Time For/To Publication

Because I cannot help myself, I write a "General Prologue" for each Two Page Tuesday. I’d be lying if it were not in part a way for myself to read also, since I’m not going to do a two-page reading (I’m the organizer: I want to hear other people read), but I conceived of it mainly as a scene-setting device, as a way to establish a tone and a mood and a clean way to transition from the bullshitting into the reading (before we, of course, go back to the bullshitting). There have been three readings so far and therefore there have been three "prologues," and in this last I began by talking about how on this podcast the hosts were discussing where it’s best to get poems and stories and things published, if and how that should be a goal. For the purposes of the "prologue" I then took it over to communities and in-person things and why the reading was so great, etc., etc., but I’ve been thinking about it mostly in other ways, at least as far as myself is concerned.

I tend to dislike sending stories out. In fact, I really haven’t done very much of that at all since grad school. Partly it was the pandemic, partly it was working on a novel, but largely it was because I just don’t like the waiting. I’ve worked for/on enough journals to know that it’s a deeply weird and haphazard thing. Yes, good work does rise to the top eventually. But also a lot of stories get passed on because the reader, often a grad student, is hungover and needs a snack and has to power through 200 submissions by the end of the day and thinks that what they’re working on right now is better than anything they could possible read here, so why send anything along through?

(Am I bitter? Maybe. But also this is not an inaccurate picture. I have been this grad student. This is also part of the reason I no longer work on literary journals.)

There was a period at the beginning of this calendar year when I was sending stories lots of places. These were "short shorts," around or under 1,000 words. They’re kind of too long for the "flash fiction" people, and a little too short for the "fiction" people (and so I tell myself that that’s part of why it’s so hard for me to get them published). But I was sending them. I’d finished a good draft of a novel and needed something different to do. Eight months later I’ve collected a good number of form rejections, a couple personalized rejections, and six or seven still outstanding. I’m debating sending out again, but we’ll just have to see: I’m also querying agents about the novel, and I don’t know how much further waiting and rejection I want to carry. (I’ll probably send, maybe after looking over the stories again; I’m OK at compartmentalizing the waiting.)

But what I’ve been thinking about, mostly, is time. How long it takes to hear back, and how long it takes to get the thing published, and then how long it takes for the next one. I’ve had new friends ask to see work, or if I would mind if they went and read some of the published stories, but I always say that they’re so old, they’re not really representative, but then, even if I were to get one of the stories I’d sent earlier this year published, those would not be representative now, either.

This is partly because I’m still not really "settled," I guess, artistically. But also I don’t think anyone ever really is, and also I suppose I’m more settled now than I have ever been. Still.

I met a guy at a wedding who’s also a writer and with whom I was commiserating about how hard it is to get a novel published. He’s got an agent, but is in the no-man’s land that is what’s called being "on submission." It was good to talk to someone about it. But he later sent me a link to a recently published story, and again the caveat was something to the effect of it not really being "current." The journal in question had a little drama and he’d sent it in before any of the drama even began, how long ago. It’s all a lot of weird delay.

Of course, I completely understand why things are the way they are. There are too many fucking writers. Too many fucking submissions, too many fucking micro online "magazines" that nobody reads, too few fucking dollars to support any of this. I think the only people making money on literary concerns are the people who own Submittable.[1][2] And there has never been money in literary journals. That’s not the point. But they also used to be run by the generationally-wealthy. The circles were smaller. This wasn’t necessarily a good thing. But it was different.

That’s largely the reason why, when I was running Response, the model was one of solicitation vs submission — I had (and still have) absolutely no interest in reading through a slush pile. It’s almost inhumane, the waiting. And journals are even now catching up to the literary agents in terms of there now being a "Closed No Response" option: "Unfortunately, due to the volume of materials we receive, we may not be able to respond to every submission or query." I mean: rude.[3]

All of which is to say that I feel good about running a reading series instead of a literary journal (even though I genuinely love producing literary journals), and I feel bad about the state of literary publishing. This is not, of course, a new or particularly unique take. But a long time ago, the writer who was then serving as the department head of my MFA program railed during workshop one day about how young writers — fiction writers especially — try to publish too soon (never mind that many of us were in or approaching our thirties or were even older than that). As with many of the things this writer said that infuriated me back then, I’m a little less enraged now. I can almost see his point. I mean, I still disagree. But this is a world in which you might get something published a year, two, three years after you finished your edits and rewrites and revisions and proofreads, and will it then still be something you’re proud of? Maybe, maybe not.

But also I guess you’ve still go to fucking try, don’t you? If you want to do the "writer" thing, I think, you really do.


