Thursday, September 3, 2015
An explanation of letters
It started a few days ago. Many more are coming. It's the letters. Letters to publishers, letters to agents, letters to magazines, and letters to newspapers. I have begun writing letters to submit my work for publication in the most ridiculous ways possible. Grandiose, clairvoyant, critical, silly, my letters are, oh my goodness, like clerkmanifesto blog posts! Wait, they are clerkmanifesto blog posts.
I have for a time wanted to submit some of these, now nearing a thousand, essays to a wider audience. The Internet stopped letting me even try, and I am now the only person banned on all 988 million websites. If you aren't already familiar with this blog and you try to look for it on the Internet all you will find is pictures of toasters. I don't know why toasters. It's an automated response to... me.
So I started thinking about going at readership the old fashioned way, with books, publishers, agents, magazines, and newspapers. But when I looked into it I quickly found that:
1. Nothing I write appears to match anything being published anywhere.
2. The submission process is touchy, boring, bureaucratic, and requires stamps.
3. I loathe rejection.
4. I'd rather keep this fun. Wealth, fame, and glory would need to come in under that basis.
So I decided to remain blisteringly over confident in my work. I decided any paper or magazine should bend to meet my work. I decided to freely ignore the normal conventions of the submission process. I decided to freely insult the editors I was writing to, albeit in a friendly manner. And I did everything I could to set aside any attempt at success, marketing, reasonableness, or professionalism.
Suddenly I started blossoming letters! You should be seeing quite a few.
Will I send them?
It could happen. If the Nobel Prize won't come to me, I am willing to go to the Nobel Prize, so long as the path is strewn with flowers.
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If you were wondering, yes, you should comment. Not only does it remind me that I must write in intelligible English because someone is actually reading what I write, but it is also a pleasure for me since I am interested in anything you have to say.
I respond to pretty much every comment. It's like a free personalized blog post!
One last detail: If you are commenting on a post more than two weeks old I have to go in and approve it. It's sort of a spam protection device. Also, rarely, a comment will go to spam on its own. Give either of those a day or two and your comment will show up on the blog.