I had a story rejected, so I post it here:

[Rabrrrrrr]

The first line is one given by the magazine (called, appropriately enough, "First Line"), which the writers have to use as the first line in a short story of no more than 3000 words. As a head's up to you before you begin, it's about 2900 words.

For two weeks now, I’ve been trying to figure out if people are laughing with me or at me. You see, for years I’ve opened for Krazy Klown’s KavalKade, our local clown TV show. My job is to warm up the audience, mostly snotty little kids with bad manners, short attention spans, and fruit juice-stained faces, and their idiot spawners who raise them in an atmosphere of largesse and an apathy that equates to a positive reinforcement of selfishness and unmannered cretinism. Stupid kids. What a waste of what could have been an incredible life, to earn a living by telling jokes to future sociopaths and meth-heads so that they’ll laugh more when that disturbingly buffoonish Krazy Klown comes out and does his dumbed-down pathetic shtick that only reinforces in the brats all the unmannerly, tacky, society-destroying behavior they’ve learned from their self-absorbed parents whose sole aspiration seems to be nothing more than to possess more meaningless crap than their neighbors, and to have their kids be involved in more lifeless activities. And, of course, the great aspiration of having the most “well-behaved” child, which is a laughable concept, since by “well-behaved” they clearly don’t mean anything potentially mistakable for etiquette, but instead mean a child in whom imagination, curiosity, and creativity have been most crushed and discarded, a wine press of hopeless conformity that discards the juice and mounts the leavings on the mantle of triumph with a poorly engraved plaque from the dollar store that says proudly, “The most compliant, unwilled, and undisciplined automaton consumerist nose-leadable livestock”. And then there are the “power” dads. The bottom-tier businessmen who realized early in their career that they will never make it even as far as middle-management, or the type-A hyper idiots who work in sales, telling a great story about their product in the desperate hope of getting enough commission to keep up payments on that ridiculously plebianly appointed timeshare on Kauai he can’t afford, but, by God, Tim and May bought one, so he had better buy one, too, because he isn’t going to be a time-shareless loser like Dan and Patty, and that guy down the street who reads books without pictures, of all the damned fool things, can you believe it, books without pictures and he actually reads them, he’s probably a communist or one of them thar East Coast ee-leet-ists with their highbrow edjukashun and thinking and talking about ideas instead of what American Idol contestants are wearing or the family life of our Olympic patriot athlete heroes. You can tell these hapless failures by their polo shirts and how they chew gum like their jaw is powering the sun, and how they describe everything with sports and military terms, from their products, to how they raise their kids, to how they have sex. “And then I saddled up to the plate and I scored, delivering my load like a patriot missile, out of left field, kapow BOOM!!” Morons. These are the ones who, when we open the doors to the studio, push others out of the way or, I’ve seen too many times, actually whip out their money clips. These types always have money clips, not wallets, because wallets hide what’s in them. The money clips ensure that everyone around them can see how much cash they carry around, impressing them endlessly, no doubt, “Look at me and my money! This is how I define myself!” even though whatever cash they have is probably already leveraged six ways to Sunday in overspent consumer debt. They whip out their money clips, usually from the “fine jewelry” kiosk in the middle of the hallway at the mall where they engrave right there while you watch, genuine crystal diamond substitute and real 10K gold plating, and they pay kids and adults to move to a different seat so that their kid, the most important kid in the universe can have what he judges to be the best seat in the Krazy Klown house, starting the kids early on the road to the narcissistic entitlement that ensures they get divorced within five years after they marry a similarly narcissistic self-loathing media-driven stooge, and spawn three hellishly boring and easily hated spoiled tyrant children. Hell, there are only 150 seats in the house, every seat a perfect view of the stage, which means the failure fathers don’t have to flip their money around, and also means that, for any tasteful person who accidentally happens into our studio, there is no escape from the banality and ludicrous dumbfoolery that happens here. But, dammit, he’s Super Dad, a “power” guy, who does “extreme” sports and bets big at Vegas not because he knows what he’s doing but because he has no self-esteem, and it’s essential that others see the size of his bets, though he’ll never tell you that because he’s convinced himself he’s the world greatest everything, and that’s his Super Son or Super Daughter, and they’re not gonna settle for ninety-nine perfect – for free, let me add – when they can have one hundred percent, no matter how much further into debt they go. No, by God, his kid is not going to school tomorrow and admit to sitting in a less-than-number one seat.

