Thursday, July 14, 2011

I can't make this stuff up...

So today I have the outline of a nice little personal experience essay about my adventures at Philmont 10 years ago, with some thoughts about how useful it has been for me as a woman to have the chance for self-reliance not just in terms of emotions, but with the physical aspects of primitive camping, backpacking, hiking, etc.

I walk to the end of the driveway to check the mail, and I see lying on the ground the weekly Eastside Chronicle, a tiny local addition to the regular paper here in town. This is the publication that I was going to send the article to, probably over the weekend when I got it revised and ready. They are literally my only hope for publication at this point because they will pretty much publish anything from anyone. Although I did send them something once, which they had requested, which took me quite a bit of time to prepare, and which they never published.

I pull the chronicle out of its plastic sleeve, and see this:




Without even reading the headline, I saw those giant shale chunks and I knew this was Mt Phillips, and I knew that the ground I was going to cover in my cute little essay had already been covered here -- had just been covered here, and yet again I was foiled in my attempts to get anything I have ever written ever in my life published in an actual paper publication. It doesn't seem like it would be that hard. Joe Smith's "how to water your garden" articles are published every week. Sally Southern's mother's pie recipes appear regularly.

[Insert rant about being frustrated at every turn here.]

So, I need you to vote. As I see it, these are my options. Please vote for what I should do next. Think of it as a choose-your-own-adventure blogpost. I will carefully consider the votes and then write about whatever the next step may be.

(1) Send it anyway
(2) Accept that the universe hates me and give up trying to publish anything
(3) Scrap this article but send a different article to the same publication
(4) Write the article but send it to a different publication
(5) Some combination of these
(6) Your idea: _______

Weigh in and let me know.

Cheers!

3 comments:

  1. Oh my gosh, how wacky! My vote(s):

    1. Send it anyway.
    2. AND send another article later to the same publication.
    3. Also submit it to a different publication. [Can you submit the same article to two places?]

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