Grist (sic) for the Mill

[ecosophia]

Rejection slips are among the enduring features of any writer's life. In fact, I fielded one yesterday. It was from Grist, a glossy pseudoenvironmental rag that caters to the overprivileged, and it was in response to the story I submitted to their "cli-fi" contest back in March. 

Mind you, this came as less than no surprise. I discussed the contest, among other signposts in the strange landscape of thought we've entered in the last few years, in a post over on my blog.  My comments on it were, ahem, far from sympathetic, and the story I submitted to the contest -- "A Modest Contribution" -- was of a piece with that:  I set out to follow the rules of their contest to the letter, while flatly contradicting the spirit thereof. I was a little sorry to get a bland generic rejection slip instead of a scream of outrage, but then one can't be too picky in this business. 

Over on the blog, however, I heard from another reader who'd submitted something in the same spirit and also got a rejection slip.  It occurs to me to wonder aloud just how many readers were as unimpressed by Grist's display of overinflated entitlement as I was, and reacted to it in the same way, by writing a story. If there are enough of us, you know, it might be possible to produce a short book -- or even a not so short book! -- and get it into publication. (And I might be convinced to invite new stories along the same lines, for that matter; you can read Grist's bellowing orgy of virtue signaling disguised as a call for submissions here if you happen to need inspiration.) 

What say you, fellow writers?  Do we have enough stories, in the jargon of a vanished age, to pub an ish? 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

This idea reminds me of the short-lived 70s sci-fi spoof series called Quark, which included a character named Ficus who was (supposedly) half plant and half human. He looked completely human, but indulged in some plant-like behavior. One episode features him "pollinating" with the human daughter of an evil emperor (who is of course outraged that his daughter should be doing such a thing). I loved the show. So the trans-plant idea is already out there!

[walt_f]

I remember that scene! I didn't watch the whole series, but I caught that episode. "Now, we wait for the bee!"

Ficus, Audrey II, Delvians, Ents, Trees of Cheem, Plant Men of Barsoom, the Veeglian plant-vampire (who as a precaution was buried with a steak through his heart) in a very short story by Damon Knight, and other sentient plants in fiction, all evolved as sentient plants. I don't know of any who decided to identify as plants. Many fewer of fiction's sentient plants have attempted to, ahem, cross-pollinate with humans, Ficus being one of them, but that's kind of a different issue. To be fair, though, magical (or otherwise) transformation into literal trees was a trope in genre fantasy for a while, there was a rather bizarre scene along those lines in A Journey to Arcturus, it occurs in an alien ecosystem in Speaker for the Dead, and of course there's the old myth of Baucis and Philemon. So, yeah, the idea certainly is out there.

[ecosophia]

For that matter, I had the Great Old One Shub-Ne'hurrath turn someone into a tree in the last volume of The Weird of Hali -- one more genre trope among the others...