Waiting for Responses

I think that possibly the worst thing about writing is the submission process and the waiting for a response. Well, it's possible that repeated rejections are worse than the waiting, but I feel like I have some measure of control over that. When it comes to repeated rejections, I feel that a few things can be done: revise it so it's better, find another place that is better suited to it, or put it away and accept that it was good practice, but not a great result. Finding the right place seems to be most important, since revising and editing a piece should go without saying.

So we come to waiting for a response. I have been guilty at times of finding and submitting to markets that respond quickly (or say that they respond quickly) even if I don't think that my story is a good fit for a story. I find the wait to be nigh unbearable at times. Currently, I have two stories that are out there that I anticipate receiving a response sometime this summer. A third is being revised and will be sent out to wait 3 months when it's ready. All this amounts to a whole lot of down time for those stories.

I understand that magazines get a lot of unsolicited submissions and that there are reasons for the long delay, but that doesn't make it easier to take.

Since I'm currently in school (again, hopefully for the next-to-last time) I find that I relate time to other things, like my daughter's age at the time that such-and-such will be completed. This has bled over into my submissions, too. I think things like "She'll be crawling when I get this one back." While it tends to keep things in perspective, it's still hard to wait so long.

I guess this isn't really an earth shattering post, but I wanted to share. Really, 3 months isn't that long in any kind of grand-scheme time line, but it can seem like forever at times.

Science vs Religion

Sorry to anyone who wants me to discuss this, but I'm not going to. Instead, I'm going to discuss a ridiculous show I was watching. It's called "Incredible Creatures that Defy Evolution". In this show, Dr. Jobe Martin (who gets his title from the fact that he is a dentist) presents and explains animals that have such a complex or baffling set of traits that he claims they could not have come about by chance. He claims that the proof that these things could not have evolved is that modern evolutionary theorists don't know how they could have come about.

I think this whole thing illustrates why I tend to side with the scientific community when it comes to these things. First, they have a dentist present a bunch of pseudo-science under the guise of proving that these things happening by chance is impossible. I might be more inclined to believe it if a biologist, an archeologist, a paleontologist and a mathematician from reputable backgrounds came together and said that the chances were so remote as to be almost impossible. This still would not rule out the possibility, just the likelihood, even over billions of years. But the fact is that they wouldn't rule these things out. My experience has shown me that real scientists tend to follow the words of Socrates: "True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us."

The search for truth, it would seem, is a lot more about admitting how little we know than in claiming we have all the answers. And this, specifically, is where I disagree with the highly religious among us: they think they already have the answers. Telling me it's God's will or that he has a plan is not wisdom. I'd prefer a simple shrug. "I don't know" means a lot more than an attempt at an answer that at its heart is meaningless. Dr. Martin (the dentist) gives us the answers, or his version of them. But not only are they highly suspect, they seem ridiculous when viewed with a curious attitude. His answer amounts to: God made it that way.

If it's all about some mythical ending in which we'll learn all that is unknowable when we die, we should all just lay down and wait for it to happen. I can't hurt anyone or steal from anyone or covet anything I'm not supposed to if I'm simply laying on the ground, waiting to starve to death.

So I'm going to keep doing stuff. I'll keep drinking beer, writing stories and learning all I can (even thought I know I'll never know it all). I'm with Socrates on this one.