1. The default submissions portal. It’s a nice app, but I remember when it was called "Submishmash" and it was free.
2. I should start a competitor and make my own money, shouldn’t I?
3. Especially given that it’s not exactly hard to automate a close/rejection email after X days. I mean, shit, I know these are books people and not computers people, but it’s really not that hard.

Two Page Tuesday #3

It was last night, it was a success.

I didn’t do a final count but I know for a fact it was the largest crowd at a Two Page Tuesday we’ve had so far. We accidentally had a whole eight readers because I lost count of how many people I invited. This was actually really fine, and really, really good. The readings were lovely. There was plenty of bullshitting and fun and revelry before and after. Many French fries were consumed. Folks talked about writing and books and not books. There were new faces, and I got some new emails for the email list. I asked folks to take photos and send them to me and they did, so I have some photos to play with for future things as well.

A part of me is tempted to try and get one going in Cambridge (or anyway somewhere north of the river) in November. But we’ll see. The Banshee was happy to have us, seemed like. I’ll get some work going on organizing the next one(s) tomorrow.

For today I’m content to bask in the glow of a very good time, and enjoy the lazy, somewhat absent-minded feeling that comes after a very good night out.

(Not) Very Online

I’ve been thinking about being on the internet and not on the internet lately.

I have been spending a lot of time on my computer working up a number of different computer projects, but also I think I’ve more or less given up on Bluesky as a place I’m really interested in (it’s not as varied as Twitter was, or at least: I haven’t put in the work to make the feed interesting), and I finally killed my Twitter (I refuse the new name) account because… well, probably I should have parked on the username, but I also just hate that there was an account there.

But.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time not on the computer, in fact, out in the world. I’m making progress on becoming best friends with the new owners of a local bar I like a lot (see me at karaoke inconsistently on Tuesdays). I went to a mother fucking backyard poetry reading for the first time in years, and it was so, so, so goddamn good, the reading, and also nourishing, the event. There have been bar nights and I’m pretty pleased with how Two Page Tuesday is going.

I wish I could remember what I was reading specifically — although the phrase is everywhere — but I came across (again, for the nth time) the phrase "a certain kind of very online person", and I wondered about this. I often wonder about this, this online-ness. I think I’m so interested in it because a lot of the kids I thought "very cool" in high school — with whom I was friends, but in a kind of distant way — were proto-very-online, by which I mean, they were kind of in the shit before the shit was shit, you know? Proper fucking hipsters, riding the beginning of the wave. I’m not saying that they were happier or in fact cooler for it — a few of them did go on to do kind of cool shit — but I admired it, or at least was interested in it.

(As an aside: it’s funny how these things tend to linger.)

And so I’m here sitting in a WeWork for the free WiFi and coffee (I am off work today) looking at the website of the poet I saw headlining the backyard reading, and at some poets around him, following links, and I’m thinking this guy might be pretty good at being online. And not in a always on social media or anything way, but in a "good at presenting the interesting things they’re doing on the internet" kind of way. And so we have a distinction, or at least maybe the beginnings of one: online in a way that online is a tool to do and talk about art, not online as a means of… I don’t know. I want to say something snarky about vanity or selling our eyeballs to advertisers, but that’s not quite right. But there seems to be a certain species of "online" that I don’t mind — more a Web 1.0 type cornering where you go to a place to find a thing and maybe you go back and check that thing later, or — here, go read this article about "The Revenge of the Homepage".

I have, at times, aspired to be "hip." Have a fun, interesting online presence or whatever. I’ve done the Instagram thing — I did pretty well when I was on my pretending-it’s-not-a-finding-myself-trip — and I enjoyed Twitter when it was. I’ve had more and less good websites. But now?

I’m not really trying to find a job. I have more or less given up trying to publish short stories (maybe I just suck at them: this might be true and is fine) and so don’t really need to have a site dedicated to shouting when they get published. I’m trying to publish a novel but if that happens I’ll have plenty of time to do whatever needs to be done for that after the things are signed. So we just have this here blog that I infrequently write on. It doesn’t really have a purpose right now. This is OK. I like having something on the Internet, some kind of "online" for when I want to play on it. It is, even if I’m not really in a publishing phase or a job-hunting phase, good to have a result I control when someone googles my name. But still: it’s all just bullshit, anyway.

I wish I had come to more of a point, but — :shrug: I always start these thinking I’ll come to a point but I do not, but that’s why I write things for here and not a magazine or something. I mean, I can do that kind of writing. And I have — and have plans to again — written things for here that are more essay-like and coherent. But this isn’t that. And that’s just fine.

A Claim to Bike Fame

A few weeks ago at D2R2, the purported founder of SRAM[1] looked at my bike in disgust and said, "Huh."

