In any case, I am playing the part of my own motivation and saying to everyone who wants to listen that I am back (on the block?) and I want to be a writer. I am a writer.

And now it’s time to write.

I hope people are still out there, sort of watching me and my self-neglected blog. I want to make this as public as possible — I am committing to finishing something I am proud of and working hard at it. There. I said it.

Have you been going through some rough writing times? Would love to know how you worked through it. For me, I guess it’s just been a matter of giving it time and eventually getting sick of hearing myself complain. That and ultimately showing my two beautiful girls that quitting at something you love just shouldn’t be an option.

Thanks,
Gordon

I’ve had conversations with people enough times to know a bit better how to respond to the question as well. So here’s my attempt.

There is only one thing I would have done differently: picked a different school.

Trust me, I am not denigrating the fine institution, instructors or students that I spent two years of Tuesday and Thursday nights with. I encountered some great people there, including a few instructors and fellow students who are making great contributions to writing and the teaching of writing.

But there is one thing I regret most of all, and that’s not focusing on teaching.

I am miserable in the corporate world. Always have been. Always will be. It puts food on the table but with every paycheck comes the price of a few ounces of my soul. I’ve been a professional writer and editor for about 15 years (including the horrendous years of being an assistant editor wherein I did nearly no editing and a crap-ton of assisting) — throughout these years I’ve never wanted to do something more than ditch the profit-driven corporate world and teach writing full-time.

So why did I go to a program that didn’t have an integrated teaching component to it? Convenience.

I was working full-time, raising two kids, my program was close by  (I could walk to it from my apartment), and held classes in the evenings. I also liked the fact that the program could be completed in two years.

If I had to do things differently, I think I would go back and find ways to make my MFA experience a little less convenient and a little more conducive to my long-term goals. It’s not that the experience was easy. Far from it. The two years I was in grad school were a couple of the most difficult I’ve had in my life — with the extreme highs and extreme lows of birth and death enveloping constant day-to-day struggles to just get shit done. In fact, if things had been any less convenient, I probably would have given up on the whole affair. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that I ultimately didn’t accomplish something I had hoped to gain from the experience. If I had a time machine I’d go back and fix that one thing.

Before you embark on your MFA journey, understand clearly what your goals are and what you’ll have to give up in order to get them. As in all things creative, convenience and shortcuts don’t often bear out the results we really want.

Found this while browsing through the popular writing-related links on social bookmarking site Delicious. I can’t help but get a little annoyed at the $2-blog-writing schemes, SEO “content” farms, and a general deterioration of originality, voice, and real content that passes for so-called writing online.

Now I have an image to conjure whenever this black mood strikes me. To the person that wrotte [sic] it, thanks.

A publisher in Pasadena hired two journalists in India to cover city council meetings via the web. It’s only costing him about $20k. I don’t like outsourcing, for many reasons, this only makes me hate the practice even more.

If, for some reason, you can’t read the article on the LA Times site (I think registration is required), here’s the jist:

James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the Pasadena Now website, hired two reporters last weekend to cover the Pasadena City Council. One lives in Mumbai and will be paid $12,000 a year. The other will work in Bangalore for $7,200.

The council broadcasts its meetings on the Web. From nearly 9,000 miles away, the outsourced journalists plan to watch, then write their stories while their boss sleeps — India is 12.5 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time.

Still, I bet they’re probably better journalists than the White House press corps. Could be the next stop…

I’ll have a tiny journal like Apple Valley Review reject my short shorts in less than a week, while a heavy hitter like Columbia Journal still hasn’t responded to a story I mailed out in January 2006 (and neither have they responded to email queries, and my last short story I sent them took a year and a half to receive a reply).

Writers should rise up and stop submitting to journals that take over a year to respond. Who cares if they’re understaffed, backlogged, and occassionally underfunded? I think it’s fair to say that they have a responsibility to their submitters in addition to their readers. You can’t have a lit journal without writers.

I’d love to know why this sort of response time should be tolerated.

Keep in mind that I take the time in my own understaffed, backlogged, and underfunded life to empty out my email inbox at least once a week. Yes, I have things that are left undone, phone calls that I haven’t made, but I’m just me. And if I do take a while to return an email, I say “sorry.” I may be more prone than the average person to get aneurysms when organizations, companies, and other people don’t take the same pains to show enough respect to make timely replies.

Imagine if we could charge them late fees like banks and credit card companies….

BookFox’s post does not go so far as what I’m ranting about. But he does end by saying, “anything over eight months makes me extremely reluctant to send any more submissions.” And for that, I commend him. Fight the power.

Read all about it here: Literary Journals

Now that things are under way at After the MFA, it’s only fair to come clean about something.

Unless you count my high school literary journal — of which I happened to be editor-in-chief — I have never been published in a literary journal or magazine.

Wait. Before you drop your laptop on the ground and storm away in disgust, hear me out.

See, I was about to sit down and write a missive about, yes I haven’t been published but I couldn’t care less because most of what I’ve read in lit journals isn’t that good to tell the truth and I’m busy working on my novel so I can’t be bothered to submit to journals no one reads anyway.

Luckily, before I became publicly obnoxious, I revisited some links to journals online. And I saw again there are some good publications out there, outlets for fiction that are trying to do some things differently, and some trying to hold the ground on delivering good fiction. And there are good stories being published.

I also scanned through my Excel spreadsheet that I use to track my submissions (part of which is in the the pretty graphic above). Looks like I’ve sent stories out over 15 times over the past couple years. That is way more than I thought, given how adverse to the submission process I usually feel. It’s way less than a lot of other people, than succesful and published writers. But that’s okay.

What did I learn today (again)? When I don’t submit or when I get rejections: Well, I don’t want to be published anyway. When I take the time to research, and think about the stories I’ve written and the huge pool of outlets available for them to have a life beyond my hard drive, I guess I get inspired to keep going.

End result, I didn’t erase “get mailing envelopes” from my to-do list. And I thought of a story to submit to Pindeldyboz. Best of all, I’ve come clean to the whole wide world that I am an unpublished fiction writer.* Now is the time to do something about it.

*I have been published, I do admit. But that’s all nonfiction. Not the same.