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Writer Math
I hate math.
I know a lot of people do, but I absolutely loathe it. Math classes were always torture for me and the only time I got a good grade was in calculus in college when I received an A-. How did I do that? Well I was failing the entire semester but we had a school-wide final exam – where if you got an A in that, the lowest grade they could give you was an A-. That also meant that if you were getting an A in the class thus far, and bombed the final exam – you could fail the entire class.
Thinking of those people who studied hard all year. Suckers.
I passed because I got fired from my retail job right before spring break which meant that I had the entire week to study for the final, and somehow one day while watching Howling 5 and drinking Cherry Diet Coke I taught myself derivatives. I’m not joking. Howling 5 saved my grade point average.
By the way, there is an appalling lack of Howling V: The Rebirth animated GIFs out there so here, have some classic Lon Chaney Jr.
There’s one type of math, I’m good at though. Writer Math.
What is writer math? Well, it’s when you look at the number of stories you’ve written and calculate how many have been sold. It’s when you check your submission and mentally determine your odds by seeing how many other writers submitted to the same market on The Submission Grinder. It’s seeing how many words you have to add to your 1753 word story to get it to reach 2,000 because that’s what an anthology requires.
I do writer math – a lot. One of my favorite forms though – is seeing how many submissions I’ve had, how many stories I’ve written and how many have been sold, rejected, pending etc. For example in 2021 I have:
17 total submissions
- 2 acceptances
- 11 rejections
- 4 pending
Yeah I don’t submit much (ignore my laziness here) – but that means I have an acceptance rate of 12% which isn’t bad. In fact since I first started submitting in late 2018, my overall acceptance is close to that percentage overall. See what I mean? When it comes to writing stats, all of a sudden I’m a mathematical genius.
Well I can do very basic elementary school calculations anyways.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter. Whether I got 2 acceptances out of 300 submissions or 12, no one is going to care. And I highly doubt an editor would be swayed by numbers. “Well, the story sucked but just look at her percentages – maybe we give the kid a chance.”
I picture a surly editor with a cigar in his/her/their mouth in that scenario. Don’t ask why.
I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with numbers when it’s the words I should be caring about. But I guess it’s a fun way to learn I don’t absolutely suck at math – and if I need a refresher, well, there’s always my Howling 5/Diet Coke study method to fall back on, I guess.
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The 100 Rejection Myth
Rejection sucks.
When I first started submitting short stories a couple of years ago, I knew they would happen (see my previous post on being a reject) but of course I don’t like them. However, they’re inevitable so to prepare myself I read blogs and insights from other writers and there was one bit of advice I saw time and time again.
Aim for 100 rejections. Not acceptances. Rejections.
WHY? If rejections suck, why are they your main goal? Shouldn’t you celebrate good things? What do you do when you reach that target? Print out the rejections and wear them like a shroud? Whine to friends, family and strangers that no one understands your art? Eat a pound of fudge and cry while watching the Mano: Hands of Fate episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 for the millionth time? I mean, I was going to do that last one anyways, but it’s always good when I have a reason.
Okay I should probably say that I haven’t even come close to 100 submissions yet overall and as a somewhat lazy person, it may take me a couple of years to get to the oft-touted 100 rejections, so perhaps that’s why I’m so cynical. Full disclosure, I’m actually more of a hobbyist than a serious writer. But I still don’t see the point.
Also full disclosure, I had to write hobbyist about 10 times because my fingers and Autocorrect conspired against me to write ‘hobbit’. I have no reason to add this but I just found it funny.
I want a second breakfast now.
So instead of aiming for 100 rejections, what should your writing goal be? Well, that’s up to the individual and as someone who can barely keep their houseplants alive, I’m not sure I should be giving advice to anyone about anything. However, I came up with some ideas anyways:
- Celebrate each acceptance (that one’s a given).
- Aim for submissions, not rejections. That means you’re trying at least.
- Eat a cookie of your choice every time you receive a personal note/feedback from the editor. Those babies are the golden tickets of the writing world and they’re awfully hard to come by.
- Eat a cookie anyways. They are happy-inducing.
And here’s what else you should probably start doing:
- Realizing you’re doing math and math sucks.
- Don’t focus on the negative. Work on your self-esteem, you jerk.
- Try not to compare yourself to others. Each writer will have their ups and downs and EVERYONE get rejections.
- Understand you are not a rejection letter. You are a writer. Even if a piece remains unpublished, you wrote that and no one can take it away from you.
Now I’m not going to criticize those who give or follow the 100 rejection advice, after all it’s subjective. All I’m asking is for you to try and stay positive in your writing journey and get your head out of the stats game once in awhile.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have fudge and MST3K waiting. No, I didn’t receive a rejection. It’s just Tuesday.
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Life is short. Make the Cheesy Potatoes
I finally was able to have a small get-together with my family for Easter this year and of course, it involved all sorts of food. Ham, corn, salad but there’s one thing I ONLY eat during the holidays and I don’t know why – cheesy potatoes.
What is so damn special about cheesy potatoes? They’re delicious, fattening I’m sure but super simple and yet I only eat them on the holidays. There’s a few things like that. Pistachio fluff for example (cool whip, pistachio pudding mix and all-over numminess). I love this stuff – but I never make it.
