It seems to me that writers need a lot of patience.  Consider, if you will, that I am still a student writer, not a professional, and yet I await word about:

• Twelve pieces currently under consideration by magazines (well, eleven magazines and one contest, if you want to be technical)
• One query, to determine whether or not a magazine wants to see an essay I’ve written.  This is unusual – most magazines will want to see an essay and ask you to query about articles.  And yet here we are.
• Publication of an acceptance from last year.  The magazine accepted the piece, but problems on their end have delayed the issue my piece will appear in.  I still have hopes to see it before August.
• The very rough draft of what may well be my thesis.  It is in the hands of my thesis adviser.

For those of you playing at home, that’s fifteen works I wonder about when I see an e-mail notification, or, in a couple of cases, snail mail at home.  Admittedly, though, I know I won’t be getting any word about my thesis until at least after the weekend.  So I suppose I could say fourteen here, except that I wonder and worry at least twice as hard about that one as I do about the others.  The others are more or less finished, but the thesis might be either a strong step forward or a tumble down the elevator shaft.

Pardon me while I take a deep breath and keep this from becoming a tangent about thesis.

The point is that the time frame from submission to acceptance by a given magazine can be weeks or months.  To give you an idea, I submitted pieces to The Sun, Tin House and ZYZZYVA at the same time.  I got a rejection from The Sun a month later.  Tin House took two months.  I have yet to hear from ZYZZYVA, and indications from Duotrope (which tracks response times and acceptances/rejections) are that this is a positive sign.

This should not be read as a complaint.  Magazines receive a ridiculous number of submissions, and that they can respond as quickly as they do is an impressive feat.  But the time frame is still in terms of weeks and months.  And so we wait.

It doesn’t get easier either.  As a general rule, it is easier to reject than accept, so acceptances take longer.  More waiting.

All right, one tangent, but it’s not about thesis.  The other day I checked the spreadsheet I use to keep track of my submissions and noticed that two pieces had been out for quite some time, according to their Duotrope entries.  That night I got rejections from both of them, but not form letters: personal, encouraging notes from the editors.  Both liked the pieces, but didn’t think they fit the magazines, and have encouraged me to submit others.

Anyway, moving to books won’t make the waiting any easier.  Suppose, for a moment, we indulge the fantasy and my completed thesis is accepted by a publisher the day I graduate from NILA.  The time frame from that acceptance to seeing the book in print and distribution is about two years, eighteen months if I’m lucky.

Waiting, waiting, waiting.

So, how do writers stay sane through all this?

We all have different forms of distraction, of course, but the most productive of these is probably more writing.  Which makes it a perpetual cycle.

And then sometimes we just write about waiting.  I am referring, of course, to the Richard Matheson short story, “And Now I’m Waiting”.

All right, I’m referring to this blog post.

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Submissions update: Since I last posted, I have submitted to The Citron Review, Shark Reef, Shock Totem, and the Writers of the Future contest.

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