May is Short Story Month

I just happened to read that May is short story month. I was thinking about the concept of rejection which Mme. Guillotine had raised earlier today in one of her blog posts. I told her about a short story that I had written years ago which was actually a dramatization of an article that I had read on how to survive a hotel fire. I thought that it would be important to children to know what to do in case of fire inside a hotel room, so I sent my story to Cricket, one of the leading children's magazines to see how they would receive it. I sent it there instead of to Highlights for Children, which I probably should have done, because at that time the going rate for a children's story at Cricket was 25 cents a word.* I have gone through life knowing that the words are taken out of my mouth, and my friends mouths, and placed in the mouths of actors on t.v. sit coms, in movies, in books, in magazines,so that I became a walking mouthpiece warning people of it, saying that I had a microphone of some kind on me. In the movie Victor Victoria it is called a bug in her throat. So that when I began the thoughts of writing professionally I became very jealous and possessive of my own words, knowing that they are worth a lot of money. I think it is time that people wake up to the fact that writers do make money from the stories that they write when properly published. So publishing houses annoy the hell out of me. I take umbrage at the fact that they would dare to reject something that is for the well being of the community simply because I did not use my own name, or did not send it to the right publishing company. So when the MGM caught fire in Vegas that same year, I felt a bit like the what they call the "bad" Jan when I thought, well, Cricket deserves that...they could have helped to save some children and adults lives. In other words, after my story was returned to me, and yes, I felt the warmth in it, but that was so much patooey, I decided that it is not worth my time to sit down and pen stories or anything else when immediately afterward I begin to hear my own words coming back to me out of the t.v. or in a movie. Yes, I heard my last sentence resounded over and over for years and years and I know of only one place for that leak, and that personal knowledge, and that is at the place called Cricket.