Pfagh! How I despise them. How I loathe all who spend their money without thought, filling their over-large houses with mass-produced art, tacky bric-a-brac, and banality, bought at house parties hosted by drab women with platinum highlights selling junk out of a catalog but offering it up like it is what artists would put on their walls if they weren’t a bunch of commie free-thinking radicals, a womb of uninspiration in which they can safely leave all aspirations outside and conceal from themselves everything which makes the world interesting and generative, and which, if let in, and actually inspected, would force them to realize how empty and unfulfilled their lives are; how they settled, year ago, for the lowest bar possible by installing it somewhere down in the basement, preferably the basement floor, maybe buried under the foundation so one never has to even see it, letting the sickness and fearfulness of their mall-based heterogeneity decide for them who they should be, and so they plunked themselves down in an oversized house on an overstuffed couch with their two kids and a mini-van, avoided live theater, shunned reading, and pretended museums don’t exist, complaining in fact that museums and schools suck so much taxpayer money that could go to sports arenas or race car tracks, places that “real” people go to where they can have a beer and a hotdog and not have to think and can pretend that they are the sports hero or the driver hero and forget all about the stupid people who don’t mean anything like the social workers and volunteers at the soup kitchen and the war protestors, so they could spend more time in the so-called “Family Room” which isn’t a place to share as a family, playing games and talking and enjoying each others’ company but is instead the room with the biggest TV and the most massive furniture so they can sit and have debased brain-numbing mundaneness force-fed into them at 24 fullscreen frames a second while they sit and grow fat together and dream about their next purchase, watching endless hours of stilted, deadening programming and artless movies, their only verbal interaction an occasional self-righteous chortle or barbed comment at someone even more grotesque than they are, muddily and illiterately bellowed over the fistful of Doritos and potato chips and string cheese and jerkied beef snacks they just shoved into their insatiable maws, honorable Sisyphus replaced with a cow-dung offering Jezebel to the human race. And sad news is, the “more grotesque” actually exist. They are out there. We get the sweatsuit-wearing families, the families who buy every food item we sell in the concession and feed to their already overweight calves, the ones whose girls have shirts with phrases like “Mom’s Little Hussie!” and “JUICY!”, and the undifferentiated sods who can’t communicate unless they’re shouting insults at one another, plodding heavily in their soiled tennis shoes, as though the words “finesse” and “panache” aren’t in their lexicon, which they aren’t.

Yet somehow I came to this point of lifeless hopelessness as a joke writer and the opening comic for a nauseatingly unnuanced Klown show. How many years must I suffer the indignity? How many have I suffered? How many of my truly creative ideas must be shot down at the writer’s table, while the lowbrow ideas are celebrated like a new Mona Lisa?

Not much longer, I decided three weeks ago. I had enough. Enough greasy spit-covered fingers trying pawing me, enough belligerent parents, enough food dropped on the floor by senseless kids who couldn’t pay attention if they were pumped up on Ritalin, which they probably already are, because their parents are so busy buying crap that they don’t bother to act like a parent. I was tired of being the only human being in a city of mindless cattle. I booked a theater for Friday night. I would begin my stand-up career which I put on hold fifteen years ago to be a puppet of the fecalous Krazy Klown empire. I opened for Krazy on Monday as usual, except not as usual, instead of the predictable vomitous hamfisted humor I am forced to do, I spoke in honesty about exactly what I thought of the loathsome garbage in the audience, and then I quit. I followed with a long, densely-worded truth-filled salvo that was published in the newspaper. Finally I was going to be free! Finally, my opportunity, long denied me by idiots and morons who are jealous of me, had come! Unlike the undriven sheeple, I was living my dreams. I was taking risks and refusing to be satisfied with just a suede couch and an SUV. I was going to be big, and be known as someone who really LIVED! The news stations, driven by the same kind of ambitionless sheep that I work – whoops, make that worked – with, had a field day, playing clips of my opener and reading from my article. Of course, no one understood the true merit of my helpful gesture, my attempt to lead them out of the cloud of mediocrity, my sacrificial desire to lift them out of their intellectual gutter, and they took offense. By Friday, everyone in town knew exactly what was wrong with them, and yet not one of them seemed to have any initiative to evolve.

My name as a Krazy Klown writer of course brought a crowd that night. They might be ignorant sloths and buffalo, but their obsession with being near the famous would draw them out, so they could live, even for just an hour, even if only vicariously, as a fully realized human being and have a taste of what it is they are afraid to strive for. I wasn’t surprised to see the theater sold out. Perhaps I misjudged. Perhaps they had heard my words, and were ready to change! They were ready to look up at me, adoringly, worshipfully, me, their intellectual and cultural superior, to ask me to open my hands and arms as their savior to lead them to new life, to real life, to the life they had abandoned! This was my moment! 1,500 of them! Ten times the crowd I’d been performing before! And this time, they left their filthy screaming antsy kids with their high-pitched wail and cotton-candy stuffed mouths at home, probably with some empty-headed teenage girl babysitter earning two dollars an hour so she could earn enough to go waste it on the next artless faddish poppish album by whatever child-whore diva the music industry was pushing that week, whose voice is in tune only because the engineers adjust the pitch for her, and whose popularity stems more from her gaudy teen-prostitute demographic-engineered outfit than anything that’s actually on the CD.