In fact, I don’t make a lot of food. During work I’ll get up briefly to grab a lean cuisine or make a poor, pathetic salad over whatever hasn’t wilted in my fridge. After work, I’ll throw something together like a pork chop and frozen peas, or live off grocery-store sushi. I do the bare minimum with food but I don’t enjoy said food. It goes from my fork to my mouth like an automaton.
It was a small Easter but better than last year when we couldn’t do much at all – and I missed my family most of all but man, I missed that damn food. I realize my cooking skills aren’t what they should be, but even when I do cook, I don’t cook things I like. Last week, I craved tacos, so I went to Taco Bell. It never crossed my mind that I could, you know, make them (and they’d probably be even better).
So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to make the cheesy potatoes, maybe because it’s a Tuesday or after a hard meeting. I’m going to throw some pistachio fluff together, simply because I want it. I’m not going to wait for special occasions to have good things in my life.
So what kind of foods are you going to start making/enjoying?
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The Short Story Graveyard
If you’re a writer, you know the feeling of the burst of inspiration. It usually comes in the shower, or when you’re falling asleep at night. It’s an idea that you MUST WRITE DOWN. It will be brilliant, it will be spectacular. It will rekindle your love of words, cure your athlete’s foot, and help you to grow thicker, longer, more luxurious hair. The idea is just that powerful.
You finally get the words down. And then…
Game over, man game over. But it might not happen right away. You might read it and say “This is the best thing I’ve ever written” and submit it, but after 54 rejections, you begin to have doubts.
That’s when you mercilessly murder that story and bury it deep where no one will ever find it. Sure instead of killing your darling, you might hack it up and use it for spare parts, but the soul of the piece is gone to wherever bad little stories go.
If I’m being honest, I’ve kept a few braindead short stories on life support far longer than they should have been. Allow me to share the not-so-dearly departed.
In Memoriam:
Artichoke: A refined gentleman is upset at a peer’s boorish behavior and is especially offended when the bloke doesn’t know how to eat an artichoke properly so he murders him in the same way you would peel apart an artichoke. I felt I didn’t go far enough in the first draft, so years later I decided to add gore and cannibalism. It made it worse. Cause of death: Artichoke Heart Attack.
The Lump: A woman forced to work from home goes slowly crazy and finds a lump hiding inside of her house. It follows her around for days and then suddenly one day she beats it up and stabs it to death. In the end, her neighbor asks where her husband has gone off to. Cause of death: Hanging – as in “this premise was hanging by a thread and the whole thing collapsed under its will to be clever”.
Eddie’s Last Job: I think this one might have ended up totally deleted but as I recall a redneck guy has a beer with his friend Eddie who has volunteered to be experimented on by a professor of some sorts and now has something crawling under his skin. I just remember a lot of swear words and two guys talking over beers. Nothing else much happened. Cause of death: Cirrhosis, probably.
So those are the stories inhabiting my short story graveyard and thankfully they have been put to rest, never to be heard from again.
Until they rise again from the dead. Oh crap.
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A Nano Rebel Without a Clue
It’s National Novel Writing Month again, where the goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month. And if you’d like to see how awful my past attempts have been, feel free to read last year’s post.
However, this year I’m doing something different. This year I’m rebelling.
Yeah, I’m what is known as a “Nano Rebel”. Instead of writing 50,000 words of a novel, I’m doing my own thing cause I’m an outcast who doesn’t have to conform to society’s rules, man.
I took a look at the word dumps of Nano Novels Past and saw 5 books that were terrible, but maybe a bit salvageable. Which wasn’t like finding a diamond in a lump of coal, more like stumbling across cubic zirconia in a pile of dung.
So I decided to edit 5 of my past novels at once. It sounds stupid, it probably is, but here’s the thing. It’s going GREAT! I’m not going to lie, I never seem to bring myself to edit a novel. It’s not bright, shiny, new or interesting like fresh words are. But editing 5 novels at once makes my brain happy. When I get bored or stuck with one, I just move to another. It’s practical. Well, that and the fact that I have the concentration span of a hyperactive puppy.
And speaking of short attention spans, when one is writing 50,000 words in a month, one usually…adds some things that enhance word count Also, I’m not a linear writer – at all. So considering all 5 of these novels were written during Nano, I’ve found some things that were a little unusual, including:
- Whole paragraphs devoted to the state of my hair.
- Characters that changed ethnicity half-way through the novel and then back again.
- Three different endings written about 1/3 of the way through a novel and the beginning written at the end.
- A word-for-word transcript of someone nearby who was talking with a friend about Harry Potter and the mistreatment of elves.
- A scene in one book with a man with a whip and an ogre. I’ve never had either of those things in anything I’ve written so I have no idea where it came from. And I don’t write fantasy novels.
- A slew of curse-words far too delicate for this blog (stop laughing) where I pretty much wrote: OHMYGODISUCKASAWRITER %$#! WHYDOIDOTHIS %&(@ IWANTCHOCOLATE.
- That last one happened several times throughout several novels.
A kindly soul on the Nano forums reached out to ask if he could help with my editing, and I had to politely refuse, because I didn’t want to break his brain, but also after reading my unedited novels, he might run to the feds and I might end up on a list somewhere.
So at the end of all this, I might have 5 terrible novels, or at least second drafts with only a few words about my hair. Wish me luck!