I've been a bit grumpy the past few days, feeling like I had too much to do and not enough time to do all of it, and that's made me snappish and growly. Just ask secritcrush. A lot of it has been wanting to write more, or, rather, do nothing but write.

Then, out of the blue, I've received two emails from readers of Wild Things. The first was this remark on my zombie story: "I really, really love 'Fading Quayle, Dancing Quayle' I think it's a masterpiece. Way to go!"

Now, I loved writing that story, and it did get a Year's Best Honorable Mention and all. But for the most part, I felt it didn't really click for readers the way I had wanted it to. Parts of it seemed too familiar, other parts of it didn't really gel. Even so, it's so satisfying as a writer to have a story click perfectly with even one reader. That made my day.

The other email had a bit more to say:

I've been reading "Wild Things" and just finished "Footnotes." I thought the
final couplet was one of the most brilliant pieces of writing I've
encountered for a long time-
"For some, for some, not even that,
A rapture without trumpets, without salvation."
Thanks.

What writer doesn't like to hear "masterpiece" and "brilliant"? But this one is interesting because the poem that ends the story was written at Gordon's insistence when he bought it for F&SF. He showed huge trust in doing that, because it was only the second story he'd bought from me and he didn't know me as a writer yet (no one did!) -- so he had no clue if I could pull it off, and without that poem, the story doesn't really have any emotional resonance.

Come to think of it, I had written Quayle for the first zombie anthology, Book of All Flesh, and the editor didn't think the ending worked. He sent it back to me to rewrite and then took it for the sequel volume.

Endings continue to be a problem for me. Gordon has made me rewrite the endings for two of the last three stories he's bought from me, and John Scalzi did the same thing for the story he bought for Subterranean. (And the other story Gordon bought recently had been through the MFA class I was taking, OWW, and my local crit group, so I'd already been forced to identify and fix the problem ending.)

I complained to Gordon that I felt like one of those ski jumpers who blows the landing, losing their knees when they hit down and dragging their ass through the snow, ruining some otherwise spiffy arial acrobatics. The difference being that writers get editors instead of judges and a chance to rewrite their landings to get them right. He told me a story about Stephen King selling a story to F&SF and having to revise the ending a couple times to nail it.

So at least it's not my problem only. I know many of the tricks and techniques for nailing endings, but I'm going to have to figure out a way to practice them and start matching the right tool to the right story so I get them right the first time out. Which is nothing to feel grumpy about at all.