followed, of course, by publication and universal acclaim.

Well, that first stage is obviously going poorly, so I'm now trying to bypass it altogether. I just found out about the Iowa Short Fiction Award, in which entrants submit a short story collection. Two winners will be selected, with their collections being published by the University of Iowa Press.

I'm going for it.

Kind of a crazy (wonderful, awful) idea, since I've written each of my stories individually, without an overriding theme which a coherent short story collection generally requires. But regardless, I'm compiling my best stories (Who am I kidding? It's almost all my stories) into a single collection, tentatively titled Rising Above: Stories. I'll be spending the next five weeks trying to arrange the stories into a coherent order, which will hopefully compensate somewhat for that damning lack of a unifying theme.

I'm desperately hoping my skills at compiling mix tapes and CDs, which I have diligently honed over the past two decades to the polite but often tepid response of the recipients, are directly applicable to compiling a short story collection. We shall see.