Spreading the Sheet

I used to tell a young friend interested in writing that there’s no right or wrong way to do it.  While I write in some form every day—lately it has been non-fiction—I have been wondering if I go about my fiction the right way.  I wonder this because I keep a spreadsheet.

This spreadsheet contains information about every submission I’ve made: the date sent, to which magazine, word count, and response.  I color-code everything so I can tell at a glance if a story’s still awaiting a publisher or not.

While looking at this spreadsheet recently, I noticed that it had been two or three years since I’d tried to get any fiction published.  Well, apart from my novel (which is also on the spreadsheet); I sent it to an agent who turned it down earlier this year.  What I noticed about my submissions is that they tend to happen in June.

I’m not a student and I’m no longer a teacher, so June has no special connection with free time.  I do, however, tend to send out lots of submissions in a manic way, when my courage is running high enough to take rejections.   I guess June is good for overlooking rejections.  I also noticed that many of the journals on my target list had folded.

Literature, it seems, is a temporary phenomenon.  I don’t believe there’s a wrong way to do it, however.  I don’t think it helps to forget what stories I’ve edited, though.  Problem is I have too many ideas and sometimes they take years to find completion, even in short-form.  On a long drive yesterday I had three short story ideas.  Who has time to write them all?

On one of Michael Stevens’ Vsauce videos he mentions the published notebooks of an author I’d never heard of.  As he held up the book (published by Penguin, no less) I thought of how those of us who write are focused on the future.  Yes, I dream of getting some money from my writing, but in the long term becoming moderately famous after death would be okay too.  There’s no wrong way to do it, after all.