I understand these publications are swamped with submissions. I understand it is so very, very, very hard for them. I really do. And I do not hold it against anyone who wants to take that long with a piece, or longer, for that is their choice and it is their magazine, not mine. I don’t claim that it’s wrong or unfair and I am not whining or being a baby or whatever you might call it. I am not judging at all. Rather, I am simply making a statement about myself and my own writing path and development, and the fact that I will no longer wait over nine months to be almost certainly rejected by tiny slip of paper or a cursory form email.

I am thirty-two years old. Time is suddenly starting to seem like a finite quantity, in all sorts of unpleasant ways.  I am much more impatient now than I was five years ago. Add to that the face that my writing is changing (hopefully improving) all the time and that the pieces I thought were great a year ago are now cringe-worthy. I’ve had many, many literary magazines sit on my pieces for nine months, a year, sometimes more. Sometimes they never bother to respond at all. In fact, despite or maybe because of electronic submissions, this seems to be happening more and more often, and sometimes they don’t even respond to queries. And ultimately, the dubious worth of having one of my pieces appear in one of these magazines, to be read by the ten people that still read said magazines when they’re in print and not online, is not enough. It’s not worth enough in the balance. It’s not worth the headache and the waiting and the checking and the resisting the urge to edit and the hope after so very long that it must be one of the finalists and the shattering of that hope after receiving the form letter that says nope, you were never even close. It’s just not.

And you know what? Screw not judging. I will judge. Not the nine-monthers, who may have their own reasons, but the truly unprofessional behavior I still see all the time in response to submissions. Here’s what I say, as an outsider, an interloper in the publishing/literary world: taking a year to respond with a form email that is two sentences long is not professional. That’s right. Rejecting someone in your submissions software but never letting them know? Not professional. Sending Xeroxed and chopped up quarter slips of paper for rejections? Totally unprofessional. Pretending you take shit from the slush pile all the time when really 99.9 percent of what you publish is solicited? Not professional. Sending rejections that say things like, “This was really pretty bad,” or “yeah, didn’t care for this at all?” So incredibly not professional.

I don’t mind rejections. I really don’t. I have an awfully thick skin and thousands of rejections to prove it. I don’t mind people taking a very long time because they are carefully considering my piece, and then sending me feedback or an explanation or even just bothering to put my name in the rejection letter somewhere. That’s fine. That’s great, in fact. What I mind is the unprofessional behavior that some very big magazines engage in regularly. Get your shit together, guys. Passion is not enough. Being a great magazine is not enough. There are plenty of print mags (because really, the worst offenders are almost always print mags) out there that are great and do the professionalism thing really, really well. (Annalemma, New York Tyrant, MAR, Gigantic, Tin House, PANK, Hobart, Ninth Letter, Caketrain, Gargoyle, Grist…I could go on and on.) If you don’t have the resources, the time, the help, the energy, whatever, to treat your slush pile peeps with basic professionalism–the kind that many of them have exhibited in carefully following all of your minute and exacting instructions to the letter and paying sometimes for the privilege of sending you their very best–then you shouldn’t be running a magazine. Being an artist is not an excuse. I was in theatre for years. If a theatre manager ran their theatre the way some lit mags run their operations, that theatre manager would be fired in a hot second. Truly. If a tour manager ran their shit that way, word would spread and bands and venues would avoid them like the plague. Same thing with a gallery curator.  If you wanted to run a magazine but you have no sense of timing or organization or you’re too busy with your own artistic career to run it properly, then stop. Step down. Find someone else to do it. Or hire people to help you. Find volunteers to help you. Do whatever it takes, but be professional, always, please. Not because you have to, because god knows you’ll always find enough people to submit to you, desperate for glory and exposure. But because you want to, because you should, because being professional elevates all of us in the writing world and what we do. Because.

The smart smart Erin Fitzgerald at PANK, on writing.

Four Fictions well worth reading by Greg Gerke, at elimae.

Ethel Rohan interviews the raw and brilliant xTx at Dark Sky.

Because I am your friendly September Writer-in-Residence there, and you’re going to want to check out this project I’m working on right from the get-go.  You’re going to see some seriously amazing writing, on topics you couldn’t possibly dream up, by some seriously amazing writers.

What are we working on? Well, I don’t want to spoil it, but we’re creating a history. A city’s history. You’ll be spending the month of September at a dig site, learning about the inhabitants of the city throughout its history, about how they’re linked across the ages through the soil and sediment and sludge, about the things they treasured and the things they left behind. By the time September is done, we’ll have built a shared history far more interesting and three-dimensional than anything you could find in your textbooks.

