Week 7: The Writing Bug Gets Stronger

Happy 11:41 all,

 *Check out my new story I published on Medium: A World Domination and Propaganda Training Course for the Aspiring White Collar Advertiser*

(It’s from a couple weeks ago b/c I have been sending in to comedy sites, and now I can finally show you all)

TL;DR of the week!

     1. Gathered more rejections. Published more on own blog

     2. Edited last week’s Trump & Religion piece

     3. Spedran a short satire piece 

Rejections & Publishing 

     On Friday morning, I got a very friendly email from The Belladonna Comedy telling me my work I had submitted had been rejected. 

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“Hi Emily,

Thank you for submitting to The Belladonna. Unfortunately, we are going to pass on this piece.

This had some fun moments, but the writing felt too factual and dense at times, and needed to be punched up with more jokes.

While we do not accept resubmissions of the same piece, we hope that this feedback will help the piece find a great home elsewhere, and strengthen your understanding of our voice to maximize your chance of acceptance here in the future. Our feedback is never a referendum on you as a person, comedian or writer! 

We hope this doesn’t stop you: even we get rejections all the time! Just keep writing and keep being you. And keep submitting!  

Thank you for trusting us with your work.

The Belladonna editors“

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     I now have two rejections under my belt, but it’s honestly exciting. I’m a new writer in a pretty specific satirical niche so it’s no surprise the acceptances aren’t flowing in. Rejection is so common in the literary field that writers write about it.

     Kim Liao wrote a piece for LitHub back in 2016 called, “Why You Should Aim for 100 Rejections a Year” and it contains an important lesson: not submitting out of fear of rejection gives you just as much as being rejected, so why not do the latter? So that’s what I’ll do. Even if at the end of my project all I have to show people is a list of polite “Sorry, not for us” emails, it still shows my perseverance. But that’s also why personal blogging sites like Medium and Write.as are so awesome. They’re places to publish your own precious work; Places where you can get that little dopamine hit of sharing your stories with others, as you grow towards getting into big publications like The New Yorker. 

Writing and Editing 

     Although my publishing hasn’t been the most fruitful adventure, I have gotten much more practice in finding comedy in politics :)! I have a rough strategy down now where I research a current event, then find historical/academic sources that corroborate it/add to it, then go back to finding more current things for some more accessible references. 

     The Trump & Religion piece is based on the idea of the “political religion/cult” that historians have observed over the millenia. It’s the grey area between ideology and reverence that can get forgotten about. The extra work (which mocks celebrity worship and leader worship) I wrote on top of that is a tad more eccentric [see my april 11th post]. There is comedy in the absurdity of a politician having an official merchandise site, but also in his made up fans’ silly twitter handles. 

Final Thoughts

     I definitely accomplished my goals for the week- always a relief! 

     I spread the word of my writing blog using the wonderful social media platform Instagram. I finalized the Trump & Religion piece from last week into something much snappier. And finally, I managed to write another work for a fun blog post :). 

     Next week I intend to refocus again on history. All of my writing so far has been inspired by historical events, but that’s not always obvious at first glance. I might revisit some of my old ideas (like the MLM marx-lenin-mao philippines) or discover something completely new. A couple weeks ago I came across a great article that had names of dictators (or at least crappy leaders) that I hadn’t heard of before like Nursultan Nazarbayev, Vladimiro Montesinos, and Baby Doc. Exploring the historical context that led to the rise of these leaders could be really fun.   

See you all soon, adieu!