New-old radio piece

So, wow, haven't updated the blog for a while, and they've changed some things around. I must say, I hate it.

Anyway, here's a piece I did for WFSU last fall and hadn't uploaded because I never knew when they played it and didn't get a copy of it until this week. So sit back and pretend it's football season!

(Is it football season? I don't keep up with these things.)




I'll be on WFSU again this Sunday at 5:18pm, talking about yoga. Should be exciting.

First rejection of the new year

And it's from Palooka magazine, bringing me up to A B C G I M N O P Q R S T U W

This one did include a note encouraging me to submit again, which I think is the first time I've gotten one of those. It's almost as exciting as an acceptance.

A Great Big Fiction Bomb Exploding in Your Face

That's the working title for my new painting, which I'm submitting to a cover art contest. If I don't win, I'm also totally counting it towards my rejection tally, since it's literature related.

*** Update: I won! I'm not sure if anyone else actually entered, but I'm still totally going to gloat.

C Is for Cookie & It's Good Enough for Me

After over eight months, I logged on to Crazyhorse's submission manager and saw that I've finally been rejected. It might have been nice of them to at least email me a form letter. Oh, well.

Current tally: A B C G I M N O Q U R S T W

Possible anagrams:
Angst Crumb Qi Ow
Gnaws Comb Qi Rut

It occurs to me that my blog has been in an angsty rut this year. Perhaps I need to adjust my Qi.

RIP, Christopher Hitchens...

...and I guess you were right about women not being funny. Or I'm not funny, at least--not according to the editor of the "Funny Women" feature at The Rumpus (who also got my name wrong). So this is probably my tally for the year, unless I hear back from some other places in the next couple of weeks:

A B G M N O Q U R S T W


***Update: Check that--Santa brought me one last rejection before Christmas, from the Indiana Review, bringing me up to--

A B G I M N O Q U R S T W

This is good, because now if I want to make anagrams from my rejections I've got the -ing words. Here are just a few of the phrases I can now spell:

Worm Bang Quits
Worm Bangs Quit
Worm Bags Quint
Worm Gabs Quint
Worm Squab Ting
Worm Tang Squib
Worm Gnat Squib
Sing Quart Womb
Wing Quarts Mob
Wing Quart Mobs
Wing Squab Mr To

I Am the Charlie-Brown-with-the-Football of Submitting to McSweeney's

So, I'm going to have to extend my project. I'll never have a rejection letter for every letter of the alphabet by the end of the year at this point, not when I keep returning to the same magazines as a dog returns to its vomit. (Sorry--I was just reading from Proverbs.)

I remember in my high school and undergrad creative writing classes how we were always warned about the submissions process and how it takes years before you even get good rejections and then maybe one day some magazine no one's heard of will accept something and then eventually you can move on to magazines that a few dozen people read, and maybe one day before you die you'll get something in Glimmer Train or something. And deep down I always thought: It'll be different for me. I'm going to send this story about a girl in college who wanders around and thinks about stuff straight to the New Yorker, and they are going to publish the shit out of it.

But this time I at least got a more specific rejection, so that's progress maybe(?):

While this certainly mounts an impressive war on Xmas, I’m afraid I’m going to pass. Thanks for the read.

Also, I am now completely obsessed with rejectionwiki.com. How did I not know about it before?

So I Still Need a "D"

I have a piece up in Defenestration magazine, a site I submitted to primarily because I love the verb "to defenestrate." It's the first acceptance I've gotten since I set out to get rejected by a magazine for every letter of the alphabet.

I other news, I was apparently on WFSU again a few weeks ago and didn't know it. I'll post the mp3 once I get it.