Writers Beware/Be aware
Why do I do this? I often ask myself this.
*Not for money.
*Not for fame or glory.
*Not for world peace.
Marie Kondo and her method of sorting out old things or adding
new things to your life is very popular right now. Does it bring you joy?
I’ve started to apply this philosophy to a lot of things—not
just physical stuff in my closet, but the stuff rattling around my brain. How
do I feel about my writing? It doesn’t make me rich. In fact, I mostly do not
get paid. Yeah, my books receive royalties—but a big return can pretty much neutralize
any expected check. At Other Writing here at my blog you can see a full
list of publishing credits. The majority of those have promised NO payment. If
I do get paid it is usually less than a couple hundred a year. The worst publications
treat my work as “content”—meaning it simply takes up cyber space at their
on-line journal or zine.
Ditto on fame and world peace. No one cares.
So why do I do this thing called writing and bother to
submit?
I’ve had a particularly bad morning—as I work really hard to
keep track of submissions. At Duotrope I mark if something is rejected or
accepted and then officially withdraw the piece if simultaneously submitted (and
WHY NOT DO THIS—life is short and I cast out many worms hoping to hook a fish).
Recently I had an acceptance and withdrew my work from 4
other journals. One got back to me—oh, we published your piece in our last
issue—Oh really, how come I didn’t know about this?—And also we changed your words
and the ending. –Really?!
This is so discourteous and unprofessional. Yes, I’m giving
you my work, yes, I’m not getting paid, yes, no one is getting rich, famous, or
achieving world peace. But this is not a license to take advantage of a writer.
Not a content maker, but a writer.
I do this for me. If I boil it all down to the nitty gritty:
I have a story to tell. I want to connect with readers. I want my work to be
read. Along the way if an editor gets back to me and says “I love this!” That
makes me happy also. If someone reads the work and comments positively. That
makes me happy. But ultimately I have to make my own happiness. Struggling to
get something onto paper, revisioning, and revising, the drudgery of making it feel
right or at least righter, the administrative headache of submitting and
corresponding with editors=I do this because of the hope of connecting my words
to your eyes.
So, yeah River Babble you pissed me off. My words are
not literary wallpaper to decorate your webpage. Please remove my story from
your “page.”
--Now that I've got that out of the way--will start a new series based upon the obscure memoirs James Schuyler
lists in his Diary edited by Nathan Kernan.
When I was at GSHI the summer of 2017 reading the Diary entries
mainly written on the island I was confounded by the archaic literature he
bothered with.
The Introduction by Kernan explains that Schuyler though a
sporadic diarist himself was a lifelong reader of diaries. James Woodeforde,
Gilbert White, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Wordsworth. He enjoyed gardening
journals, descriptions of the English countryside, details of 18th
C. food and drink.
From Kernan:
It was a memoir, Logan Pearsall Smith’s Unforgotten Years, that awakened him to the realization that he too
must become a writer: reading the book as a teenager, Schuler looked up from
his backyard tent and saw the landscape “shimmer.” Schuyler quotes at length in
his Diary from Henry Daley’s memoir, This
Small Cloud, from Iris Origo’s War in
Val d’Orcia and from Boris Pasternak’s Safe
conduct, he extolls Charles Darwin’s memoirs for their “simplicity”
and “reticence of intimacy.” . . . One of the characteristics of the
Diary, as of Schuyler’s poetry, is the way memories seem to rise abruptly out
of the fabric of whatever else is going on, like Proust’s “involuntary
memories.”
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