Story: Trembling Aspen
Published in: The Fabulist [print]
Length: 100 words
Brief synopsis:
How the story came to be: This was an idea I had knocking around for awhile, and is part of the “what if [thing that’s not a dragon], but a dragon?” habit of mine. I tried writing it but it wasn’t really happening.
Then I went to an Earth Day write in at a park up in the hills. So even though it was not this specific biome, it was very Moody and full of trees. So I thought, yeah, sure. Let’s try this again.
I got most of it done then, but I didn’t have all the ecology hammered down, nor all the rhyming/alliterations/whatever. That took a lot more research and tweaking at home.
PUBLISHING THE STORY
Relative Confidence Level Before Submitting: 4? 3? I’m not a poet. It’s too prose-y to be a prose poem, and it’s too annoyingly a poem to be prose. Also will people “get” the image I’m doing with the colonial tree dragon organism thing? Would people ever think a tree would be a dragon?
Rejections before finding a home: Also 20. (I copy-paste this from the last post, so I didn’t have to change the number lol). I didn’t send it to too many poetry markets, as it was the only “poem” I had, and most markets don’t want only 1 poem.
The eventual home: The Fabulist. The fact it was prose AND a poem really worked for them and what they’re trying to do, which, hooray! As you’ve probably noticed by now, I make a lot of weird stuff, so it’s always a pleasant surprise to find a market that both gets what I’m doing and appreciates it lol
