I write, edit, and sub quite a lot. Probably more than I should, at times — sometimes, I just send out a story because I’ve been having a bad day, and I want to feel like I did something productive. Then later, I look at what I sent out, and I regret it. Hey ho.
But more often, it’s just something I do — a necessary step at the end of the writing and revision. At first, I get neither optimistic nor nervous. I don’t feel bad about rejections (or at least, not as bad as I USED to feel), and I don’t get excited until a story’s lingering at its market for a while…and now, even that doesn’t really stir me up too much.
But there’s an exception to all of this.
Whenever I’m submitting to a mail-only market, one of those old-fashioned places that doesn’t take electronic submissions, I get a real buzz out of it! There’s something great about the whole process — printing out the story, holding it in my hands, dropping it into an envelope to go, and sticking my own little address-label in the top left corner…even though it will likely come to nothing more than the same rejection I get back from electronic subs, it feels like an event. I feel like every time I do that, my writing has reached a kind of waypoint. It just feels really, really good.
(I asked some people online about this. Apparently, I’m the only one who feels this way.)
So, I suppose I’m old-fashioned when it comes to this. I’d probably be delighted if every market was restricted to mail subs, or even if more of them allowed mail subs as an option at least — it costs paper, ink, envelopes, time, and mailing fees of course, including the little pre-stamped envelope for your form rejection letter.
But I love it.
And to end with, a song that’s completely unrelated to all of this, but that’s on my mind after watching Park Myung Soo’s Guerilla Concert on Infinity Challenge…
(Addendum: this is an old post, and whatever the video once was, it’s now gone. What’s here now is what I think it probably was, but it’s hard to be certain.)