I skipped in joy onto the stage, and regaled the slack-jawed trash with my comedically insightful brilliance. My first bit didn’t go as well, but I was nervous. I got my groove on for the second bit, and it went flawlessly. Surprisingly, even as culturally feeble as they are, I thought they would laugh their processed-food-based asses off, but they just sat, thoughtless lumps dreaming of their next fast food king-sized meal topped off with a malt and an extra order of frenched fries. “Engage your brains, you donkeys!” I screamed to myself. I let go with my third, fourth, fifth bits. Nothing! The chattel were leaving, and leaving noisily. During the sixth bit, someone yelled out, “You suck!” The audience rose to a standing ovation for him. They probably had no idea who they were applauding since he had no makeup and used his normal voice, but I knew it was Krazy. How dare he! I continued, but as their applause died down, they all left. I guess they had their chance to humiliate me. Imagine, them thinking they could humiliate me! It was they who were humiliated by their failure to engage the world. Instead of bettering themselves, instead of taking my advice and making something of themselves, they tore down the only person in their midst who had a plan, a solution, a way out of the insipid life-denying culture they created. I flipped them all the bird and threw the microphone to the floor and stormed off the stage, imagining the various levels of hell to which they would be assigned when they finally realized that the life to which they have been clinging so desperately is so ugly, so awful, so pitiful, that there is no point in living any more, and die, lonely and forgotten, without ever making a mark in the universe that says “I was here!” or that they did anything of merit. Filth.

Krazy came to the dressing room. He stared at me, watching as I raged at my utterly unjust treatment. He finally spoke, in that annoying cloying bearded-Californian-hippy-therapist new agey emasculated voice that is his natural voice, if it even is natural, which I doubt, since I’m sure he took it on as an affectation to fit in with his crowd of equally conformist “sensitive” children’s performers, as though that were even something to aspire to instead of something to be utterly ashamed of. “I don’t think you’ll make it as a stand-up.” “No,” I said, “Not for these noxious cavemen.”

He looked at me, changing his face into his most egregious “I’m going to say something affirming and uplifting now” face, the one he uses whenever he’s being “serious” with the children or one of the crew, chastising at the same time he tries to lessen the wound, damning his soul to eternity, I can only hope, with his dishonest fakery and inability to speak the truth as it needs to be spoken. I wanted to shove my chair down his throat, push pencils in his soft cow-eyes, take blunt scissors and carve off that smug little “I still like you” smile on his face, anything to kill the saccharine over-wrought mood that oozed from his pores like the manufactured even-tempered “I tolerate everything” attitude of the dreadlocked hemp-wearing bicycle-riding clerks at the organic vegetarian co-op. “This has been an ugly week, but you’ve been part of the Krazy Klown family for a long time. Why don’t you come back? A family sticks together, forgives, and moves on.”

Moron! Seriously, what kind of moron says that? Every ounce of my hate, every gallon of my rage, boiled up within me at his arrogance, his stupidity, his simpering, fawning, superiorness! The world is an unjust place, especially tilted against the thinking, the thoughtful, the ones who have a will to live on their own terms. And that world thought it had beaten me.

I agreed to go back two weeks ago. The first day was awkward, since some clearly still were eaten up with jealously. Talentless uncreative trolls, all of them. I’d feel sorry for them, but they chose their soulless path. A few of the self-righteous wastes in the crew actually stood up for me, as though I needed defending! How dare they?! But I said nothing. What could I say that wasn’t already said, which they hadn’t already refused to hear? Makes me sick. And the audience! Just as low-class and unappreciative as ever. Their mouths still noisily scream with unrefined and untempered laughter and resound with the untamed smacking of lips that never can stay together while they chew their cud, whatever over-salted chemical-laded monstrosity they whined to their prozacced parents to have, except now I don’t know if they laugh at the jokes, or if they’re laughing at the one guy in their ugly, cookie-cutter world that had the willpower and brains to escape, but who they were able, through the power of the mindless mob, to shoot him down and hogtie, forcing him into a life of servile sterility and joyless conformity. Well, they may think they did that, but they didn’t. I still win. I am still their superior, because I have ideas, I have thoughts, and I put them into motion. And if they are laughing at me, then I laugh at their laughter, because they’re still numb to the world, advertising-driven monkeys with no hopes of any merit beyond stuffing their faces with junk and their minds with boorishness, and I have proven their lowness in comparison to me. They will never learn. They can never learn. Pathetic losers. They have learned nothing. But all the sickness I am forced to live with is worth it because the last laugh is mine, and it is aimed at them.

