It’s the end of October and thus close to the end of the open submission period for many literary magazines, and I have spent the week sending out lots of short stories before that garage door closes again. Yes, I am still sending stories out to lit mags. Why? I don’t know. It feels like a self-destructive compulsion at this point. I would say it’s like cutting, but then at least the self-harmers have something to show for it afterward — scars vs. spreadsheets. 

But let’s briefly table the ghost rationale for sending to literary magazines and just talk about the weird rote formalization of the process instead, another online iteration of form-filling drudgery. First there is Submittable, the almost universal online submission manager. I don’t mind using it, but it is perplexing how it forces me to sign in and verify my address each time I submit to a different journal. One would think you could sign in once, verify your address once, and then be off to the races, but each discrete journal necessitates a whole new click through journey. Perhaps this is what they mean by reading the journal before you submit. I suppose, on a technical level, that Submittable software “lives” “on” each lit journal’s site/server, so that while your submissions look connected, they are not? The procedure is both numbing and disorienting. Journals are hard to tell apart already and the dead mall quality of Submittable only exacerbates this feeling, a Backrooms for books. 

One of the bits you have to fill out when submitting is a cover letter, which is a trap. No one at the journal wants to read your cover letter unless you are a friend of the staff, in which case you’re probably emailing on the side first? But the cover letter box asks for a “short biographical statement,” and I tried to fill this out earnestly, and then humorously, and then ironically, and then finally bitterly. And at this point in late October I loathe the short biographical statement. What even is such a statement? How could it be useful or interesting? Is this going to be the famed “contributor’s note” that appears at the end of the journal and which is often more entertaining than the main text? Contributor’s notes are traditionally epic displays of log-rolling and tone-deaf bragging. I will not say “humble,” because these brags aren’t humble. Everyone has won more awards, been to more schools, and had more stuff published than any human who has ever existed prior. Or they are “based” in a yurt in the Galapagos when they’re not teaching coding to inner city youth. Or something equally intricately noble. No one is just a schmoe living in the sticks with a job and a dream. A dream of someone reading his short story and saying, Dude, that was funny! Everyone is leading the glamorous life in their contributor’s note. 

Is that what they want? Or do they want something else? Also, who cares who I am? Just read the story and tell me if it “fits.” Also, I hate themed issues. Why is it a themed issue and who came up with these themes? I can understand a symposium-type segment in a journal: “What’s to be Done About All These Cats on the Internet: a Roundtable Discussion.” But themes like “Redemption” or “Perspectives” are just lame. It feels like middle school. And actually as someone who is parentally adjacent to a middle school, these are beneath middle school. And also as a parent, there are entirely too many themed school days, too many dress-up days, too many special days. Just have normal days/lit mag issues. Regular put-your-chinos-on-and-show-up-vaguely-on-time days. I blame the phones. And the kids. I may be old and out of touch but I’m not wrong. And so lit mags should not have costumes. By the time this post gets up Halloween will be over. 

I do love it when people say they are “based” somewhere, as if they are themselves a terrorist organization. I love it when people list their awards like they are fourth-graders who lack self-awareness. I love it when contributor’s notes are oddly personal and chatty, as if we are suddenly girlfriends two chardonnays in. I love it when lit journals put headshots of their contributor’s next to the stories and poems, as if each of us didn’t go into print for a reason. I love how successful writers talk about submitting, saying that it’s a numbers game, which makes the endeavor feel even more like gambling, except that here the prize is prestige rather than money and the odds are even thinner than at a casino and the prestige is dubious and invisible. I love how the answer to the question “why submit to a literary journal?” is always “credibility,” but credible to whom? A poem in the Colorado College of Mines Quarterly does not bring the props. And neither do these bloggy ruminations. I am resolutely prop-less. My milkshake brings no boys to no yard. 

And another thing. They should have journals for old people, by which I mean people over 40. Now in the thinning fields of serious middle age, I maintain a simple policy: never trust anyone under 30. They are insufficiently calloused. I want to interface with someone who’s been bunioned up by life a bit. A journal run by and consisting of material from people over 40. Enough of this “children are our future” stuff. I know they’re our future and it terrifies me. It feels insulting to know that I’m sending my delicate little Cheever-lite stories to a group of grad students. What do they know? I want a journal where you have to be over 40 and you have to prove it. Provide your mortgage statement, or if that’s too class-based for you, then maybe your premium invoice for your life insurance. What, you’re over forty and you don’t have life insurance? You should call me so we can talk about your choices, why you don’t have any dependents, or if you do have dependents, why you aren’t making meager provisions for their welfare in the unlikely event of your untimely demise. Postscript: Don’t buy Whole Life. Call me. We’ll get this done. 

But I still fill out my short biographical statement, because it’s required. I write: Barrett Hathcock lives in Mississippi. He does not teach. He has never been to Brooklyn. Which is not completely true. I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge once. And also once I went to a warehouse party in Brooklyn where there was a long line to the bathroom. But the novelistic truth remains. I don’t know what else to say. Any greater level of biographical disclosure risks incurring a copay. No one wants to hear that saga. Just read my story already. I dislike all these para stories that accompany your actual story. Tell us a story about the story you just made up. Sell us with a story of the story you have created. Stories growing on stories like mold on mold. I would say like mushrooms, but I don’t know if mushrooms can grow on other mushrooms and also these para stories are heartier. Nothing kills them. 

At this late date I don’t actually think any of these stories are going to get accepted and published. I am not trying to be self-pitying. (Well.) I am just going by what’s happened before. These journals receive an enormous amount of submissions, a problem that’s only been exacerbated by the LLMs out there. Or at least that’s what the internet tells me. I am so tired of hearing about AI, the most boring topic ever invented. Turns out Skynet takes over the human race by tricking it into talking about Skynet at all times. I don’t myself use AI except for skimming the search summaries that Google puts at the top of every search result now, and I’ve seen enough blatant errors in those summaries to be highly skeptical of the whole enterprise. As before, wisdom comes to those who do the reading, the actual reading, not the condensed soup version. Plus I’m not trendy. I have never been and will never be cool. I think the stories are good, but they are not hip. I don’t even know what hip is anymore. Should I read more contemporary short fiction? Sure, no doubt. But also, I’m not trend reporting here. I am writing short narratives where people get into scrapes, morally speaking, hopefully rendered in artful English prose. I am not out there 6-7ing or whatever. The stories should be meaningful in and of themselves. They should generate their own substance and significance without glomming onto some current movie release. That’s why they are aspirationally art and not commentary, and if they don’t generate this meaning, then the stories don’t “work,” as the lingo goes. Though this makes the stories sound like machines. Devices. Programs that run. But maybe they are. Maybe that’s what short stories actually are: small machines for meaning. You run them by reading them. But sometimes these machines don’t work. They don’t generate meaning for you. There’s a bug in the script. They just whirr and hum and grind to a halt somewhere around page eight and you start scanning for the nearest trash can. But also, as a mere machine inventor, I am not quite sure if the machines run. That’s the paradox of writing. The machine might work for me, the one who made it, but sit inert for someone else, and there’s no way to tell without persuading someone else to crank it up and give it a go. I need some test pilots, which in this analogy are also actual pilots, meaning that the readers are always testing out the machine to see if it flies, or runs, whether it’s published in the Colorado College of Mines Quarterly or not. I am losing my metaphorical thread here, my own machine breaking down, sentenced to the junk pile, strings too short to use, grey dust left in the fuse, a machine that makes emotional news, I guess that’s why they call it the blues.