Oh, cynical me
[ I found this story buried in a stack of old papers in my office. I wrote it twelve years ago!! ]
Esquire makes papier-mâché masks out of them for wear during the magazine's annual Christmas party. Atlantic Monthly transforms them into elaborate origami pieces and hangs them in the lobby of its Boston headquarters. The New Yorker folds them into paper airplanes, regularly holding competitions to see how far each one can be launched from the rooftop of its Manhattan office building.
These are just a few of the many ways I imagine magazine editors make use of the stories I send to them. Of course, such treatment assumes that my manuscripts actually make it to their destinations, and are not deliberately misplaced by jealous mailroom clerks who aspire to be writers themselves.
Basically I am a neurotic writer. This is due in large part to the amount of time I spend working at home – alone. Long hours attached to a computer make it easy for me to lose footing with reality. I don't get outside much at all. In fact, some days how far I stray from the house depends entirely upon the accuracy of the toss made by my paperboy.
Being a neurotic writer does have its interesting side effects. For one thing, with a loquacious id, ego, and superego, I never have to count on another person for a discussion on career goals. “Things are great!” my ego will just blurt out at will. "The stories are getting better all the time, freelance checks are trickling in, we’re making it.” To this my id will usually respond, "Listen to the big, fat ego going on again – when was the last time we saw our name on the front of a magazine anyone’s ever heard of?" My Superego will listen to only so much of this before interjecting, “Knock it off you guys, we’ve still got to address the much bigger problem of why there are people hiding outside in the bushes trying to steal our ideas."
But it isn’t until after a story is finished, wrapped up and sent off to a magazine that my writer’s neurosis really kicks in. First, comes paranoia: I should have run it through the spell checker one last time...What if I misspelled the editor’s name? Then come the usual doubts about my abilities as a writer: I’m not fooling anybody...every word, every passage says novice...I got a C in freshman English for heaven’s sake! Finally, there are aspersions as to the brain composition of the editorial staff at the magazine: What the hell are those shitheads doing with my story anyway?
The second day is much the same as the first. And so it goes until, several weeks to months later, it dawns on me that my story is never coming back, that it has, in all likelihood, been folded and wedged beneath the short leg of an editor’s desk to keep it from wobbling. This realization is aggravating since I am a professional writer, and as such I expect at least a modest kill fee for the use of my work in the stabilization of office furniture.
In fairness to the magazine industry, most of my submissions do eventually find their way back to my post office box. Usually they arrive with curt rejection slips offering small bits of editorial advice, such as: "We’re not interested at this time.” Or, if I am lucky enough to catch an editor with time to critique the piece more thoroughly: "We’ll not be interested in this at any time.”
I spend considerable time searching for hidden advice between the lines of an editor’s rejection slip. Recently, I got a story back with a note from an editor that read, "I am returning your story so that you may place it somewhere else." What did she actually mean by this? Was she saying that it was good enough to appear in a magazine, just not hers? Well, which magazine? If not the New Yorker, then, maybe, Readers Digest? Horse and Rider? Coin World? Or maybe the editor saw some potential in my work but figured I hadn’t paid my dues as a writer yet. Or maybe she hates men. Maybe if I wrote under a pseudonym. Maybe if I submitted the story through an agent. But what if I couldn’t find an agent? What if they all rejected me too?
This is the world of the neurotic writer. Writing, I’ve come to realize, is the easy part. It’s selling that is hard. Selling and waiting and worrying. I’m guessing every writer goes through this, some more than others. Still, how can you not be at least a little bit anxious knowing that somewhere out there an editor is peeling the pages from your manuscript, crumbling them up into little balls and shooting three-point shots into his wastepaper basket? Swoosh.
10:02:21 PM  Stories
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