Friday, September 10, 2010

Write-jection 2: Freddy's Revenge

I really hate Twitter.
-----"Going to bank now."
------"Stuck N class."
-------"Late 4 work again."
--------"Jerking off 2 Miley Cyrus."
Facebook is better, but some people use it for the same inane reason.
---"Mason Dixon...hates Tuesdays."
I don't know why, but I always feel my blog posts need to be entertaining. That I need to have something to say other than
"Hello, I know I haven't written in my blog in a while, but I promise to try harder. I'm taking Jenny to soccer practice in five minutes, so I thought I'd get on here and update everyone on the family. Aaron is fine. Jenny is fine. Howard and I are fine. The dog is whiny, but he is fine. It is time to start buying fall clothes. Oh dear. Time to go, Jenny is giving me the finger. Will blog again soon."
I don't get the people who are fine with that. But hey, that's just me.

So, I really only got on here to say two things.

1.

A few months ago, I got a rejection letter for something I had written. I was particularly upset about it because it was sent in to one of those "for the love" publications (ie, a non-paying market) and it was still rejected. I'm not good with rejection, and I blogged about being sad about it.

Well, I got another one today. This one was even sillier, since an acquaintance was starting up a online magazine and he wanted some free stories to start out with (he'd only put up one so far, and it was only two hundred words). I wrote a story a month or two back I thought would work fine, but ending up spending twice as long as I did to write it trying to get it down to the requisite length. The rejection, while friendly and constructive, came almost immediately (within twenty-four hours of submitting it), and the editor felt it needed some work.

Now, this didn't destroy me or ruin my day or anything.* But it did give me pause. While I admit I'm not a great judge of my own work, I felt this was a perfectly cromulent story, and certainly better than some of my writings. What if I've been deluding myself, and I'm just no good, or at least not cut out to be a writer?

I've heard filmmakers say, "If you can do anything else with your life, do not pursue filmmaking as a career." I may have heard writers say that too. And the truth is, I've probably made ten times as much money (and gotten far more accolades) for my acting than my writing. Yet a writer is what I consider myself, first and foremost.

2.

The other thing I wanted to comment on was exercise. As in "my lack of."

For some crazy reason, I got my bike out of storage yesterday and took a ride around the block. It was nice, so I figured I'd ride until my legs started to hurt, then I'd turn back. Of course, that meant that they REALLY hurt by the time I got home. No big deal, I need the pain.

But when I woke up the next morning, my legs were very upset with me. What's more, my arse felt like I was back in summer camp.

Sorry.

I'm just saying that I'm out of shape and my body complained when I did exercise. So tonight, it was after midnight (nearly one) and I was going to lay down and read, when I got the crazy idea, "You know how your legs hurt from yesterday's bike ride? Wouldn't it be great to do that again?" So, I got a flashlight and went out and bike rode again, even though it was much less comfortable than the night before.

This is how real people probably do it, I thought, They exercise all the harder when their bodies don't want them to, and they never, ever, ever think about writing.

Well, even though I suffered for my dedication the day after that, I somehow found renewed determination on the writing front as well. I submitted five stories to various podcasts and webzines, figuring that, even if I am rejected by all of them, I will have some feeling of accomplishment, the way I did when I grunted through those final two blocks on my bike.

I'm trying here, folks. Not a lot, but some.

Rish "Bicycle Writer" Outfield

*The criticism of a recent episode of our show got me way more bummed than this.

4 comments:

Big Anklevich said...

Keep it up! Like you yourself said many times in the past, quitting anything, be it writing or exercising or almost anything else, is so much easier than forging ahead. Someday, you'll thank yourself for it.

Big Anklevich said...

Oh, and your pretend sucky post looks so remarkably like one of my most recent blog posts that I can't help but feel like my writing was just rejected by a personal acquaintance, just like you were.

At least I followed it up with a post about my cat. So I totally redeemed myself there.

Abigail Hilton said...

Anything you see from me on FB is cross-posted from Twitter, so you are subjected to the same level of lunacy no matter where you go. Personally, I like Twitter because a lot of the people I never wanted to see again from high school can't figure out how to use it. Unfortunately, everyone knows how to use FB. :-z

Submissions - yay! Go Rish! I need to write some more stuff for general submission.

Markets - In my experience, once you get beyond the pro-rated markets, it's no more difficult to get published in a for-the-love than a semi-pro or a token payment market. It's just a matter of matching the tastes of that particular editor (which can be difficult anywhere). That story you ran on the Dunesteef recently was first published in GUD (a semi-pro market) and it was rejected several times from for-the-love markets. I decided a while back not to submit to for-the-love's anymore. A market that pays something, anything, just looks better on your writing resume. It's no harder to get published there, and wait times are about the same.

Now if you're aiming at the pro-level markets, yes. It's harder and wait times are ridiculous - 6 months to a year for them to send you that 3 line form rejection.

So, for me, the markets at the top and the bottom of the foodchain are the ones to which I have the hardest time justifying submissions.

JMPerkins said...

Rejections suck.

When I started submitting I think I was at a 50 rejection to 1 acceptance ratio. Now I'm 'better' with about a 12 to 1... uggg.

The perspective trick that helps me is I imagine that there is a certain (unknown) number of no's have to collect before I get to a yes. It's kind of a cheesy salesman's trick... but even for all that it makes me feel better.