Tag: Ruminations

Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right: Oscars 2022

3 Oscar winners standing with their gold statues posing for the cameras.
Source: https://abc.com/shows/oscars/news/nominations/oscar-winners-2022-list

So, I just wanted to get my thoughts down in a considered way–which is why this blog entry is late. I don’t want to belabor the incident, but I do feel that it is important enough to at least remark on. Now, I will keep it brief, and hopefully, respectful, as I can be, but I do think that it is something that needs to be discussed. To quote the old cliche: Two wrongs do NOT make a right.

Chris Rock

I believe that Chris Rock was in the wrong. He made a fairly innocuous joke with Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem as to what would happen if Cruz lost and Bardem “won” for the Oscar and how that win wouldn’t have been an actual “win.” I thought that was a good joke and then I thought that Rock should have moved on and presented the award (which is why he was there). I know that being a comedian is his “thing,” but you also have to remember the purpose of why he was there–to present an award. This was his primary purpose and every thing was secondary, including his jokes. Whether or not Chris Rock knew of Jada Smith’s struggle with her hair, we are (as a society) moving past shaming people based on their looks. Yes, he’s making a comparison, but it isn’t one that’s a flattering one to Jada. Again, to bring out another cliche: “if you can’t say something nice, then don’t say anything at all.”

Will Smith

I also believe that Will Smith was in the wrong as well. Had he responded with words, while also not great with an audience in attendance, it would have been much better for all involved. Once he moved from his seat to the stage, that crossed a line, but then he took it way too far with the actual hit on Rock. Obviously, if you need to defend yourself from an attack, then self-defense is appropriate. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened–by hitting Chris Rock (doesn’t matter if it was a punch or a slap)–Smith crossed a line in which you use physical violence in response to words you don’t like. As a writer and a scholar, I know the power of words. Words matter (which is why Chris Rock needs to understand when to say something & when not to say something), but responding to words with violence is never good. If the First Amendment works for Will Smith, then it also has to stand for Chris Rock. If Will Smith didn’t like what Chris Rock said, then he has to use words to refute/challenge what is being said. There’s Twitter, there’s YouTube (Will does have Youtube channel), there’s even the “afterparty” where he might want to discuss Chris Rock’s poor choice of words.

Summer of Soul

So, I really feel bad for Summer of Soul by Questlove. I don’t usually post to Facebook or anything like that except on the rare occasion, but I felt moved to post a clip from YouTube showing Summer of Soul winning the Oscar for Best Documentary. This was important to me as I used this film in both of my classes this semester. For Contemporary African American Writers, I used it to introduce the idea of “African American Vernacular” and how music/lyrics were an important component to African American writers and how musical forms (like Gospel, Jazz, Motown, etc.) are endemic to African Americans and their writings. For my Black Film Matters course, it served as the transition from the Civil Rights era into the more integration-minded 1970s and 1980s. So, I was really looking forward to telling my students that they had watched an Oscar nominated movie that won the Oscar over the weekend (and I will still be doing that), but the fact that the Will Smith/Chris Rock incident happened just before that category and the aftermath happened just after, it really took the wind out of the sails of the event for me and overshadowed Questlove’s achievement, which I think is a real shame.

I know it will never happen, but I really believe that both Will Smith AND Chris Rock not only owe each other an apology, but also one to Questlove as well. He deserved to have his moment and it was, in my mind, taken away from him by the incident.

Again, Rhetoric is about knowing (at minimum): audience and purpose. Of the three men at the Oscars in that “moment,” only one of them, Questlove, was there with the right purpose in mind.

YouTube

Sidney

Please consider supporting these fine small press publishers where my work has appeared:

Currently Working On (March 2022):

  • The Runner (Fantasy Story–4000 words)
    2022 Revision; Out to Market.
  • Unhallowed (Weird Western Story–4100 words)
    2022 Revision: Completed; Out to Market.
  • The Independent (Science Fiction Story–4800 words)
    2021 Revision: ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION (Mythic Magazine)

Productivity and Me During the Covid Era

African American student with beard and glasses in front of a bookcase with a computer on his desk stares out the window in a distracted fashion.
Source: https://www.apa.org/topics/covid-19/student-stress

I watched with amazement at the announcement video by Brandon Sanderson on how he managed to spend his time during the Covid 19 pandemic. I’ve included the video link at the end of this section in case you’re curious, but suffice to say, Sanderson’s Kickstarter project, announced in the video, has become the #1 Most Funded Kickstarter OF ALL TIME! Already a number 1 bestselling author, I believe that his success came from the fact that he already has a very large audience for his works, he was able to actually “show” the fruits/efforts of his work (something that is highly dubious on Kickstarter/social funding sites), and because of the “limited” nature of announcements (i.e., some things he would try to make available later, but not sure how/when that might look like) he was able to capitalize on that you need to “act now” if you want to be sure to “get it/get in,” although the more cynical among us would say he was able to capitalize on FOMO–Fear of Missing Out, but that’s always something in a capitalistic society (I once bought a mediocre PS1 game once because it released while I was in the hospital and I knew that, at the time, production runs on games were limited and you often couldn’t find a “new” release 3-6 months down the road; I wouldn’t have bought it–based on the reviews–had I not already been a couple of weeks/a month behind the release “window” of the game). My point is that Brandon Sanderson used his time well and is now being rewarded justly for his efforts.

Home Life Interferes with Work Life

I cannot say the same.

I am not one of the writers who can dream of a big (or small) house, with a room overlooking a lake (or a garden) with a white picket fence. For me, that type of dream wouldn’t work.

Why, you might ask?

Well, the “Covid Years” have helped me to see that I’m a person that likes discreet settings and that my “work/life” balance is strong when I’m able to separate my life and life activities into units. Work = work, home = home, and mixing the two is NOT desirable for me. That’s one of the reasons why my blogging has become so sporadic and my blog has become such a low priority on my activities: I used to do the blog while at work as a way to “ease” myself into the “workday.” I didn’t have to worry about time as I knew the majority of it would be spent working on grading, working on developing lesson plans, working on administration of the class/school (answering emails, etc.).

However, during the “Covid years,” trying to manage this while at hope has shifted my strategies and I’m having to try to work around making sure I get the mail before people get into my mailbox (or spending the time to put up a locking mailbox), trying to do errands on 1-2 days before working, where I could spread those errands out over the course of the work week (5 days) and get 2x as much done in a week, just over a slightly longer timeframe. I even used to get up at 7am — 7:30am, so that I could get to school (and the graduate “office”) at about 10am even when I didn’t have a class. I would then work until lunch time, go home (apartment) and eat lunch, and then return to the workroom at about 2pm and work until dinnertime. Sometimes, although not always (about 2-3 nights a week), I’d even come back and work in the evenings (from 7-9 or 8-10) before going back to the apartment to do it all again–you can ask one of my grad. student friends as she had to come back to the “office” one evening to unlock the door after I’d accidentally locked my keys in the “office.” (Thank you! 🙏).

