Being quiet around here means I’ve been dealing with a lot of rejection and getting angrier than I should:
There is really no reason for this seething because: 1) This is nothing new to me, 2) I know it isn’t personal, 3) there are tons of submissions, and of course, 4) publication is largely a luck of the draw, depending on who is reading, what that person likes, the mood they’re in, the point they are in their life, and all these other variables that are well beyond my control. See? I’m being levelheaded. And yet.
Melissa and I were talking recently about how we should make quilts out of our rejections. To keep us warm at night. I sometimes think about making an Excel spreadsheet of all my rejections and acceptances, but realize that may only exacerbate my problem. This is the literary rabbit hole: We’re all mad here, Alice.
Here are some good things that actually haven’t made me feel crazy:
- I did a Q/A session with Cartridge Lit about videogames and writing and videogame writing
- I was nominated by Ghost Ocean Magazine for the 2014 Best of the Net anthology
- I had an essay published in the Rumpus about the movie Return to Oz and being a weird, morbid child
- I’m now reading fiction submissions for Pithead Chapel and you should send me stories to read
- I have an Ello, although I’m not sure what this will turn into, if anything
I’ve missed reading submissions. I like to see what people are trying to write, what kind of vibes are out there in the literary zeitgeist. You can distinguish patterns after a while. I’ve thought again and again about starting my own literary journal, but I always decide against it. It’s a huge commitment and I think I’d just rather spend more time working on my own writing instead.
I’ve been using Ello as more of an unfiltered brain collage. Like Twitter but with less people scrolling through. I told Facebook how I was enjoying it because no one is there. This was something I posted:
I don’t know how I feel about social media anymore. I used to love it (genuinely and unironically) back in the days of MySpace and Livejournal, but I have a much more bittersweet relationship to it all now. I think this is mostly because: 1. There is so much content and noise to filter through that it hardly seems worth the time, and 2. there’s not very much dialogue, despite there being plenty of words. I used to have a much better sense of community too, which is something I thought was not very important to me. How things change.
I guess I don’t really know where to put the words anymore. What goes where? Does it matter? Won’t it achieve the same result if I just scribble to myself in a notebook? I’ve never been the writer who thinks about audience or even thinks about having an audience at all. I just do it to do it. Social media isn’t about promotion for me, it’s about productive discussion and connecting to people who might make good friends someday. Not even readers, necessarily.
It’s October already. The year is disappearing. I made a new mix tape on 8tracks that’s all about witches and witchcraft:
[8tracks width=”300″ height=”250″ playops=”” url=”http://8tracks.com/mixes/4847361″]
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