Happy Independence Day, everyone. Well, a day late, but what can you do. My general incompetence is always leaking all over my life, ruining everything. I’ve got nothing coherent to say, but a few random things are bumping about, so I figure I’ll make use of them and just jot them here.
I keep pretty good track of my writing projects and how they fare, especially the short stories. I submit stories pretty regularly, far and wide. So far, over the course of my entire ‘professional’ career (since I was about 18), I’ve submitted 1120 stories to various markets, and sold a grand total of 24 (sold being a loose term -Â accepted might be more accurate, as many, especially in the early going, were sold for contrib copies or similar). This is a success rate of 2.1% for those keeping score at home. On the one hand, this is a pretty sucky percentage. On the other, this reflects the relative lack of due diligence I perform when researching markets – I’d guess a good 20% of my submissions are doomed from the beginning because I am too lazy to research markets properly.
My success rate with novels, on the other hand, is great: Out of 8 novels that I’ve attempted in some way to sell, I’ve sold 4, for a success rate of 50%. Out of the 4 that haven’t sold, one is still being actively shopped, so there’s always hope.
Other randomness:  I just finished playing the game Portal, which was a blast. I don’t play many video games; basically I am a whore for First Person Shooter-type games and that’s about it, unless you count Text Adventures. I played a mean Zork when I was a nerdy kid as opposed to a nerdy adult. Portal is a lot of fun, and I recommend it not merely as a cool FPS game, but as a puzzle-game – the whole game is about solving puzzles, really, and you never once hold an actual gun or kill another being in the game. Well, almost never. Depends on definitions, I suppose. Still, a fun game.
I’ve also been hearing a bit about MagCloud, which is interesting to me as a DIY publisher of a zine. MagCloud is kind of like Lulu.com for magazines – they let you upload a PDF for free and claim they will handle subscription fulfilment and manufacturing, with a base cost of 20 cents a page. You can set the cover price and keep the difference, so if you’re mag costs $5 you can set the price at $6 and keep the dollar. A nifty idea, especially if they really do handle fulfilment for you. . .except, sweet jebus, twenty cents a page? My fucking god. It sounds okay at first, because twenty cents doesn’t sound like much scratch, but my little zine right now costs between two and three cents a page to produce. Granted, I am manufacturing them myself and handling fulfilment myself, but still. If MagCloud cost five cents a page, I could see it as an alternative, but this shit is bananas. An issue of my zine would have to cost $12, and that’s without me making a dime from it.
Sure, if you want to do a small 10-page kind of thing, it might be do-able, especially considering the zero startup cost. But for anything else, not workable. Unless you want to be in the same boat as folks who put their books out through Publish America, where their books cost three million dollars each and they wonder why no one will take a chance and buy one.
So that’s what’s bouncing around in my head. That and drink recipes. And my complete inability to play my guitar in time. And the fact that it’s been raining in Hoboken for about sixteen years straight.