This is so not my life now. I struggle to get my afternoon session in on MWF and my morning session is often “shot” because that’s when I tend to need to run the errands that I used to get done M-F. It is a struggle to spend 1 hr on the blog, knowing that I need to get ready and go out so that I can get back and try to do work. Also, because I can’t spread out the work, I end up trying to get everything done in 1-2 hours and invariably everything takes longer than that to do and I just end up with incomplete tasks and high levels of frustration.

Writing: Forget about it! I’ve not written anything major in a while although I’ve tried (I’ve really tried!). Unlike Sanderson, I can’t write when I’m stressed. Writing is one of the 1st things to go. I need both stability and routine (outside the home) in order to write effectively (or even to write at all)

Work Life Interferes with Home Life

And that’s just how home life interferes with my own work life. I can’t tell you how having to work while at home is disruptive to my home life. I can’t actually enjoy anything that I do (TV, video games, reading, etc.) because of all the things that I feel that I should be doing because of my “work life” is bleeding into my “home life.”

I’m never able to “shut off” anymore–because I work at home much more than I used to, I feel obligated to try to get a ton of stuff done on my days at home, but I’m never able to accomplish as much as I intend to/set out to, and then when I stop in the evening to “rest,” I still have all the many things that I wasn’t able to finish “nagging” at me even as I’m trying to rest, recover, and prepare for the work day (which usually involves a substantial commute and teaching). I feel like I’ve been “on” now for the past year really–and having the dissertation makes it just that much worse.

Instead of, say, doing grades/lesson plans/classroom admin stuff in the mornings/afternoons, and then working on my dissertation from say, 7-9pm as would have while at MTSU before Covid, I find that I’m exhausted by 7-9 from running around all morning doing errands, eating lunch, trying to work on grades, etc. during the afternoon and not getting everything finished and then being too tired to do anything except go to bed or play a game to get ready for the next day’s commute/teaching load.

Even the weekends, which used to be my saving grace, don’t seem to work for me anymore. I spend the time doing way more than I used to, especially in the mornings as I’m trying to do all the “dissertation” work during the mornings that should have been spread out over the week and I find myself just as dissatisfied and overburdened on the weekends as I do during the week.

Next Steps

They say, the first step to solving a problem is recognizing that you have one. I need to find “spaces” outside my home where I can get work done. I tried adding an extra “commute day” up to where I work, but every time I did, (on Wednesdays) there was some sort of “traffic” issue that either cost me time or was dangerous due to other drivers. I’m going to investigate my local library branches–downtown has the most space, but you have to pay for parking and at $1 to $1.50 per hour, that gets expensive quickly! The branches have free parking, but they are much, much smaller and (knowing the demographics as I do since I’ve worked in every branch), their populations are much less likely to have been vaccinated so, for me, I feel the risk of Covid exposure goes way up going that route. University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s (UTC’s) library would be an option, but because I’m no longer a student, again, I’d need to pay to park on a daily basis. I don’t really need wi-fi, as I already have the books and articles that I’m working with (& can print out what I need when I’m home), but I do need someplace that has a good (i.e. comfortable) table and chairs where I can spread out my materials and work–I used to have that in our graduate “office.” I may try to find a space on UTC’s campus that will allow me to do that, but again, parking will be the issue.

In Closing

So, I really just want to say thank you for reading this–this is just my way to try to come to terms with how Covid has affected my work/life balance and to consider how I, as a writer, need to try to inhabit a particular writing personae. I have said that I’m the opposite from Stephen King in that I “build up” my stories from the ground up while his process is to throw “everything” in and then begin to strip away elements. I see I’m also opposite of Brandon Sanderson in that he reacts to trauma by delving in his fiction. I react to trauma by delving into “other worlds” to escape the trauma, but not the worlds I create, but that others create. If I want to create my own “other worlds,” I need stability and routine, but most especially, I need that “work/life” balance.

While I wonder what it means that two of the most successful writers in the genre have patterns opposite what I have (does that mean I’ll never be successful/achieve bestseller status?), I do know that if I don’t find a way to create stability and routine in my life, I’m never going to produce anything in order to find out.

I need to find a solution to the problem that Covid has presented–preferably, without catching Covid while doing it, it I really want to produce the works that I say that I do! 😎

Have a great week!

Sidney

Please consider supporting these fine small press publishers where my work has appeared:

Currently Working On (March 2022):

  • The Runner (Fantasy Story–4000 words)
    2022 Revision; Out to Market.
  • Unhallowed (Weird Western Story–4100 words)
    2022 Revision: Completed; Out to Market.
  • The Independent (Science Fiction Story–4800 words)
    2021 Revision: ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION (Mythic Magazine)

Thursday Potpourri

A bowl of potpourri on a table with white lit candles on a wooden table.
Potpourri

Like YouTuesday, I’m using Thursdays as a prompt to help me get out a blog post each weekday, which I used to do with a fair amount of regularity, I’m using this day (for now) as a “pick-up” day where I talk about 2-3 topics that I’m interested in for various topics. I won’t do this every Thursday, but those weeks were I don’t have a specific topic that want to cover, I’ll probably bring out the Potpourri to just touch on the high points. Once school starts, this may move to Fridays (going in to the weekend), but for now, Thursdays are the day.

Curriculum Vitae (CV)

For the 2nd time this year, I’m working on updating my curriculum vitae (cv). I usually only work on it once per year to update it with all of the activities, changes in study/employment, etc., so as to keep it current so that I don’t have to do a massive update whenever I need it for something. The last one, I thought was good, but the “working group” I’m a part of had some insightful comments and working to revise the cv based on their suggestions. I found a template that I like and I’m trying to move the information over the template. My only concern is that the template has “blue” headings as text. I don’t know how that’s going to go over with the working group, but I this template is pretty “user-friendly” so I should be able to make the text the traditional black if I need to do so.

EA Play 2021

As I’m writing this blog, I have the new EA presentation of their games for this year. “E3” this year was very much a disappointment. The Ubisoft presentation was mixed, although I thought they were mostly good with more good experiences and games than anyone else (including Micro$soft who did their traditional non-gameplay hypefest–Starfield, I’m looking at you). So far, I hate to say it, but I think EA is continuing the stream of disappointments. I’ll probably talk more about individual games, but they just showed Grid Legends today, but I’ll have to see gameplay and not trailers and developers talking about it. The other games looked like I expected, except the final game which looks good, but I was never into that game series any way (I bought it and played it, but didn’t like that it didn’t give me enough ammo–I’m being intentionally vague for spoilers, but I’ll probably talk about it more later on when it’s more of a “thing”). No real gameplay except on games already released and little snippets for games to be released in the near term. I know EA’s presentations aren’t for me, the gamer anymore, but for their shareholders, but as a gamer, I doubt I’ll be purchasing any of their games this year based on what I’ve seen so far.

