What to do with a one-act play about Hitler.

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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Photobook.

Like everyone else with an iPhone and Instagram, I have convinced myself that I am a fantastic ameutur phorographer. With an eye toward making a photo book of the quality one might find at the neighborhood Urban Outfitters, I have been checking photo books out of the library every day and teaching myself the genre of the photo book and let me tell you (as a writer), I am very much disappointed by what is going on there. The brutal dictatorship of the joyless black and white - while not total - is near total.

The other day I checked out a book called WHY IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE IN FOCUS: Modern Photography Explained and while I fancy myself an egalitarian, I am left with the cancerous black humor of one who wants simply to yell, “STOP IT! JUST STOP IT!”

Much like my father at a Jackson Pollock exhibition, I feel the urge to to scream, “I feel like I am taking crazy pills!”

Perhaps it does not have to be in focus, but perhaps it should be.

Now let’s be clear, I do attend a second tier research university, have no formal photography training, and am what my mother refers to as “artsy” (by which she secretly means,”I so hope he is gay”. My mother desperately wants at least one of her sons to be gay and I am the most likely candidate due to my love of scarves and my propensity to blog about the failings of photo books. I am however not, sorry mom), and I guess I am simply a person who is upset by the unrelatable quality of most of the photo books I have seen lately. Perhaps the selection at my library is just lacking. Whatever the case may be, I am soldering forth with the photobook idea. 

In my defense, I do imagine it as being something more than only a photobook. I look forward to writing the captions and notes. I’m envisioning a sort of lunatic and lie-filled travel narrative to inform the pictures. I haven’t written it yet though because I am still gathering up photos. Today though I have taken the first real step on the road to creation: I have made a folder in Google Drive.

Tellingly, I put it inside of my “Writing” folder.

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Something I May Have in Common with Ho Chi Minh.

Last night as I was falling asleep I was thinking about the Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (as we all do from time to time) and that got me thinking about that golden age of comic books and pulp writing. I used to imagine that I would have been good at that life, constantly writing crappy detective novels and getting paid by the word. I think I would have been good at that sort of thing because I have always found that almost without fail the best writing is produced by actually writing and not - as many writers I know seem to think - by not writing. I’m not necessarily a quantity over quality kind of guy, but I think that good writing is often produced by accident while trying to do something else.

Then it occurred to me that I live in the 21st century and I goddamn COULD be writing that way! Why am I NOT constantly writing pulp novels and just e-publishing them? I could be making TENS OF DOLLARS if I did that!

Well there are two reasons why I have not been doing that and both of them are pretty stupid:

1. All of the professional type publishing people I have ever talked to (which is basically four people) all told me that that sort of independent publishing has not yet shed the stigma of the old vanity presses. One woman told me, “If your band puts out an album on its own or if you make an indie movie and distribute it online, that’s totally cool, but people don’t feel that way about self-publishing.” That being said, it is increasingly clear that no one in the legit publishing industry has any fucking clue what is going on in the legit publishing industry, so why do I ever listen to anyone? Listening to other people has never gotten me anywhere in life.
2. This reason is even dumber but also of practical concern, I am a terrible editor of my own work and I am an even worse line editor. Can you imagine how embarrassing it would be to put a novel out there into the world with spelling errors and tense shifts? It would be SO EMBARRASSING!

Now, all that being said, I could overcome those things. I want to say that I don’t have the time to do all of that right now (this semester really is kicking my ass), but there never seems to be time for these things, so one just has to DO them.

I probably would make a small concession to the legit publishing people though and e-publish under a pen name. Actually, let’s not think of it as a nom de plume and instead as a nom de guerre, like Leon Trotsky or Ho Chi Minh or Martin Sheen, that way I still have my own name (tarnished as it may be) if and when those fancy New York publishing houses come aknockin’,

It is fun to think about: what to write if no one knows you’re writing it. What would you do if you knew you’d get away with it?

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