He later tried to sell me on Eagle and electronic shifting while I replaced a snapped tubeless valve stem. I said I liked my stupid friction shifters and wide-range double, thank-you-very-much, and muttered about just riding the fucking fixed year next year…[2]


1. Not the founder. I think this was misheard. Maybe just some guy who reps SRAM?
2. Suffice to say, this would be an awful idea, as I couldn’t even finish the 180k due to back pain due to having insufficiently low gears and fitness and having tweaked my back the day before, hastily pulling an AC unit out of a window, because the cat had been sitting on the AC unit, but outside the fucking window. Stupid cats, god love 'em.

An Ode to a Rosetta Stone Mousepad

What is now a long time ago I went to England and northern France on a high school AP European History trip in my senior year. I was still newly eighteen and mildly obsessed with blank-verse poetry. By which I mean I was writing a lot of it (badly), and was attempting (in vain) to corral what other members of our out-of-school book club[1] that were on the trip to write stories that we could tell each other on the long drive down to Canterbury.[2] Suffice to say I was the only one who finished the assignment, having hand written pages and pages of semi-sensible blank verse (or was I trying heroic couplets? I have no idea.) in a spiral-bound notebook I wish I still had.

It was, as all high school trips are, an odd collection of people. I had two or three very good friends on the trip, one or two folks I was friendly with from choir, a few kids in other grades with whom I was acquainted, and then a bunch of people I either knew by sight or was simply in class with. I was more or less (I hope) friendly with everyone and — being somewhat extroverted — became closer a few of the folks that were on the trip. One of these was a guy I’d been in classes with for a long time, with whom I was friendly, but not someone I’d ever spent much time with. His name was Steve.

Steve was smart, and good at the kind of thinking and calculation and science that I was pretty shit at. But we both liked history and sort of arcane things and we had a grand old time at the British Museum. I don’t really remember anymore what we had talked about going there and back and whatever else, but I remember a strong fondness for him; we didn’t really keep in any touch after we went off to college, save maybe running into each other at some party or other a few years after graduation, but at the end of the trip, waiting in one of the airports on the way back, he pulled a Rosetta Stone mousepad out of his backpack and gave it to me. Whether this was in pure friendship or as thanks for letting him use my cell phone to call his family a couple of times over the course of the trip, I’m not sure,[3] but it caught me off guard (as someone who is not really a gift-giver himself, nor a particularly comfortable gift-receiver), and was super nice, and anyway that mousepad has been on nearly every iteration of "my desk" since, through college, back home, and how-many apartments.

Unfortunately my brother sent me a very nice, fancy, has-a-lot-of-buttons-I-don’t-know-what-to-do-with mouse so I could try a little better to keep up when we play video games, and it doesn’t work with the mousepad, or at least not well. Long gone are the days of the rolling-ball mice and maybe the laser gets confused on the semi-reflective surface of the pad. And it’s intermittent that it doesn’t work so well — sometimes, I think, it’s the batteries, but then I "turn it off and on again" and it works, but in general when I remove the pad it works best. And so it might be time to put the pad into the "technology box" in the closet for another day.

And I’m a little sad about this.

Not, of course, in a sad-sad way, but I’m inclined toward nostalgia, particularly about tools I’ve spent a lot of time using, and I’ll be a little sad not to occasionally notice the mousepad as such and remember Steve, take a minute to wonder where and how the hell he’s doing,[4] but then, perhaps the absence of the mousepad will remind me of him and that trip anyway.

If I were smarter or if I didn’t have to go do my day job I might come up with some grand metaphor about how the Rosetta stone serves as a translation layer between my past and present, while keeping in mind the intermediary steps along the way, mapping one mode and cycle of life to another, but — 

Mostly it’s just a real fucking cool mousepad, and maybe one of the best unexpected gifts I’ve ever gotten.


1. We started this book club in earnest teenage rebellion against our English teacher, who was insisting on making us read Chaucer and Shakespeare and that Andrew Marvell poem instead of the hip stuff we wanted to be reading like Salinger’s Nine Stories and The Waste Land. It was a whole thing, and went on for a remarkably long time as an actual book club before (d)evolving into something like a late-night Denny’s club.
2. Because, you know, Chaucer. Even if what we really wanted to be reading was… I think Abby was into Robert Lowell at the time, and maybe I had just read A Farewell to Arms. Greg was maybe into Plato? I remember having lots of discussions with him about education and pedagogy on a choir trip.
3. I had been under the apparently mistaken assumption that we’d bought international minutes for my phone plan; this was not the case and the bill required a conversation. It’s important to note that Steve’s calls were a drop in the bucket; mostly I was on the phone with the girl I was infatuated with at the time.
4. I did contact him a few years ago, and we chatted for a little bit, but I have no memory anymore about what he’s up to, where he lives, etc., and I am sure he has no clue I am in Boston.