It Chapter 2

So, I started It Chapter 2, but I haven’t gotten very far. I’m only the first 30 -45 minutes in, maybe a little farther. So far, I don’t like it nearly as much as Chapter 1, but I will reserve judgment until I’ve seen the entire movie. I’m not sure how much I’m going to like it as the adult characters don’t have the same “charm” as the child characters. Not to say that the adult actors aren’t good–they most certainly are good and they do their characters credit. It’s just that the characters seem to be more active and more engaging when the kids are on the screen. They intercut the kids and adults early in the movie and I find that I’m always wanting to see more of the kids and minimize the adults. Again, I’ll reserve judgment and do a review/mini-review of it.

Well, that’s all for today! Thanks for reading!

Sidney

Please consider supporting these fine small press publishers where my work has appeared:

Currently Working On (July 2021):

  • Unhallowed (Weird Western Story)
    2021 Revision: Completed; Out to Market.
  • Starlight, Starbright (Science Fiction Story)
    2021 Revision: Completed.
  • The Independent (Science Fiction Story)
    2021 Revision: Completed; Out to Market.
  • To Dance the Sea of Storms (Fantasy Story)
    Prewrite: Completed, Plan & Outline: Completed, Write a first draft: Completed, Revision: In Progress

Keep It Simple

Man in suit drawing a straight red line through a maze to illustrate the point to Keep Things Simple
Image Source: https://summitlife.org/keep-it-simple-summit-life-today/

So, it has been about two weeks or so since I last wrote a blog entry. Am I burned out? Have I lost the desire to blog? Nope, I’ve just been doing 2 major things (and a lot of minor things) that have taken my time away from blogging. So, work has been constant this summer and where I might have had an hour or two to blog in other summers, I’m usually working in the mornings and afternoons, so this obviously means I don’t have as much time for blogging that I might under other circumstances. However, more than that I’ve been 1) reorganizing the way I write/create my stories, and 2) working on my dissertation. I’ve talked a little bit about the first point already, but I really want to tackle the second point today.

The 29 Page Introduction

So, if you’ve read the heading above, you’ll know that my Introduction is 29 pages long. Except it isn’t. You see, even for a dissertation, 29 pages is extraordinarily long. Thanks to feedback I received, I realized that I wasn’t really writing an introduction (which is what I’d been working on most of the summer), but rather I’d actually been writing the beginning of one of my chapters. Now, I’ve been working on and off on this 29 page “section” for the better part of the summer. This is the reason why many days I’ve just not had the desire to blog–after putting 250 words (minimum–it’s usually closer to 500 words) per session, there’s just not a whole lot of impetus sit down and knock out another 500-750 words for the blog–although I’m working to change that, starting this week.

Why 29 Pages?

I started out on the Introduction shortly after the TPA Conference wrapped up in late February/early March. I got pretty far by the time the Spring Semester started, but for some reason, after reading over it, and other examples of dissertations, I didn’t feel like mine was very good. So, I thought, “Right, let’s just start over and do this right.” In essence, I’d let the “inner critic” take over too soon. So, I came up with a more elaborate plan, and really dug deep into the events of last summer (summer 2020) in the United States in order to set the stage for what I was planning on covering and why it was important. This is where the 29 pages comes from.

Where’s the Beef?

However, when I gave it to the University Writing Center (UWC), while I was given good feedback on it, one of the consultants asked, where’s the Afrofuturism part. This wasn’t a knock–just an (astute) observation! I continued to write, but alarm bells began ringing in the back of my mind and I felt like I was going on the wrong path. I decided to look at other dissertations in my area, but more specifically, ones that were published by my school and they were much shorter than what I was working on.

Pivoting for the Win

So, I’ve spent the past week, revising and rewriting my Introduction. I haven’t thrown away the 29 pages that I wrote, just copied the material to Chapter 4, so I will have a head start for that chapter. What I’ve learned from this process, however, is that I have a tendency to “over complicate” things. I seem to think that “simple” = “too simple” and therefore = “bad.” However, I know from experience that this isn’t always the case. I used to be into Role Playing Games (RPGs)–collecting them and (when I was a teenager) playing them. Aliens RPG, based on the Aliens movie was one that I managed to find (unfortunately, I gave it away along with about 25 other fairly rare RPGs). However, I remember that it was SO complex that it would have been nearly impossible to run. I may be confusing it with another RPG, but I also remember it as being “deadly” in that the rules were so lethal to characters, getting hit in combat and failing a roll would have maimed or killed characters left, right, and center.

My point with the Aliens RPG is that the game, while complex, complicated, and reflecting a fairly large amount of reality, wouldn’t have been much fun. It would have been a slog–the game was really more of a nice sourcebook than an actual game. I innately know that complicated doesn’t always mean better, but there’s always this striving for perfection in me that sometimes makes me turn the simple into the complicated.

Luckily, due to some insightful questioning by one of my friends/colleagues here at MTSU, I was able to pivot before I’d gotten too far in the weeds. I’m really going to have to work on the KISS model: Keep It Simple, Sidney! 😁

Sidney

Please consider supporting these fine small press publishers where my work has appeared:

Currently Working On (July 2021):

  • Unhallowed (Weird Western Story)
    2021 Revision: Completed; Out to Market.
  • Starlight, Starbright (Science Fiction Story)
    2021 Revision: Completed.
  • The Independent (Science Fiction Story)
    2021 Revision: Completed; Out to Market.
  • To Dance the Sea of Storms (Fantasy Story)
    Prewrite: Completed, Plan & Outline: Completed, Write a first draft: Completed, Revision: In Progress.

Commodore 64 (C64) Nostalgia Review: Karateka

Tan box with an Asian "warlord" character with headgear staring out at the viewer. Also staring out at the viewer is a western male protagonist with indeterminate hair color (brownish blond) in a white karate gi, and a blonde western female with her shoulder bare.
Insert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karateka_(video_game) (You’ll also notice the “Westernized” protagonist and his love interest in an Asian themed game for the box art)

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, but based on the analytics, these are far more popular than I thought they would be. It seems there’s a lot of love for the C64 (as the Commodore 64 is affectionately known) and there are a lot of people in other countries that find these interesting at least, so I’ll continue doing them. Eventually, they will run out because I got all my C64 stuff via birthdays and holidays as the software was far too expensive for me to purchase with my own allowance as a child. Luckily, the C64 era spanned most of my tween and teen age years, so I have a fair amount of it that is pretty cool.