I think it's pretty funny and has a few truly wonderful lines.

I'm sad it didn't get accepted to publish, but what the hell. Some day it'll happen. And it was fun to write.

[Ozymanithrax]

1. A few comment on a first look.

Your first paragraph is way too long. YOu shoudl break it up. Something like this:

For two weeks now, I’ve been trying to figure out if people are laughing with me or at me. You see, for years I’ve opened for Krazy Klown’s KavalKade, our local clown TV show. My job is to warm up the audience, mostly snotty little kids with bad manners, short attention spans, and fruit juice-stained faces, and their idiot spawners who raise them in an atmosphere of largesse and an apathy that equates to a positive reinforcement of selfishness and unmannered cretinism.

That would have opened the story and not been so fatiguing to the eye. The problem with really long paragraphs is that people's eyes get fatigued and they quite reading.

Some of the stentences are also too long.

What a waste of what could have been an incredible life, to earn a living by telling jokes to future sociopaths and meth-heads so that they’ll laugh more when that disturbingly buffoonish Krazy Klown comes out and does his dumbed-down pathetic shtick that only reinforces in the brats all the unmannerly, tacky, society-destroying behavior they’ve learned from their self-absorbed parents whose sole aspiration seems to be nothing more than to possess more meaningless crap than their neighbors, and to have their kids be involved in more lifeless activities.

That sentence will not fly in the USA, though in British and Australian ficiton they write longer sentences.

It is also just a bit dark. It is a bit dark and your POV character is about as sympathetic as Dick Cheney with a bottle of Jack Danials and a loaded shotgun.

What market did you sent ths too?

It does have a lot of dark humor.

[Rabrrrrrr]

2. As I stated, I know that the sentences are too long.

The effect being that it's being written by an idiot.

You could be right on the first paragraph, though - even though it's written by a long-winded idiot who learns nothing, it might help to have a shorter first paragraph.

It's a tough story (in real life) because instead of being written well as a normal story might be, it's a first-person semi-literate stream-of-consciousness rant by a guy who's a total failure with delusions of grandeur.

I should hope that readers would realize that the shitty writing style is not my (the real author) problem, but a problem with the character who's too consumed with faux-rage to bother to write clearly.


But, since you didn't seem to get that, perhaps that's the problem with the story. But I don't know how to make it any clearer that, obviously, I-the-author know it's written poorly, but the character-who-is-the-author is clueless about how almost-unreadable his rant is.

[Ozymanithrax]

3. I also like to stay in character.

But you are selling this to an editor, who probably isn't an idiot.

As I said, huge paragraphs and very long sentences are difficult for American readers. An Editor must think about how his/her audience will view the story.

It is also difficult to sell a story where the character isn't sympathetic. I did get that the character was an idiot, I just found nothing in the character to relate to.

I write in a naturalistic style using lots of natural speech and rhythms such as,

"I was walkin' down ta sidewalk a week ago last Sunday when this sailor up and asked me if I was sellin' what I was wigglin'? I told him I wasn't that kind of lady. He gots to ask me out right and proper and buy me a drink bevore we dicker for a price."

It doesn't always go well. It also depends on the market. There are markets out there for edgy, stream of consciousness stuff. Keep trying.

I've sold several short stories. One of them went to eleven different places before they bought it. It takes time.

All misspelling on my dialog above are there on purpose, because the character speaks that way.

[nuxvomica]

4. I enjoyed the story very much but I have some notes

First of all, replace the first line. It should have read "whether" instead of "if" anyway and it doesn't grab the reader very well.
I think you need to sketch out the Krazy Klown character more and earlier on, before he appears at the narrator's comedy gig. A little background about that character, viewed through the narrator's filter, would create more personal tension in the story. It's also an opportunity to see how much you can convey about the narrator's cluelessness through his own words. Setting up that relationship will make the scene in the theatre more interesting.
The long sentences are not a problem as long as you work on the rhythm of them. They should be waves that carry the reader, not an undertow that they struggle against. For the most part, I think you're successful in doing that but you need to finish some of the weaker spots. One example is this line:
"...a womb of uninspiration in which they can safely leave all aspirations outside.. "
It has too much "spiration" in it and it begins a confusing part of the story that I had to re-read a few times. I didn't find purchase again until "...and so they plunked themselves down..."
The worst I could do with my criticism is convince you that it's a bad story and it's not. The basic plot is a good idea and there are plenty of brilliant moments in the rants so I would suggest a little rewriting would be worthwhile. It reminded me of the book "A Confederacy of Dunces" and the movie "A Thousand Clowns", both of which are good company.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

5. I thought he couldn't change the first line.........

That was the purpose of the whole gig.