About this blog

There are other blogs or listings of opportunities for artists, and they are confusing to me. To that end (and others) I am doing this blog. The opportunities I collect here are ones I endorse as medium-okay to good ideas.

The jist is this: I don't have a teacher giving me baffling exercises and assignments anymore, so I'm typing "Call for submissions" into Google and crawling through craigslist just looking for something that will give me a deadline and force me to create, edit and show my work to people.

You (the hypothetical reader) can follow along. You can even do the same thing on your own, but the internet is a tantalizing place, which is to say it will dangle food over you just to yank it out of your grasp and annoy you in new and interesting ways. I cope and try to maintain my intentions for this blog using these seven commandments:

(WARNING: The following is less interesting for the casual reader, and is put online on the off chance that somebody wants to become a contributing writer for Empty Promises and Broken Dreams, which is not, in fact, an exciting opportunity for any writer--but is a possibility.)

I shall not give money to strangers: If a place I know and love is doing a curated show and I've got work that I think fits, paying a submission fee isn't out of the question. If a contest online has a submission fee, it is (out of the question.) The wonder of web 2.0 is that people can be creative and get connected for just the price having a networked computer.

I shall delete expired opportunities: I hate reading a call for submissions and after three paragraphs seeing that it ended last week.

I shall show the reader everything I know: I will post the website or listing where I heard about the opportunity.

I shall know the opportunity pretty damned well: Perhaps at the price of having a more extensive listing of opportunities, I am actually reading up about these folks, and emailing them questions--and I'm submitting to them and being rejected, much as how I imagine a reader might. For every one opportunity I post here, I email questions to a dozen sketchy propositions to people who never get back to me.
Related to that,

I shall not post any opportunity that's too busy to send a rejection letter: My criteria for a valid organization is that they send rejection letters. If I've discounted a legitimate rag for accidentally not getting back to me, that's fine.

I shall use a specific definition for "opportunity:" An opportunity includes a publisher who will put work in print, will pay the writer some amount of money, or both. A "publisher" who does neither is not a publisher, they are a web host.

I shall not just put up listings: The opportunities I put up are personal to me, and while I won't get into that too much, they are my doubts, and my aspirations. I shall, in brief, discuss exercises or tutorials used. I shall have secret challenges.