I actually want to talk about one of the ones that I enjoyed playing the most and a game that definitely inspired me as a child growing up in the 70s and 80s: a game called Karateka.

Karateka

So, Karateka was made by Jordan Mechner who also made a video game called Prince of Persia (PoP), which is now a currently dormant, but major, franchise owned by Ubisoft. At the time, however, I didn’t know about PoP, but as I was in to all things Martial Arts as a child, somehow I discovered this title and I thought it was absolutely awesome.

The gist of the game is that an evil warlord (Akuma) has kidnapped your one true love (Princess Mariko)and you had to fight through various warriors in the evil warlord’s palace to get her back. Yes, the damsel in distress trope was common in the games of the era. However, was was unique was the range of moves and motions that your character, the Karateka (which means, practitioner of karate as far as I’m aware), had available to him. Remember, this is years before a game like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Games were lucky if there protagonist remotely resembled a person (I’m looking at you, the “cursor character from Adventure), so to get a human character who could punch, kick, and move away realistically was absolutely fantastic!

Action, Adventure, and a Little Chess-like Strategy

The game starts with you pulling yourself up onto a rocky crag where the evil warlord’s palace begins and you fight your first enemy. Your enemy is basically a “white belt” beginner and the challenge increases in terms of timing, moves, and belts as you delve deeper and deeper into the warlord’s palace. Along the way, there are eagles that you have to defeat with a well placed kick, otherwise they will attack and take valuable life away from you–life you’ll need to get through the ever-increasingly difficult fighters that lie in wait.

The game very much relied a timing system. It took your character a set time to throw a punch or a kick and it took the enemy a set time as well. However, as the enemies became more difficult, I remember their timing becoming slightly faster, although that could have been just memory–if I’m misremembering that, my apologies. One thing I know for sure, however, is that the enemies’ life increased dramatically as you went on. As you only had one life (yep, this was the era of one life games), this made it incredibly tense and super important not to get hit and squander one of your valuable life arrows (which went down in increments, if I remember correctly–no, I think it could go down in increments or if you caught a powerful punch/kick it could go down a full life arrow).

I found the instruction insert to the game and here are some of the strategies/story given:

“You can withstand only a limited number hits. The rows of arrows across the bottom left of the screen tells you how many. Every time you get hit, you lose one arrow. If your last arrow disappears, you die . . . As long as you avoid getting hit, your arrow supply will be replenished. Every guard has a different headgear and fighting style. As a rule, the guards get tougher as you advance into the palace. When you kill a guard, take advantage of the opportunity and run forward. Watch for danger when you’re standing or running. In these positions you’re vulnerable to attack — one well-aimed blow could kill you!”

Karateka Getting Started Insert

You Think the “SoulsBorn” Games are Hard?

It was incredibly difficult to go through the entire game. There are a couple of “traps” that you had to watch out along the way. I remember getting to one of the traps, a gate, and being stymied for literal months as to how to get through. It was only by happenstance one day where I was running and remembered the gate at the last minute and I “decoyed” the trap (yes, I don’t want to spoil this even though it is nigh on 30 years old at this point and no modern machine outside of emulators can even run this game properly). From there, I knew it could be done, but it was figuring out the parameters of the gate and its timing. I got to where I could pass it reliably, but it was still months before I would see the end of the game, after getting by another “trap” as well. This second one, I didn’t think was fair, and it also broke the internal logic of the game to me, as if it was “true,” it made no sense to me as to why/how the Princess could have been captured. This was a classic twist, that while surprising, didn’t really work with the fiction of the narrative and probably my first time figuring out that games functioned differently than other novels. There was a narrative/narrative rhetoric in what the story was doing, but there was also a procedural rhetoric (although I wouldn’t know the term until studying my PhD here at MTSU) in what the code was doing.

While the code/coding didn’t break the game and was entirely consistent with the concepts of “gameplay,” it most certainly broke the narrative, and showed the duality behind the game. You can have narrative structure and/or gameplay, but they aren’t at all the same and can be, at times, at odds with each other.

Favorite Game?

This was one of my favorite games as child, easily within my top 5. Was it my favorite game of all time? That I can’t say, but it was one that I finished as a child, and for a game this difficult, this was no small feat. It is also a game in which I was dedicated, I used problem-solving, and had a little bit of luck to see the gate’s “pattern/trick.” If this wasn’t my favorite game as a child, it was certainly close. I still remember the sweaty palms as I made my way into the inner sanctum of the palace with only a handful of life arrows remaining. Would I have enough skill or would my journey end at the hands of a combatant with way too many life arrows?

Karateka was an absolutely perfect game for my childhood. It had everything that I wanted in a game, compelling story, cool martial arts, and a new and unique (for the time) setting. It also had everything I needed as it was a well crafted game that rewarded patience over rushing in and a measured, tactical approach to combat so as to help one to utilize problem solving skills and timing.

I think this is probably one of the games that I consider formative to both me as a person and me as a gamer. Without Karateka, I don’t know that my love of games that require strategy and patience, like the original Tomb Raider games would have developed and blossomed as it has, so hat’s off to Jordan Mechner. We always talk about art inspiring and moving people, and I can definitely say that Karateka had an effect on me as a human being. For those who say video games aren’t art, well, you’re welcome to your own opinion, but essentially, you’re only looking at one dimension of games–the procedural one. Computer code is 1s and 0s, but just as novels are more than the words written on the page, so too, this game is much more, to me, than the sum of its parts.

Sidney

Please consider supporting these fine small press publishers where my work has appeared:

Currently Working On (June 2021):

  • Unhallowed (Weird Western Story)
    2021 Revision: Completed; Out to Market.
  • Starlight, Starbright (Science Fiction Story)
    2021 Revision: Completed; Out to Market.
  • The Independent (Science Fiction Story)
    2021 Revision: In Progress.
  • To Dance the Sea of Storms (Fantasy Story)
    Prewrite: Completed, Plan & Outline: Completed, Write a first draft: Completed, Revision: In Progress.

Even Scholars Need Their Sleep

No Sleep for You!
Image Source: https://www.funnybeing.com/70-most-awesome-sleep-memes/

It is 4:20 am in the morning as I write this post. I have been awake since approximately 1:45 am.

Is it because I was working on a new creative writing piece? Nah . . . I did that at 8:30 pm last night.

Is it because I was re-reading Afrofuturism by Ytasha Womack or Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy by Lisa Blankenship for my dissertation? Nah . . . I did that at approximately 4:30 pm yesterday, after work at the Writing Center and then recording a “mini-lecture” for my asynchronous class.

