Introduction
This anthology is dedicated to failure. Failure is a popular literary topic these days - coping with failure, embracing failure, learning from failure, learning from the failures of others, self-help tome after self-help tome on the topic of hitting the ground and exploding. That's not what I'm doing here. I didn't put this together so that you could learn something and I'm not going to argue that I'm happy to do it. As far as I'm concerned, the main thing one learns from failure is that it's bad and best avoided.
This is a book about disagreeing with failure, in this case my failure to achieve recognition from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in a timely fashion. The following 21 stories were written between February 2017 and April 2019 and each of them, by the best objective metrics at my disposal, is a failure. Each one bears a passport of rejections from professional and semi-pro markets - ten, fifteen, even twenty in some cases. Each one was marked as an inferior product with no marketable worth.
The Cavalcade of Rejection was born from this gauntlet of failures. This anthology does not feature every story I've written that was rejected. It features a selection of stories that meet two criteria: They were rejected many times (10+ in most cases, though I drew some exceptions) and I feel very strongly that they do possess worth, in some cases more than the stories ultimately published in those markets. It is an aggregation of beautiful garbage.
And make no mistake, these stories are – to the publishing sector at least – garbage. I've restrained myself from including excerpts from my rejection letter so suffice it to say that they were really quite illuminating. They always begin with some niceties (critical when dealing with writers, who are a much more fragile bunch than history might lead you to expect), and then they get right to business.
Per the editors I've heard from, this is a collection of repetitive, unoriginal stories with unlikable and underdeveloped characters, banal dialogue, insufficiently detailed settings, threadbare and unfocused plots with endings that are either predictable and cliché or excessively vague, all linked with prose that is overburdened with exposition or, alternately, lacking in exposition to the point that it becomes confusing. They are riven with amateur mistakes and plot devices that baffle and frustrate readers. They are preachy for addressing social issues; they are insensitive for NOT addressing social issues. They are boringly old-fashioned; they are excessively experimental. And how did you not notice that THIS part doesn't make sense, and this character could have done something else, why didn't he do THAT?
This anthology is, fundamentally, an argument. The speculative and broader literary community have declared these stories lacking in worth, so I have appealed their verdict to the court of public opinion. I'm leaving it up to you to decide who is in the right here. You are free to take the side of the publishers, to insist - as they have at length - that the stories are the predictably poor output of a mediocre, unoriginal, artless talent. If, on the other hand, you see some beauty in these tales, I hope you'll spread the word.
In fact, to aid you in spreading the word, I have released this anthology as a whole and all stories within under a Creative Commons license. This gives you a large amount of leeway to use my works without seeking permission, provided you honor the terms of the license. You may copy the stories, post them publicly in any forum, incorporate them into a CC-licensed anthology, edit or translate them, use characters or settings in your own works, adapt them into radio plays or short films, or even try to sell them as reprints (though consider the track record - it might not be worth the pain in your wrist).
I require only the following:
One final note: Every story has a story behind it. The final chapter of this anthology, "Behind the Cavalcade," contains some brief anecdotes about the 21 stories that preceded it. If you're interested in something more in-depth, some of the stories have been posted to the blog section on www.findthefabulist.com along with more a more thorough treatment of the background and some of my actual rejection letters. If you think this is self-indulgent nonsense, then you are free to ignore it and pretend that I said nothing.