The Internet Makes Me Feel Old. Get Off My Lawn!

I am 34. When I started writing, seventeen years ago, it was a real pain in the ass to submit work and if it was a pain in the ass then, I can’t really imagine how writers maintained their sanity or accomplished much of anything when they wrote manuscripts by hand or used mimeographs or other such quaint things. We’re all kind of pansies compared to a, say, Charles Dickens.

When I was 17 and a young writer, we had computers but they were big and loud and slow, albeit we didn’t know that at the time. Printing involved dot matrices and paper with perforated edges and very complex ink systems. You had to put stories in envelopes and add postage and wait for interminable periods of time only to eventually receive an impersonal slip of paper letting you know that you were rejected. It was a very kind process. Journals were quite literal when they warned, “Don’t send us your only copy,” so you saved your stories on multiple diskettes, not the hard small kind but rather, the big 5 1/4″ floppy kind that also made for effective throwing stars. Submitting work was such an ordeal that you only sent out your best, most carefully edited work (best being an intensely subjective, relative concept). In sending out your best work, you generally submitted a handful of stories each year. It was generally, a matter of quality over quantity.

It was all very exhausting, so for a very long time, I just stopped submitting work to literary journals and focused on genre writing which had far more relaxed submission processes because I am, at my basest level, a very lazy writer and I prefer the path of least resistance.

When I was getting one of my thoroughly useless degrees, I worked as a slave at Prairie Schooner. My duties involved processing hundreds upon hundreds of submissions in manila envelopes, carefully sorting wheat from chaff and making rubber band bound piles of ten manuscripts to pass on to readers. Sometimes, I was the one who read through the chaff and once in a great while, I got to enjoy a little wheat. No matter how mind-numbing the process could be at times, I always tried to handle each manuscript with care because I knew, personally, what a pain in the ass it was for that work to come my way.

The print/stuff/send/wait/wait mode of submission still goes on, but thanks to the Internet and most literary outlets stepping into the modern age, you can send your work into the world with a relatively painless click or two of the mouse. As a very lazy writer, I am a fan.

At the same time, I am astounded at 1. how prolific writers have become and 2. the frequency with which writers submit their prolific efforts and it all leads me to wonder if the same amount of care is being given by both writers and editors. It is something to think about.

Now, get off my lawn!