Is it because I was perhaps working on my PowerPoint so that I could guest lecture in one of the professors’ classes at MTSU for valuable classroom experience and teaching advice? Nah . . . I already did that on Monday (it seemed to go well by the way as the students were engaged and really interested in the class).

So, then why am I awake and pounding out a blog post in the middle of the night/wee early morning hours?

BECAUSE A GROUP PEOPLE DECIDED THAT MY FRONT DOOR WAS THE PLACE TO STOP AND “PARTY” (which is, in case you didn’t know, a “euphemism” for doing drugs).

Of Security Cameras and Police Sirens

To set the scene, I rarely stay up all night anymore. After doing some research on the effects of sleep deprivation on the brain and seeing how even one night of missing sleep can do lasting damage to brain and its chemical function, I have tried to make a concerted effort to go to sleep on time.

However, in my neighborhood, sleeping comes with risk. This neighborhood actually used to be a true neighborhood. However, due to the closing of a housing project in the area and the death of older homeowners and the renting of houses, this neighborhood has stopped resembling a true neighborhood and is quickly becoming part of the “Hood.”

On two different occasions, once in 2020 and once in 2021, I have caught people actively rooting inside my mailbox. I have replaced my mailbox twice–both times with a locking mailbox, and the second time with one that is actively designed to not just lock, but deter theft from the mailbox. I have had to fix an outdoor floodlight that senses because a next door neighbor’s shed was broken into. Nothing of value was taken–he’d moved all the valuables from the shed and house while he contemplates what he intends to do with the house, but my light has a motion sensor, and its position on my house means that if it had been working, it would have probably deterred whoever broke into the shed as the light would have sensed movement, and even though the light falls mostly in my yard, it still would have encompassed the area, protecting it. So I had to get that working again, not only to provide my neighbor with some protection, but also to act as a possible deterrent for any who might think of targeting my house next.

I’ve even had to go so far as to install security cameras in strategic locations around the house. I won’t go into too much detail as this is social media, but suffice to say that I now have the capability of both live viewing and recording options, in addition to motion sensing options. Why, you ask? I keep my outer gates locked, but I’ve had to buy new padlocks as I’ve found the old ones unlocked at least twice (and neither I nor my family had unlocked them). I’ve even seen a drug deal go down last week with a dealer riding a bicycle–while this didn’t happen on my street, it did happen on a crossing street at the upper end of the block.

And yet, at approx. 1:45 am this morning, I was awakened out of my sleep. As I lay in bed, I thought that I could hear distant voices outside. Reluctantly, I grabbed the phone, and checked the security camera app. I didn’t see anything, but I still heard the voices. As I was just considering putting on my glasses and grabbing my robe to get and look out the door, I heard a police siren. It got louder and louder (as police sirens do), and then I saw a strange thing. On the camera app, I saw movement, like car doors closing, and then–to my surprise–car headlights flared–RIGHT OUT IN FRONT OF MY DOOR/MAILBOX. As the siren got louder, the car pulled away.

At first I was stunned, then annoyed, and then angry. What woke me was the people in the car, I’m sure of it. Why I couldn’t resolve the car in front of my house even looking at it through the camera is a mystery to me. Maybe I wasn’t truly awake, maybe I needed my glasses to resolve the fine details of the dark car on the dark street, but whatever it was, the only reason why they had left was because the oncoming siren spooked them. I don’t think they were thieves or after any property as they were far too noisy for that (unless they were incredibly bold), but I do think they were either on drugs or doing drugs in front of my door and that is a practice that most certainly intend to put a STOP to (there have been on-going issues with drugs on this street for a while now).

And so, as I type these words, it is now 5:12 am, and the birds are starting to chirp, even though it is still dark and raining, heralding the morning. The sun will be rising in about an hour and half/two hours and then my biorhythms, even if they allow me to nap for a couple of hours, will kick in and I’ll be waking up in about two hours or so myself, with only a maximum of 4 hours of sleep after two really intense work days (and having to go to work today as well). And that’s only if I manage to nap–if not, then I’ll be operating on about two hours of sleep.

Yay?

Even Scholars Need Their Sleep

While I was working at the Public Library, and even as a school teacher, especially when I woke up in the middle of the night, say 2am or 3am, and I would get up and play games on the PS3/PS4 for an hour or two (usually an hour) and then I’d go back to bed. This didn’t affect my sleep, nor my quality of work. When Destiny came out for the PS4, I’d often play on my own until 9pm or so, but that’s when the West Coast players would come on and look for people for Raids. I’d often hop in, hoping to be finished by midnight or 1 am, but the sessions would usually stretch until 2 am or even 3 am. One time, I had to teach and the sessions stretched until 4:20 am. I managed to go sleep and get up at about 7:30 am (we had a late 9:00 am start time, thank goodness) for a fairly restful 3 hours of sleep. I didn’t do this often, about once every week or every two weeks, but my body seemed to handle it fairly well.

However, once I started in the PhD program, this all changed. I noticed that the more I tried to do this, the worse the effects would be the next day. Trying to pull an all-nighter, like I had in my undergraduate years, and even into grad school, produced even worse results, so much so, that I could barely function the next day and couldn’t even think about trying to pull an all-nighter on days that I taught. I’ve gotten to where I don’t even try to do an all-nighter, even when I’ve not finished a paper/work. I just work until my normal bed-time, sleep, and then try to set my alarm for an hour earlier wake-up. I can so much more done if I’ve slept than if I haven’t that even one hour or so is equivalent to what I could accomplish if I tried to stay up all night.

So, I’ve learned to try to get to bed at a reasonable time and while I don’t always sleep perfectly (who does?), I have managed to become much better at going to bed at a good time and waking up refreshed . . . that is, until this past year or so thanks to people “prowling” much more and now, people “partying” in front of my door.

If it happens again, I intend to confront the individuals and to call the police. And I intend to call the police again and again, until the “party-goers” get the message. Find some place else to do your “partying.” In front of my door is off-limits.

Why? Well, even if you do think that “partying” in front of someone’s house isn’t a sufficient reason, I can give you another one:

Because even scholars need their sleep.

Sidney

Please consider supporting these fine small press publishers where my work has appeared:

Currently Working On (March 2021):

  • Unhallowed (Weird Western Story)
    In for Revision & Editing
  • Starlight, Starbright (Science Fiction Story)
    In for Revision & Editing
  • The Independent (Science Fiction Story)
    Out to Market
  • To Dance the Sea of Storms (Fantasy Story)
    Prewrite: Completed, Plan & Outline: Completed, Write a first draft: Completed, Revision: In Progress

Back to Basics: AKA Back to Blogging

Moving image: Keanu Reeves in John Wick mouthing the dialogue from a scene in the movie that is below his mouth in white lettering: "Yea, I'm thinking I'm back."
Image Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/nD2LWjO

Hi Everyone,

Sorry for being gone for so long and not blogging consistently for at least the last 4-5 months. This blog post will be both an explanation of what happened and what I’ve learned over this period.

