LUNCH TIME
by Elisavietta Ritchie
I’m wrestling this can of tuna. Not that I like tuna but he does and he’s out mixing concrete, says it would set if he stopped. His music so loud out there, he’d never hear me ask Help, he’d shout back to go –I won’t say what he’d say. Another reason I hate canned tuna — not just that tinny taste, though he grew up in a can-opener family –who knows if fishermen hauled in a dolphin. Stupid can-opener’s cranky. Rusty. Like me.
My Swiss Army knife in his toolbox. I use the long blade to cut bread, fish or bait, or all at once with a swipe on my jeans in between. Last week he snapped off my corkscrew. He’s that strong. Screwing around with this thick pry-hook you risk an artery or is it vein. Maybe those Swiss are trained for it, scared they’ll bleed chocolate or gold. Continue reading “Story Time: Elisavietta Ritchie”
When I finished my book, SICK, and had it edited I felt like I had really accomplished something. Of course the dream of an agent was fluttering around in my brain like a beautiful brightly colored butterfly. I proceeded to write the most interesting gripping query letter I could possibly muster up and sent it out to eighty agents. Yup, that’s an exact number I carefully logged them on an excel spreadsheet. (geek) My beautiful dreamy butterfly quickly turned into an ugly moth as the rejections flooded in. Add the bad timing of Borders closing to the fact that agents now get hundreds of submissions sometimes daily, and I realized that I didn’t stand a chance. Borders was now sending back its entire inventory to the publishers at the cost of the publishers. That’s how it works. So no one was willing to take a chance on an unknown author. (I’m not ready to ponder the possibility that I suck as an author.)