Ways for Neurotic Writers to Torture Themselves – Possibly a Rant

If you are a writer submitting your work around, you know the ol’ waiting game is torturous. You know the drill: spend a few buckets of blood on a new story, then chew off all your fingernails as you edit the thing, re-edit it, then go back to the way it was two edits ago, then re-edit again. You know – just for fun.

After a while, you get confused. Is the story better the way it was 3 versions ago, or if you combine the ending from 2 versions ago with the beginning from 5 versions ago would the characters seem more developed? 7 versions ago the sentence structure seemed tighter, but this last version it seems looser. But which is better?

Of course, once you completely and utterly HATE the story, you know it’s ready to be sent out to editors who you expect will hate it equally as much as you do. You gird your loins and go out to Duotrope to find places where you think the story might possibly get massacred, or maybe the editors will just slit its throat quietly in a dark alleyway (uh-oh, I’ve been reading too many Court Merrigan stories, sorry…) or perhaps your story will come back with a terrible virus if the editor is really mean and says something a little encouraging. Oh hell…

THEN you have to look at the story cross-eyed for two weeks and start plucking and reshaping its eyebrows, but before long you’ve shaved half its head into some wierd half-mohawk, and of course you soon realize you have to shave the other half of its head and then it’s not the story you started with at all … but maybe this one is better?

You’re not able to send it back to editor three who was slightly encouraging in their rejection because they didn’t ask for a rewrite, they threw the raw meat back at you and said to filet it a different way and serve it to someone else.

Oh, mother of all parrots.

All of this is actually the norm. No, really, I mean that. It’s pretty much par for the course. At least for me it is.

But lately, I’ve come up with new and daring ways to torture myself all on my own without the assistance of an editor.

If you’ve gotten this far, you writers who are addicted to the masochistic tendancies we all share, for god’s sake please look away now. Don’t read what I’m about to say, because it’s a great way to make yourself crazy.

(Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

So just for fun I go to my list of submissions and look at submissions that are more than four weeks old. I start at the bottom, which means a submission labeled #1 – the item that has been waiting longest for response.

Then I go back to Duotrope and see what is the average number of days to acceptance or rejection. Then I go back to the list, as if it was my very own personal crystal ball, and figure out if I should have heard back yet.

If I’m overdue for a response, I send a polite inquiry to find out if, maybe, perhaps, the editors have been fighting amongst themselves whether or not to accept my piece or a piece by Jhumpa Lahiri. (Hey, this is my blog and my fantasy so back off, M-kay?)

Now here comes the maddening part. Sometimes, the staff will write me back with a cryptic one or two sentence note saying, yeah we’ve still got your story hostage over here, we’ve tied it up in the backroom and we’ve water-boarded it repeatedly and its not talking. We’re moving on to the pliers and fingers next. In other words, we haven’t made up our minds and we’ll let you know when we do.

In the world of neurotic writers, and by “the world” I mean me obsessively checking email 100 times a day, getting this “your story is still under consideration” note is not enough to do a happy dance, because it’s not an acceptance, and yet, YET, it’s not an out and out rejection either.

It would never, ever occur to me that the editor’s dog got bit by a squirrel and they are off at the vet and that’s why I haven’t heard back, or maybe they’re off doing the very mysterious things editors do in their free time (hahaha, I said editors and free time) and not spending their every waking moment thinking about whether or not they’ll accept my story or not. No, in my fantasy life, that’s all they think about.

And since it’s all they’re thinking about – why can’t they Hurry Up and Make a Decision before I gnaw through the cable connecting my laptop to the internet?

Please, writer friends, for the sake of your health: Do Not Try This At Home.

I am not cool

I’m not cool. I’m not a hipster. I don’t live in Brooklyn. I’m not hipster enough for Brooklyn. I’m not a lesbian. Lesbians are cool and hipster. They get extra points if they have tattoos and multiple piercings. I don’t have any tattoos (or multiple piercings). I’m not sure what kind of tattoos I’d have if I got any, but I probably wouldn’t get cool ones if I did. I’d probably get a tattoo of a butterfly and then my hipster friends from Brooklyn (I don’t really have any) would tell me that’s SO 1980′s. Yeah, that’s probably what would happen.

An editor friend of mine, (in other words, an editor I befriended by sending them lots of emails and they graciously answer,) recommended I read The Chronology of Water. Another editor friend of mine said it’s a fantastic book and she wants to know what I think of it when I’m done reading it. (I just started reading it.)

After two pages of reading it I have an opinion about me, not the book or the author. I thought, yeah, I’ll never be able to write like this. I’m not just un-cool, I’m so far out of the loop on what is cool it’s a freaking miracle any of my writing has seen the light of day. She starts the book by describing how she delivers a stillborn baby. It’s a fucking memoir. Non-fiction. Yeah well, game over, check and check mate. Mad respect to the author, for sure, and I’ll continue on in my un-coolness.

And then, THEN, an author friend of mine sent me an email telling me about that whole Adrien Brody kerfuffle over at MuuMuu House. So I went and read that thing and I was completely horrified and disgusted by it. I guess now when a 21 year old girl (yes, GIRL) decides to be self-destructive and publish her self-destructive sex-capades for all to read like a car wreck happening in slow motion, we’re all supposed to read it and clap and say how cool it is? Well I’m not. It wasn’t cool and I’m not cool about it. And shame on the 40+ year old pervert asshole who took advantage of the situation. That girl needs adult guidance, role models and help, not publishing.

Maybe this blog post is really about how I can’t keep up anymore. I just started reading The Rumpus, and I’m getting hooked on HTML Giant and I regularly read PANK, Word Riot, Wigleaf, Dogzplot, and many other talented writers - and editor-writers too – and I’m running out of time and room in my brain for what’s cool. All these things I’m mentioning are cool, I know they’re cool and THEY know they’re cool.

How does a writer without an MFA and without connections to Brooklyn or Berkeley or any other cool place get known? (Am I worthy of being known…yet? I keep asking people to read my stories, so clearly I’d like to be known.)

And since we’re being honest, I don’t even really know who is cool. I know who I think is cool but even that is my own limited knowledge based on where I’ve been stumbling around on the internet to do my reading. I know what I LIKE and I know what I RESPECT – but is that good enough? I wish I knew the answer to that question, but as I’ve already said, I’m not cool. I don’t know the answer.

I want to hang out with the cool kids, and be in their company, but I think they might think I’m a poser. A wanna be.

I feel like a poser when I look at my stories and their stories. I don’t want to write what they write, I want to write what I write – just better.

I want to be good enough to write the stuff people say…wow, did you read that? That was cool.