I didn’t intend to stop blogging on a (mostly) daily basis, but it is something that just happened as I was teaching during Covid. Every post took longer and longer to write and more and more time was taken by the requirements of school. I found that the more I wrote, the less time I had for grading and preparing for the next week’s lesson. So, while I tried to continue to blog, it just made my life harder and harder, so I finally had to stop. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t have topics to blog about (oh, boy did I have topics), but instead of helping me by allowing me to coalesce my thoughts, it hindered me from getting my work (school or otherwise) done in a timely manner.

However, here are the biggest factors/reasons that I stepped away from blogging at the end of 2020.

School (Online)

So the biggest issue was school. Now, most of you are aware that I’m a graduate student working on my PhD. Generally speaking, school is my largest time-sink in that, even though I’m finished with my course work, I often have to teach in order to stay in school. Well, with Covid this year, most classes were held online. I had two sections of an English Literature class (English 2020: Themes in Literature) and I chose to do Science Fiction. This is a course I’d not taught myself before (even though I’d been mentored in another professor’s class), so I had to choose my own assignments, books, etc. for the class. Even though we had weekly Zoom meetings, I still had to set up the online class distribution platform (for us, it is Desire 2 Learn or D2L), upload any additional videos/PDFs, read the books for the class and make notes on them and then teach them–for 14 weeks straight. This was in addition to prepping my own Prospectus (outline of a dissertation) and then defending it towards the end of the semester. And all this doesn’t include the absolutely MASSIVE amount of email that I had to answer as we did classes remotely. Questions that might normally have been answered before or after class or in the Graduate Student Office, now had to be handled via email, so instead of answering 1-2 student emails per week, I was average 1-2 student emails per day/every other day. Multiply that times 2 (x2) as I was teaching two sections of the course–and well, now you see where the overwhelming majority of my time was spent each week.

As you can see–what would normally be a fairly average semester in-person ballooned to a massive amount of work to make sure everything was ready for class and I still ran into quite a few hitches along the way.

I’ve learned 2 things from this area: 1) try to get as much done and in place before school starts, so that most everything is ready and posted and all I have to do is make “course corrections” along the way. Technically, MTSU is closed this week for the holidays, but I’m already working on my syllabus and planning my schedule and assignments (while reading sources for my dissertation) with the goal of having 95% (or more) of the class uploaded to D2L by the time class starts, and 2) working on things in small increments. I’ve already done a blog post on this earlier this year, but will do another one again as I “re-learned” the lesson again during school.

Computer Keyboard

Thanks to Covid, I had to get a new computer this semester. It wasn’t that I wanted to, but that I had to. My first day of class was an absolute disaster as my Chromebook completely crashed trying to host my first class of the semester via Zoom. It was laggy and unplayable for the students and I had to end the session after about 11 minutes of trying to get students to hear me/see me. It was so bad that I had to use my phone for the 2nd class. I went looking for a computer that could handle Zoom and finally found one powerful enough to host a 20+ person Zoom call (which isn’t easy on a computer, btw).

However, this computer (that I will also be using for my dissertation), was a necessary expense between Zoom and my dissertation, but it’s keyboard isn’t the greatest. The key travel on it is a bit too shallow for the way I type and surprisingly enough, the Chromebook keyboard feels–if not better–at least lest “hard” when I hit the keys too hard. So, it is pretty hard to type on for extended periods of time–or at least it was. I now get a case for all my electronics and this was no different. With the case came an unexpected bonus–a keyboard cover that is has a soft “gell”-like coating. While the key travel is still “harsh,” the cover softens (most) of my keystrokes and I don’t feel the hardness of the keyboard with every keypress. However, the cover has its own problems: I can’t feel the keys the way I’d like and I end up with many more miskeys than I used to make, so I end up mis-typing something quite frequently and have to go back and erase it and then correct it, so my words-per-minute have gone WAAY down. And I was already a fairly slow typist to begin with. Also, because the “gell” doesn’t feel natural, I have to hold my fingers differently (high off the keyboard) and I find that my hands tire pretty quickly in this (unnatural) position.

What I’ve learned is that I work best on this computer when I limit myself to short sessions (for heavy typing sessions, at least–normal web-browsing tasks and other non-typing tasks are a dream). This is where working on things in small increments daily is going to pay dividends as it will allow me to get the things I need to do done, but without the dread of having long painful and fatiguing stints at the keyboard, typing until my fingers cramp up. This problem may be endemic to me as I have fairly long fingers, but I can tell you from experience (typing in feedback to 40 odd students’ papers) that if the keyboard doesn’t feel perfect for me, then any amount of typing that I need to do will be met with a certain amount of mental resistance on my part–I just can’t help it. Good keyboard travel is essential to a happy Sidney.

Conclusion

There are also other reasons why I didn’t blog, but I’m going to stop here. One of those reasons is the internal need that I have for a 5 paragraph essay structure (An introduction, 3 body paragraphs/topics/, and a conclusion). However, I’ve already been writing this blog post for an hour (1) and a 3 point would take at least another 15-20 minutes of drafting at my current typing speed. So, no, I’m stopping here (without the 3rd body paragraph/topic–although you’ve just gotten a preview of what it would have been).

Going forth, I will try to do better with the blog and blogging, but until Covid is much less of a thing (which I’m hoping will be true in 2021), I can’t make any promises. I’ve put other things in front of school before and payed the price. School has to be my primary goal–and if it sucks all the oxygen out of the air for other things that I want to do, then until I graduate, that’s just the price that I have to pay.

Thanks for listening!

Sidney

Please consider supporting these fine small press publishers where my work has appeared:

Currently Working On (11/2020):

  • Unhallowed (Weird Western Story)
    Out to Market
  • Starlight, Starbright (Science Fiction Story)
    Out to Market
  • The Independent (Science Fiction Story)
    Out to Market
  • A Spell in the Machine (Science Fantasy Story)
    Rewrite (Planning): In Progress 
  • Project Seas (Fantasy Story)
    Planning: Completed, Rough Draft: Completed, First Draft: In Progress
  • KnightWatch Graphic Novel (Fantasy Graphic Novel)
    Planning: In Progress

The Travails of Being a Writer

A slide with the text: "Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard." William Zinsser, On Writing Well"
Image Source: https://www.slideshare.net/GlennLeibowitz/the-secret-of-good-writing-is-to-strip/3-Writing_is_hard_workA_clear

Travail = n. Painful, laborious effort.

