Managing Your Submissions Properly

By Antonios Maltezos

You need a good pencil, first of all, nice and sharp, but not too sharp in case you have to log a new entry, or change an existing one while the log sheet is resting on your bare thighs. Need a good erasure on that pencil too. If it’s a dollar store pencil, the lead may be okay, but I certainly wouldn’t chew on the erasure. Besides, dollar store pencils have plastic erasures that’ll smear your corrections and adjustments and make an overall mess of your log sheet. Having everything neat and tidy on that piece of paper makes you feel more pro-ish, less amateurish, if you know what I mean. Gives you hope. And the more entries you jot down, the less devastating the inevitable Xs signifying the rejections. So fill that page. Submit, submit, submit! But stuff does come up, life happens, and managing your submissions, as I’ve mentioned, can be really time-consuming, so there’s always the possibility that valuable info will get misplaced, or wrinkly, and you’ll have to start a new one. If that happens, know that you aren’t obliged to copy over the rejections from the last list. What are we living in the past, here? You’ll need a new pencil, sharpened just right. Not too sharp, though, because you want the script to have a flare. You want it to look natural, like you scribbled the names of those journals on the fly, as a stylish individual might, with flare but steady and balanced on the page. You see? It’s like a pair of jeans’ll make one person look like a farmer, and another real cool. You want cool, and that too sharp pencil will just dig into the paper making your script look like it’s come from a shaky person. You don’t want that. You want Mont Blanc smooth, like you got enough money in the bank not to care that much, eh? Okay, g’luck!

Next week: Hunting agents