Fictional Thought #001: Revisiting the Rejection Pile for Kernels of Truth

It's been more than five years since I last sent out short fiction submissions, and on a whim I decided to look back at those stories.  I've always been a bit embarrassed to look back at my older stories--even the ones that made it to print--so up to this point I've simply let the ones that have collected their full measure of rejections collect dust in my files.  Reading Nei Gaiman's short story collection Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders, however, made me realize that some of those stories might be salvageable.  Or more than that, truly great stories that I had failed, whether through lack of skill or experience, to tell properly. 

I've only managed to work my way through one and a half of them so far, but the mistakes literally leap out at me from the pages.  This could be either a good or bad thing.  Maybe it means I've gotten much better in the last five years; or maybe it means I was crap then, and I'm still crap (though of a slightly lesser magnitude) now.  I'm prepared to reserve judgment on that determination.  But what surprises me is how clearly I can see the gem hidden within each story--a kernel of cathartic truth (for it is truth that the storyteller seeks to share, though every word from his mouth and character on the page is, by the very nature of fiction, a clever lie) that could serve to animate a story, the way the soul can be said to animate a human being--and the sense of excitement I feel at the prospect of nurturing those kernels into a new form, one hopefully more true to them than my previous attempts have been.  In both cases, it's been so long since I'd written the stories that I had completely forgotten about their kernels, so it's almost as if they are care packages that I'd given to myself, more than half a decade ago.