Writing is hard. There’s no two ways about that. Writing is not easy, no matter how Hollywood tries to glamorize it. Even in these blogs, I find myself struggling to find topics, struggling to write those topics down, struggling to keep grammatical errors from cropping up in my writing, something that seems to be harder and harder every day, and struggling to keep p with a 5 day a week blog–you’d think it wouldn’t be so difficult for a blog, but blog or creative writing or writing for school, it is still hard.

However, there are a couple of circumstances where it is very hard and I’d thought I’d talk about those today.

Knowing Which Market to Send a Story

So, this one is one of those problems that happens if you are a creative writer who sends out stories. I know several creative writers who don’t send out stories, but get friends and family to read them, but don’t take that next step. However, for those of us who do, it is very hard sometimes to know where to send your story. There are only a limited number of places that you send a story (for maximum money/exposure), so you want to make sure you’re sending it to the best places possible. However, when two markets have an upcoming deadline, how do you choose between between the two?

I have a market who has a deadline of today. I’ve no idea when they will open again, should I miss the deadline. However, I have another market that has no deadline and I can send it to them anytime. One is more prestigious in terms of name recognition, but both offer quite a bit of money and are qualifying journals for SFWA (Science Fiction Writer’s Association), something that I’m still working towards. So, today, after class, I need to decide where and when I’m going to send the story. I have until midnight tonight decide.

Writing for School

So, for these past 5 weeks (approximately), I’ve been working on writing for school, but not for my dissertation, etc. I’ve spent the time designing, creating and uploading for my literature class. We are 3 weeks into the “school” year and I’ve yet to do anything thing to move myself forward. The same is true for my creative writing. Once “summer” ended, it became all about the class and making sure that all the elements of the class were covered and completed.

On Monday, I had a holiday, so I planned to do quite a bit, but ended up grading and doing a little work there on the class again to try to stay current. This is where most of my time goes and I feel that I’m just treading water. I really do need to get it in gear, but it is very difficult when there’s so much to do just to stay current.

Well, that’s all I have time for at the moment–I have class later today. Hopefully, I can get back on track, sooner rather later. Have a great day!

Sidney

Please consider supporting these fine small press publishers where my work has appeared:

Currently Working On (8/2020):

  • “Project Wall” (Science Fiction Story)
    Drafting: 2nd Draft
  • Unhallowed (Weird Western Story)
    Revising: 2nd Draft (Working Draft)
  • KnightWatch Graphic Novel (Fantasy Graphic Novel)
    Drafting: 1st Draft (Issue 1)

Car Problems, 2020 Edition

Woman with her hands in the air with her car hood open and looking frustrated.

This will b a shorter blog post than usual as today I need to take the car into the shop. 2020 has been filled with memes of how terrible a year its been so far with Covid, the lockdown, etc. You have but to look at yesterday’s blog and see my retrospective on the untimely death of Chadwick Boseman to see how stressful this year has been. For me, currently car problems lead the way in terms of my own overall stress level for this year.

Beginning of the year: Battery

At the very beginning of the year, the week after New Year’s Day, I came back up to Murfreesboro to do some work, get some preliminary planning for my classes done, and to work on my prospectus. Everything was going fine until that Thursday, when the car wouldn’t start. I tried everything, but finally, I had to walk to school. I called a repair shop in Murfreesboro and they could look at it if I could get it to them on Friday, but not before (and they warned me they had a lot of cars already ahead of me). I thought I was going to have to have it towed, but surprise, surprise, it started on Friday. Now, I could have packed everything in the car and risked the trip back to Chattanooga. I probably would have made it as it was only when the car was shut off that it wouldn’t start. However, I went ahead and took it in and they diagnosed the problem as needing a battery, but it would be Monday before they could get to it. So, I ended up spending all weekend in my apartment, getting nothing done, just killing time until Monday when they could fix the car. I popped home shortly after and then went back up for a truncated week for orientation and other school related things. While batteries aren’t expensive, diagnostics and labor were and I was at the end of my money from the last semester, so the next 2-3 weeks before school started were a bit tense/tight.

Summertime Blues: Water Pump

So, shortly after the Covid-19 lockdown began, and the US government sent out their only set (so far as of this writing) of Stimulus Checks, I felt fairly confident that I could make it through the summer. May, June, July, and especially August are hard months as they come at the tail-end of school year and the money doesn’t refresh until the beginning of school in the last week of Aug. However, right at the beginning/middle of May, when I was going to do a weekly store run, my car began to overheat. I wasn’t far from the store, so I made it to the parking lot, and opened the hood of the car. What was left of the cooling fluid was gone and the rest was steaming and bubbling out. Luckily, a very nice man who knowledgeable about cars came up and helped (we were both wearing masks). I took it to the service place (that was luckily right across the street from the store) and they diagnosed the problem as a water pump failure. It was an outstanding amount of money because of the time and labor involved at getting at the water pump in my particular car. I basically spent my entire Stimulus check on the car, and had to really strain to get through the end of July and the first 3 weeks of August.

Freaky Fall: Check Engine Light

So, now its Fall (well, not officially, but school’s started and that’s pretty much the unofficial start of Fall around here), and there’s yet another problem with the car. Everything was fine until the Tuesday after I got out of the hospital. There were several things that I needed/wanted to do in Murfreesboro for school and so I attempted the trip, having gotten out of the hospital only 2 days prior. I couldn’t make it as I began to feel ill again, I turned around and came home and went back to bed to rest. On Wed., I felt better, so I decided to go for a weekly store run, but, you guessed it, my Check Engine light came on. I drove the car to the store and back with no issues. In fact, I’ve driven all around town with no issues (so far). I took it to the service place that did my water pump and they suggested trying a simple oil change as that’s what the “computer codes” for my particular issue were coming up with. Well, we did that, but no dice, and the check engine light came back on and were giving the same codes. I’m now headed to a different service place as my first one said that they weren’t really designed to handle detailed engine work, so I’m crossing my fingers and hoping it isn’t something major.

So, you’re now caught up on my car situation. I have a friend who leases cars for just this very reason, not wanting to put up with issues that crop up. However, my family doesn’t like that because you don’t own anything once the lease is up. We’re a “sweat-equity” type of family who, despite the problems, soldier on and find a way through it, no matter what, keeping the experience and the spoils gained in the process. That’s my life in a nutshell–especially, in the year 2020.