So head over to Necessary Fiction tomorrow for your first look at the Ancient City. That’s all I’ll say for now.

Harvest Time by Matthew Lyons

Stephen Colbert decides to start a for-profit online school:  Steven Colbert “University.”

Two must-read “Folktales of America” by Emily Mitchell can be found in the brand-new online TriQuarterly. Actually, the whole thing is a must-read.

Sinclair McKay on my favorite movie fight ever:

And then the fight itself. It’s the implacable violet of the compartment night-light that somehow sticks in the mind, the only point of stability in a breathtaking blur of fists, punches, swings, kicks, all choreographed in this claustrophobically small space.

And Isaac Chotiner on McKay’s new book about Bond. Which I shall obviously have to read.

The Rumpus interviews the fantastic Lydia Davis.

And a gentle, loving reminder: GO PURCHASE Aaron Burch’s How to Predict the Weather and Matt Bell’s How They Were Found! NOW! Before you kick yourself in the teeth and head because they’re all, all, all gone.

Thrill to the death-defying stunts. Marvel at the awe-inspiring spectacle. Enjoy every minute of the rollicking, rolling show-on-wheels that is: Spotlight On…starring ETHEL ROHAN! With special guest: ME!!

Whatever. I think I’m high from all the Benedryl in my system and the fumes from the Calamine lotion I’m bathing in right now. (I got eaten alive this weekend by mosquitos, as usual. I also found a bee just hanging out in my hair. This is actually the second time that’s happened to me in the last few weeks. Whatever pheromones I have seem to have been mixed up with insect pheromones. It’s fun.)

While I’m gone, there are some things you should read:

The new Northville Review, which is all about celebrity and stars so many amazing writers, I refuse to list them here. Go check it out and you really, really won’t be sorry.

In decomP, this very good story by Alexandra Isacson.

In Annalemma, this quite stunning painful story by Kirsty Logan.

This great piece by the always wonderful Roxane Gay, in Amphibi.us.

We feel bad about death, about decay, about endings. Despite religion. Despite philosophy. Despite our enlightened minds and all the scientific knowledge we possess. We fear death, for ourselves and the others we love. In the same vein, we fear the lesser forms of death: pain, loneliness, anxiety over being. After all, we invented existentialism.

We are depressing, sad creatures, us humans, so no wonder we want to bring everything else down, too. Well, maybe you don’t. But I do. I’m a writer and a neurotic–and an agnostic, too. I don’t have the faith of the religious in an afterlife–the world for me is only here and now and all my stakes are tied down here, and all my love and loss lives here. So maybe that’s why I want trees to long for the past, balloons to suffer crises of faith, the sun to feel sorry for itself because it always misses the moon.

I keep reading reviews lately–in journals, on Amazon, online, most recently, I think, in the Georgia Review–where some writer bashes some other writer for excessive use of the pathetic fallacy (the gifting of human attributes, actions, and emotions to animals, plants, and objects), but I think it’s all a matter of taste and desire. I want the universe to be as crazed and miserable as me, so of course I’m going to love Calvino’s Cosmicomics. Others may find it too cute by half, but I say why not find solace in the fanciful thought that even ions can wander and weep and want, just like us humans? If existence has made me a melting mass of nerves and depression, then why can’t I define that existence any way I want to? Why can’t I mold it, box it in, expand it, frame it, give it the ability to share my pain and maybe my joy, too?

Some of us want to feel less alone in the world; we want the world to live and be as we are.  Some of us like to dream the world the way the world will never be. Some of us just want the world to be a dream.

Seriously, such a great, intense little piece. If you’ve ever had the slightest bit of OCD, this story will slay you.

Art by the amazing Matthew Lyons, whose site you should most certainly visit.

“Against Specificity.”  By Douglas Watson. Who is apparently a genius.  In Fifty-Two Stories.  Read a bit:

On your way to the Thing Exchange, Thing B tucked under your arm, you run into someone—an unemployed magistrate, say, or a circus clown who comes up to you and says, I have scurvy. Give me an orange!

You say, Orange!

The clown lurches away.

You revolve through the front door of the Thing Exchange and into the lobby. Ah, the lobby. How grand, its pillars or frescoes or whatever! How high, its well-crafted ceiling! How long abandoned, the style in which it was built!

But you have not come here for the architecture. Holding Thing B tight against your side, as though it might leap from your grasp, you hurry across the lobby to the elevator. A sign reads, Things A-Q, Floor 2. You operate the elevator in the usual manner.

When the doors open and you step out onto Floor 2, a flutter somewhere near the center of you reminds you how very badly you want Thing A.

I want it considerably more than I ever wanted Thing B! you think.

Read this whole wonderful story here.