SethFleisher.com

  Eighteen months ago, I submitted a five-thousand-word story to the Bellevue Literary Review. It seemed, in my personal, uber-objective opinion, a very strong piece and perfect for the BLR, whose literature focuses on themes of sickness and healing.

Six months crept by. Nothing. Each time I checked in, I received a friendly response saying that it was still under review.

Nine months after submitting, I got the rejection letter.  It was a detailed and encouraging email from Ronna Wineberg, Senior Fiction Editor at BLR, letting me know that she couldn't accept the piece as is, but would be willing to read a rewrite. I took this as positive news. I polished up the piece, addressing each of her very good editorial points, and submitted again a few weeks later, hopeful for a quick acceptance.

Months passed. No response. Seasons changed. Several times. I grew weary, frustrated. Why was I the only one who could see that this was the perfect story for this journal?

After nine months, I mentally wrote them off. I needed to get on with my life, I told myself--pick up the pieces, start again. That sort of thing. Kind of like trying to break up with someone who never agreed to date you in the first place.

But this past Friday, almost exactly eighteen months from my original submission date, I got an email from Ronna saying that the Bellevue Literary Review wants to publish my story in their Spring 09 issue.

See? What did I say about patience? There are happy endings after all. Maybe I just need to relax a bit.

Vlad and Boris clearly have the same knack for plaintive elegy as their literary ancestors, Checkov, Gogol, Dostoevsky.... Something about that slavic DNA.

It was with sadness, or perhaps nostalgia, that I read the announcement earlier this year that Howard Junker, founder and editor of ZYZZYVA, will be retiring soon after nearly 25 years at the magazine's helm. Last week, I mailed him the impassioned plea below along with a new story.

Dear Howard Junker:

This could be our last chance. You're leaving soon. I understand that at some point one just has to move on. But we're going to miss you all the same.

I realize I haven't sent you the right story yet. I've been holding back, waiting for the perfect moment. Here it is. Attached.....

I look forward to the possibility of working with you to publish this piece in ZYZZYVA. Let's do this...while there's still time.

All the best,

Seth Fleisher

I'm aware that Howard (typically) doesn't read cover letters, but the last letter he sent me (to ask that I renew my subscription, which I'm considering btw), was equally candid, and I felt compelled to express my feelings here about the urgency of the situation.

I've had ghastly insomnia for the past three nights. All I can think of is ZYZZYVA and what we could still do together, if only....

While McCain continues to prepare for the presidency by mastering "the Google" and inventing cutting-edge telecom gadgets like the Blackberry, I'm reminded that writers and editors, like certain politicians, are not always terribly tech-savvy.

At a talk at Squaw this summer, a veteran teacher mentioned with a sort of religious awe that one writer she particularly admires actually uses a spreadsheet to track his submissions to literary magazines. The immediate thought I managed to choke back went something like: "You don't use a spreadsheet to track your submissions?" Man, I'd be done for without my handy Excel-based submissions tracker (which serves as a backup to my logged submissions in Duotrope and allows for sorting and cross-tabulation by date, story, publication, etc.).

This is all prelude to a rather off-putting experience I recently had trying to submit a short story to a certain 50-year-old literary magazine based in the great state of Massachusetts. Said magazine has implemented Devin Emke's Submission Manager, with which I've only had positive experiences to date, but they did it with a twist: there's a $3 fee for each submission. I'm generally not a big fan of the pay-to-play form of literary magazine editing, but I don't complain over a fee this small. It's about what I'd pay after all for printing, paper, manila envelope, SASE, and postage, and infinitely more convenient. Or at least that's the idea.

So, I happily clicked the little button thingy on the magazine's web site, which sent me to a far-off place called PayPal, which kindly removed three dollars from my bank account and returned me to Submission Manager with the notice that I could now proceed to submit my manuscript. Fantastic! So quick, so easy.

All that was left for me to do was provide the requested account data, select my document, click Upload, and...apparently I crashed the entire system. I tried again. Five more times. I banged a little harder on my keyboard with each (failed) attempt. While the cash was removed effortlessly from my bank account, it was impossible to submit my manuscript.

I decided to use a tool of last resort (something called "e-mail") to notify said magazine of the problem. That was four days ago. There's been no response. And here I am still out my three bucks.