Every Damn Day

May is about to fall over and crush me flat. It’s good to see the future!

Anyway, I will participate in Story-a-Day May, and to add a dash of extra madness (because really, whenever you do anything, a dash of extra madness is good) I’ll be trying National Blog Posting Month too! The topic (for NaBloPoMo always has a monthly topic) is maybe. And since it is a big maybe that I get everything done, well, perfect!

My posts–if all goes according to plan–ahem–is to post about what may be happening in the short stories I’m writing. Posts will be short.

And your current projects are?

The Common Sense Page from My Brain

The ink is my pen is frozen and so are the keys on my keyboard. Really! It’s true!

Okay. Really, nothing is wrong with the ink or the keyboard. The problem is in my head.

One or two of you may know that a while ago an agent asked to see some pages of my novel. Very exciting, of course.

A few email exchanges and I like said agent. So far, so good.

Agent tells me that the beginning doesn’t pull. What do you think?

Hmm. It isn’t that I dislike those first chapters, but I know the rest of the book, and I know–in my papery, inky, obsessed book-shaped heart–that the first few chapters do not really have much to do with the rest of the story.

I’ll rewrite the beginning. Would that be okay?

The agent agrees to look at the whole novel when I’m done with my edits.

So further, so better. Maybe.

Now the ink won’t move. I know the beginning may not pull a reader in. But I don’t know what worked either. What am I cutting? What should I keep? What was likable enough to keep this conversation going? I’ll read the rest. Then something was okay with it or why bother?

But what?

I cut a few things. I changed a scene.

Have I made it worse?

Someone has torn the common sense page from my brain.

What isn’t missing is the page explaining everything a writer can do wrong. That page is duplicated a thousand times.

Here is an agent willing to talk to me, and my spine cracks under the pressure.

Ridiculous.

Hey Blog, You’ll Never Publish in this Industry Again.

art for the lid of a box--the box I think in

Rejection hurts. Sure. No surprise there. But rejection doesn’t annoy me.

People throwing their cigarette butts on the ground annoy me.

Students who don’t do any work and then insist on moving up to the next level annoy me.

Absurd rules annoy me.

And publishing is filled with absurd rules.

I understand rules of politeness. Spell the agent’s name correctly. I get tired of people spelling my name wrong, and hey, if you want something from someone, take the time to get the name right.

I understand following guidelines and taking time to proof read my work before sending it in. I understand using active voice and point of view. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Here’s a rule I don’t understand–the we don’t accept work that has been published on your blog. Publishing anything on my fiction blog is the equivalent of printing a hard copy of my story out and sharing it with my friends–because near as I can tell only my friends read it. Isn’t that the case with most people? How is having anything on my blog going to hurt their sales? My friends are going to support me anyway. Either they will buy a copy of what I’m printed in to show their support (in which case, increasing sales) or they won’t buy it because they weren’t going to buy it anyway.

So, if I want certain journals to accept my work I have to keep my work to myself until they decide to publish it–which is, as we all know, unlikely.

And if you self-publish your book, they say you can’t submit it to an agent. Damaged goods, so to speak. But then again we can all find examples of self-published worked that did well enough for a traditional publisher to snap up anyway. And it seems that if someone who is established–let’s say, Neil Gaiman (who I love by the way)–asked a literary journal to publish something that he’d posted on his blog, would they turn him down? Sorry, Neil. You posted it on your blog.

If posting something on a blog counts as published, seems to me it ought to count as a publishing credit, which it doesn’t because that would lead to publishing credit chaos.

Why should a journal care about my blog when I can’t even get most of my friends to care?

I understand the many rules of the traditional publications. They have every right to make their rules as they see fit, but sometimes when I’m reading those rules I feel they punish those who seek to express themselves off the traditional pathway.

If you could explain this don’t-publish-on-your-blog rule to me, that would be great.