Sidney

Please consider supporting these fine small press publishers where my work has appeared:

Currently Working On (8/2020):

  • “Project Wall” (Science Fiction Story)
    Drafting: 2nd Draft
  • Unhallowed (Weird Western Story)
    Revising: 2nd Draft (Working Draft)
    
  • KnightWatch Graphic Novel (Fantasy Graphic Novel)
    Drafting: 1st Draft (Issue 1)
    

A Distressing Trend for Writers of Short Fiction

A picture of the Godfather with the caption It's Nothing Personal, Its Strictly Business
Image Source: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-rude-that-companies-dont-send-out-rejection-letters-leaving-you-checking-your-email-every-5-minutes

*Author’s Note*: I pulled this image from a website in which some HR managers were answering a question about candidates for work/school where this has become standard practice. I find it both ironic and somewhat prophetic that the rhetorical image used to portray and normalize this behavior is drawn from a movie glorifying the Mob/Organized Crime where fear, threats/intimidation, and outright violence and murder are also considered “acceptable” business tactics–food for thought, don’t you think? So, my response to those on that website who think that candidates (read writers, for my purposes) are whiners on this subject–yeah, job candidates/school candidates/writers, etc., are also all humans, not cogs in some giant “wheel” and I don’t care how much of buyer’s market it is out there–it is still unacceptable not to update candidates/writers on their statuses. Courtesy is “Good Business” as well!

In the world of writing short fiction, there’s a distressing new trend that’s emerging that I assume will become standard practice for many markets in a few years. While I don’t want to be another “angry voice” on the internet, I do feel that it is important to call attention to practices that are not fair to the writer. Charging writers fees to submit is something that gained prominence in the early to mid 2000s. While it remained controversial for that time, it has become normalized and there are many, many markets who would like to make their money both off the writers who submit work to them, hoping for publication and from the readers they hope to sell the work to in the future.

Submit All You Want, We Still Don’t Want to Talk To You

So, to be brief, I’ve noticed that now many markets want to actively submit works from writers, but now they no longer want to respond to you. More and more, I’m seeing markets that say that editors will not respond to every manuscript they receive. On Duotrope, the listing notes that you should wait “a reasonable amount of time . . .” to wait for a response before assuming that the submission has been declined.

“A reasonable amount of time?” BWHAHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHA!

I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be dismissive or sarcastic, but . . .

BWAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHA!

Okay, sorry, no more laughing fits. A “reasonable time” to me is one month or 30 days. Fully 75% – 80% of my submissions have been been longer than this with a couple at the 9 month mark. What I might consider reasonable is (obviously) going to be different from someone else–and since I can’t say yes, publish this and cut me a check, only they can, then I (as a writer) need them to actually make a decision and let me know the result.

A Slow But Steady Trend Away From the Editor/Writer Relationship

One of the reasons why I’m a little more cutting in this blog post than I might normally be is that I see it as yet another way that certain markets are trying to distance themselves away from the very writers they (say) they need. In the 1950s and 60s, fiction writers used to get feedback from editors about their stories. Tolkien, for example, “shopped” Lord of the Rings around to different publishers because he was distressed at the initial feedback that he reportedly received from an editorial reader (not the publisher himself, btw, who was the only one empowered to buy the work) if I remember the story from the Tolkien biography correctly.

In the 1970s and especially in the 1980s, the big thing became the “rejection slip” where rejections were preprinted on little slips of paper with a “canned” rejection notice on them–maybe there was a handwritten note on the back of them, but more often than not, it was just the slip.

Writers retaliated by going to Simultaneous Submissions (SS), which was also a reaction against very long wait times to hear back from markets (just to get a “rejection slip”). The thinking was that SS helped writers maximize their time and energy by sending out stories to a bulk of markets, hoping on finding just the one or two that were interested.

Then came Reading Fees, which I’ve noted in a previous blog, are not helpful to writers. Reading fees were once the province of “contests,” but they’ve become more mainstream in the intervening years and now you can see them in certain magazines as requirements before submitting work.

Why This is Bad For Writers

One of the reasons why “open submissions” (i.e., “the Slush Pile”) exists is because it is expensive to keep people on staff and on payroll to create content. For most markets, it is way cheaper to buy content as needed rather than to pay salary and benefits to someone to always be available to produce content. That’s why you have “submissions.” With things like Rejection Slips, Reading Fees, Agented Submissions, and the like, markets seem to be intent on removing any vestiges of human contact between editors and writers, and trying to turn writers (who are pesky human beings) into commodities that produce work and nothing else. Many of these markets keep trying to create their own version of the “phone tree” system in which they never have to interact with the writers they are actively solicit work. The easiest way to not have to deal with writers is to close submissions and have an on-staff writer–but let’s see, a year’s salary plus benefits vs $50 per story and you only buy 10 of those a quarter. 10*50 = 500 (1 quarter). $500*4 = $2000 per year. Good luck trying to hire someone who will work for that a year.

And yet, those same markets now want to turn around and ask you to submit work to them, but don’t want to take the time to let you know whether you were accepted or rejected. “Assume if you’ve not heard from us in two weeks/1 month/3 months/1 year” that your work is rejected.

Really? I, as a writer, can take the time to read your guidelines, make sure it matches everything as closely as you the editor/market requests, but you don’t have the time to reply to my submission. I’m to assume that I didn’t get in because you’re too busy to actually tell me?

Not to be “Mr. Angry Guy” on the internet, but I’m going to just say: if you’re going to solicit my work by allowing open submissions, then please do me the courtesy (and yes, it is a courtesy–an interaction between two humans) of telling me whether or not it is accepted.

If you’re too busy to do that, then I respectfully submit that you are too busy to be in business in the first place. Or maybe consider hiring that $15,000 a year on-staff writer that you seem to need rather than paying the $2,000 to us freelancers who are way too “needy” and “bothersome” just because we’d like to know definitely whether or not our stories have been accepted or not.

Sidney

Please consider supporting these fine small press publishers where my work has appeared:

Currently Working On (7/2020):

  • “Project Wall” (Science Fiction Story)
    Drafting: First Draft
  • Unhallowed (Weird Western Story)
    Drafting: 2nd Draft (Working Draft)
    
  • Childe Roland Graphic Novel 
    Up Next: Rough Draft (Story)
    
  • I, Mage (Urban Fantasy Story)
    Drafting: 1st Revision

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LAUREGALIE

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Extra Content from PaulsPages.com

DragOn Writing

Sci-Fi and Fantasy writer, dreamer and Netflix junkie

The Godly Chic Diaries

BY GRACE THROUGH FAITH

Learning to write

Just your average PhD student using the internet to enhance their CV

Blog Writing Profits

Memoir of a Writer

perfecting language on paper

Tiger Riding for Beginners

Bernie Gourley: Traveling Poet-Philosopher & Aspiring Puddle Dancer

unbolt me

the literary asylum

The Solivagant Writer

The world is my playground; the pen, my friend

James Harringtons Creative Work

A site of writings, musings, and geek culture, all under one domain!

renegade7x

Natalia's space

Read Men and Nations

S.A. Barton