A couple weeks ago I spent an entire day gathering up all of the various pieces of short writing that I have (two lines long all the way up to 30 pages long) and sat myself down and started submitting it out. This is something I try to do every six months or so. I was not able to do it early this year because life just got so chaotic and busy. It was starting to bother me though that I had not published anything since the end of 2015 and if I now that I have started this MFA program, I can not reasonably go around bitching about wanting to publish “for real” (ie: a serious work with a serious publisher, and preferably a novel) if I do not have my nose pressed against that old grindstone. So I submitted out about 40 pieces total (stories and poems) and now they are floating out there in the ether.
I’m making it sound easy, but it really is an endeavour. I like to go to the Poets & Writers database of lit journals. If I have pieces that I already think would appeal to particular journals, then I get those out of the way first. Then I - sort of randomly - pick out a punch of lit journals and learn about them and read some of their old stuff and then read ALL of their submissions guidelines (this is one of the most tedious ways to spend one’s freetime) and then if everything looks good, I submit.
As of this morning here are my stats:
I’ve had 2 pieces of fiction accepted for publication.
4 pieces of fiction and 5 poems rejected.
There are 36 other pieces still floating out there.
Believe it or not, that is not bad. That is actually pretty fantastic and I am very happy so far.
Sometimes it can take months to hear back from a magazine or journal, assuming your hear back at all, many places just never respond, that’s why I wait about 6 months before doing a big push to get stuff out there. One of the more prestigious locally published Los Angeles journals (which still required paper submissions) has never gotten back to me at all and I submitted to them in 2014.
Once I get a few more rejections in, I will go resubmit that stuff out again. I also have about two dozen more pieces that I did not submit last time because I just couldn’t find a good place for them (For instance: I have a one-act play about Hitler. You know how hard it is to find a place that will even consider a one-act play about Hitler?)
Doing all of this stuff is a little stressful because it means that the writer is going through every day always knowing that at any moment a new rejection email can come in (On Tuesday I got two completely separate rejections within hours). That, however, is the life.
I often wonder if any of this means anything. Unless I’m getting published in The Paris Review, does it make any difference? I don’t know. And here’s the thing - which I have always suspected, but since starting this MFA program feel truly confident about - no one else knows either. There is no career path for a writer and no prescribed guideline.
I guess the best shot any of us have is to do the best work we can and then try to get it out there into the cold and cruel world. Don’t take the rejection that hard, accept that it is part of the process, and keep going.
There are two other new and interesting things I have been working on:
I got in touch with a small press I have always liked that is down in LA and asked how their submissions works, hoping to pitch them the book I am working on as part of that artist-in-residence thing I did with the San GAbriel National MOnument. Well I was able to get the first half of it into their hot little hands. I doubt that anything will come of it because its not quite their jam, but still, they’re reading it. That in and of itself is cool. I have never had the courage to do that sort of thing before.
Long have I wanted to play around with some of the print-on-demand self-publishers set up to work with Amazon, so I took a poetry chapbook I had sitting around (about 30 pages long) and went over to the PSU library (because I no longer have a PC) and set it up using a company called Blurb. The layout was incredibly frustrating to learn, but will likely be easier in the future since I have kind of learned it now. Through that company I have ordered a (hopefully) real-looking version of the book (I made a cover and everything!) and it should be here this week. If it looks good enough and I’m happy with it, I can get it set up to sell on Amazon. How cool is that?? Now, obviously no one is going to buy the thing because I am a TERRIBLE poet, but still it would be pretty cool.
So that I what I have been doing. In addition to, you know, all the work that goes into earning an MFA degree while also looking for a job and also trying to write a Nanowrimo novel.
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