Submitting feels good

Recently I have been waking up at 5AM to send email job applications, so that the potential employers might take note and perceive me as some kind of early bird.
A friend said this was dishonest of me, but for me (and probably you) applying for jobs is all about dishonesty.
I have answered the question "What is your biggest weakness?" honestly in a job interview. It ended in tears.

So my latest "creative enterprise" has been re-imagining my work experience of three jobs held for less than two months each as desirable and useful. Of course I'm pulling from my academic, professional and volunteer experience and hunger for new experience, so I'm lucky if I can get my cover letter to three sentences.

In a recent job application I claimed to be a freelance writer. When they emailed me back with a questionnaire and asked for two samples, I thought they'd called my bluff. But when I started filling out the questionnaire and looking at all the odd bits of writing paid for (or not) by internet strangers of questionable motivation, I think I found two things that made me seem competent at writing articles, not the weird story-ish things I normally do. The process of creation and revision are great, but I probably couldn't get along without these brief, serene moments where I've convinced myself that I've convinced someone else that I might be able to write.

Conflicting advice and three lessons from Writer's Market

1. You can't make any money off of poetry.

2. Getting a literary agent to represent you is a better goal than getting published.
Recently, I listened to a panel discussion on being published, and they said that their literary agent was indispensable, and that a bad literary agent could really hurt you.
This makes sense to me, because I have a bad literary agent--me. I send work to places that were probably mostly interested in adding me to their mailing list, if that.
Hearing this sage advice, I sought out the Writer's Market handbook to look up literary agents.
There I discovered what I probably should have figured out on my own: first, literary agents only work with things where 10% of the profit is still some amount of money, like screen plays, novels, and just maybe a collection of short stories, and second, I don't have any of those things written.
So, essentially I realized that I am doing a bad job, but I am doing approximately what I should be doing as a writer: writing down stories and showing them to people and publishers, honing my writing skills and creating ideas that could be used in the kinds of work that have the possibility of actually making any money at all.

3. Publishers would prefer that you be somewhat known, for something
That very informative panel on being published mentioned self promotion briefly.
They said it's more or less a waste of time, that you should focus on being a good writer instead.

Then I happened upon a segment in Writer's Market about "your platform."
Publishers looking for your platform are looking for ways that you are already famous or known not including the work that you want published. The book suggested a laundry list of get-famous-quick schemes like making shitty youtube trailers for your book, starting a webcomic or blog or otherwise trying to catch a ship that's already set sail.
Bob Powers got a good following by giving away stories on girlsarepretty.com but to paraphrase something a published writer told a sweaty, desperate crowd, I am not Bob Powers, and you probably aren't either. You're probably not even the why must I cry guy. But more to the point, why would you want to be somebody else?
Don't answer that. Let me just say that you are even more unlikely to be successful if you're trying to be somebody else. Probably the best strategy would be to turn something you need to do or enjoy doing and make that your get-famous-quick scheme.
Okay, that's kind of contradictory.
Let me start over. I think the best any of us can hope for in our endevors is to be an example for others. And if more people know who you are, AND know you for doing something interesting or good, you've got a better chance at being published, I mean, making a difference.
I, for instance, lead art workshops in my community. But I haven't put in anywhere near the amount of work to get my efforts into the newspaper on a slow day, and being in the newspaper on a slow day is a very low bar to set for a non-profit arts program.
Also, freelance article writing is another way to get kinda known, and at the same time do something that might feed yourself sometimes. How to write good articles and get them published, I have no idea. More on this later.

Watch what you say...

I have been running down everything on 

www.placesforwriters.com/calls

much as I had in previous posts, I just haven't been blogging about it, partially because the information is already on placesforwriters, and partially due to the following issues:

Doing this blog immediately and conclusively taught me one thing: Some publishers read nearly everything said about their publication (particularly anything that links to it) so even without a real readership, it's probably wise to watch what I say for this little project, where I am liable to say things like "I have not read any of this magazine, but they pay for submissions, so I chucked some stuff their way." or "I tried reading this magazine, and it made me want to punish them rather than participate, so I sent them an essay I had saved on my computer from a high school writing assignment."

But allow me to reflect upon the morality of that last, very rhetorical statement.

Certainly I should be reading from publications where I submit work, so I have to give the rhetorical second speaker there some points.

Recently Matrix magazine sent me a very kind rejection letter informing me that they enjoyed my work but couldn't fit in in this most recent issue. They encouraged me to submit to their upcoming issue on terror and the terrifying (www.matrixmagazine.org/submissions.html)

which is both encouraging and discouraging. To take them at their word (I believe it isn't a copy pasted message due to the spelling errors, zing Matrix!) I am making good work, (which is encouraging) but I would have needed to be the best around (darn.) Obviously, I can take this on with a dual strategy, aiming for getting  better, and getting lucky, but getting back to that other publisher, there is another strategy that comes to mind: submitting somewhere with low standards and high aspirations where I can submit what might be the best they could publish, without actually having to get better. Places that describe themselves as evolved but are composed mostly of generic, semi-literate bile in formats that just don't work, and poetry that appears to have been edited not so much for potency and flow as for spelling errors.

Yes, I was looking for places to send my work and I read such a publication, one that didn't make me hope that they would publish what I would submit, rather the idea that they might made me shudder. 

Then I thought of a piece of excessively negative writing that I had never been able (or bothered trying) to write any perspective or hope into. It was something counter-productive and feel-bad, and I submitted, yes I submitted writing just this once not for money or for glory, but for revenge.

Check out the many calls with deadlines this month at places for writers, read their publications (with caution) and write something special, just for them.