LEND ME YOUR EAR: HOMING PIGEONS GRIST FOR WRITER'S MILL

At inventory time, I always take a breather from writing to compare the ups and downs of my checkerboard career with the outs and ins of previous years. My files have odd labels: Publications, Funny Stuff, Regrettable Stuff and Rejects.

The Rejects folder is the weightiest, and I wonder why I keep separating Funny and Regrettable. No one has been rejected for more reasons than I, and often, the reasons have been as funny as regrettable; funny-peculiar if not funny-ha-ha. Once, I had a story returned because my name ends in "berg" and I was not Jewish. Other submissions suffered the same fate because I was not black, or a musician, dancer, bowler, boater, member of the Peace Corps, a university professor, a psychiatrist, or an unwed pregnant co-ed.

Later, some flyers became homing pigeons because an advance query was now required, or because they had not been assigned. Three of seven assigned by Jack and Jill were returned because they were no longer relevant. Two became picture stories, and only one was published in full. "Ben Franklin's Mechanical Man," however, wound up as the lead in the Saturday Evening Post Youth Publications 200th Anniversary collection, and this more than compensated for the total losses.

Once, after Seventeen accepted a story, they reneged because I was not a teenager. How was I to know they were sponsoring a contest for teens? Their editorial readers assumed "The Money Tree" was an entry. Unfortunately, they asked for my picture.

The most gratifying reject I ever received came from Frederick Fell, a publisher of guidebooks and how-to's. The editor dubbed it "thorough, amusing, amiable, and downright fun," but the publisher explained that interest in a "Guidebook for Singletons" would be too limited to risk. In short, Mr. Fell didn't fall. Not long after, we singletons came into our own, but the burgeoning of the electronic age rendered my excerpts obsolete.

Fancy receiving a reject when all you wanted was permission to paraphrase a title. Why on earth did I ask? I was writing a puppet play to be incorporated in a novel for teens, and my query landed in Australia. Norman Lindsay's wife and co-author replied that plans were afoot to turn "The Magic Pudding" into a puppet play and tour America with it.

Six months later, my title -- "The Magic Onion" -- appeared as a puppet play in Woman's Day. Jean Bell Mosley, who had followed the course of events, telephoned to commiserate with me. My only comfort was that I had not revealed my plot!

Some years ago I sent "Ten Ways to Save the Money You Don't Have To Begin With" to Sunset, a new magazine for senior citizens. Five months and two queries later, the L.A. publisher returned it with the jolly news that something similar would be coming out in their very next issue. I asked for a copy, but my request was ignored.

Shortly after, I lost a one-act play ironically titled "Inner Peace" to an experimental theatrical company. The group had disintegrated, and the director wrote he had no idea what had happened to any of the plays on hand.

To balance the score, many a chapter lifted from an unsold book found a home. Most of those in the "Guidebook for Singletons" were published in small magazines, including London's Bedsitter -- and came to rest in the bedsitting room of Queen Elizabeth II. "The Money Tree," having failed Seventeen, went to American Girl, and was reprinted in Braille for blind children the world over.

Eventually, ignoring advice to scribblers to write only what they knew, I set "Lookout Summer" in the only part of the country I had never seen -- the Pacific Northwest. But Lothrop, Lee and Shepard had 20 career books on hand, and published only four a year.

So how did "Lookout Summer" make it a year ahead of schedule? Perhaps because I sent a wire reading "Shall try to hang on till the book sees print but fear I am but a dangling Participle."

The "Participle" has continued to dangle for another 35 years, with Lend Me Your Ear her principal subject since late 1981. But the Lord of all keeps hinting that the time is near for the predicate to end the sentence.

Happy New Year.

~Aileen Lorberg is a language columnist for the Southeast Missourian.