Postage Prices

Since Puntitas’ new postal scale should arrive some time next week or so, she decided to piddle away part of her afternoon by reading up on first-class postage prices of the United States:

http://www.usps.com/prices/first-class-mail-prices.htm

(Puntitas really will update her blogroll links between now and January 1.)

Wow, Puntitas had clearly underestimated the complexities of postage calculations and the specific stresses put upon the American postal employee, whose job is it to keep track of it all.

Previously, Puntitas thought that postcards of a maximum length and width were mailed at a fixed rate of X while envelopes were delivered at a rate of Y per ounce. She had a vague notion that large envelopes, the ones that are the size of a half sheet of letter writing paper or larger, had a higher postage minimum than other envelopes, but it was one of those nebulous and possibly mistaken notions based on the coincident circumstance that such envelopes usually hold more pieces of paper.

Now she discovers that she was right about the postcard, more or less: it takes 28¢ to mail a postcard that is 3.5×5 to 4.25×6 inches in size, provided that it weighs less than 1 oz., has a thickness that falls between 0.007 and 0.016 inches, and is addressed conventionally in landscape position.

But she was completely misinformed when it comes to letters, large envelopes, and packages (Puntitas book-length manuscripts, when combined into a single mailing, may actually be packages). Yes, size does matter where envelopes are concerned, and so does girth, heft, flaccidity, and degree of conventionality in terms of general dimensions and weight. Who wouldn’t have guessed that postmasters have traditionally been male?

Puntitas had to read the page several times to familiarize herself with all the esoteric details. She has no complaints about the rates themselves. They seem reasonable enough. At least they do at this point, while Puntitas has no real way of knowing how much her manuscripts weigh. Her neuroses center around all the factors involved in coming up with the right amount.

Hmm, Puntitas just realized she doesn’t always figure postage into her expenses.

Puntitas reads _First Comes Marriage_ by M Balogh.

Back to Thinning the Herd

Puntitas deleted half of the contents of her nonfiction prose folder. This was hard. In page-length alone, she was two thirds of the way to a collection, and in terms of quality, the pieces she deleted weren’t bad. She deleted them anyway because

 they were incomplete.
 they needed a lot of work.
 the style/voice was so annoying that Puntitas couldn’t stand the thought of working on them even to fix that.
 They covered the same couple of themes and handled them in the same way.
 The settings and characters were so uniformly the same that the pieces blended even for Puntitas.
 No unifying theme suggested itself in terms of how the individual pieces can be combined into a collection.
 Nothing jumped out as far as how to reshape the individual pieces if they were to be revised.

Of the six pieces left, only two will definitely remain essays. A third, the one she has been working on, will most likely also continue to be an essay. The last three, however, will likely evolve into short stories though one of these last can go either way.
Though Puntitas understands that essays are about ideas while stories are about characters, the distinction gets harder for her to sort through when she considers the memoir with the hammer-and-nails part of her brain. One piece is clearly about an idea, which is really only described in the current draft, so that piece will continue to be an essay. Two other pieces cover both characters and ideas, but because Puntitas wants readers to know the experiences actually happened to at least one person and probably others, those pieces will also almost certainly continue to be essays. The other three pieces can be revised to emphasize either the character or the idea, each type of revision calling for more or less the same amount of work.

What she finally does with the pieces will depend on more pragmatic factors. In part it will be based on what the material suggests once she settles down to work on it. In part it will depend on how many pages she needs to complete her fiction anthology. In part it will depend on whether a piece is published as a particular genre. Puntitas is not above sending prose out as fiction if it can pass for it. She doesn’t expect to do the opposite because she doesn’t believe in claiming an experience that isn’t hers, But she also knows that we don’t behave according to our ethics as consistently as we would like to think.

Puntitas reads _the Link_ by C. Tudge.

The Book Submission Blues

Puntitas has had a long, exhausting day. She printed out 1 copy of each manuscript (2 books and 1 chapbook), which took about 3 hours. She read contest guidelines, wrote cover letters, and swooned at the $365.00 in reading fees that she will be kissing goodbye by day’s end.

She is feeling bitter and bitterer and bitterest as she realizes she is unlikely to reap any fruits from this outlay, especially as this month has also involved spending $231.00 on a new cell phone, which in turn involves an extra $44.00 monthly fee to her cell phone bill—all because her current quasi employer likes to text and because Puntitas decided in one clearly stupid moment that she would be accommodating. Puntitas’ old celular barato texted just fine; Unfortunately, none of the currently available screen readers worked with it. So yet again, Puntitas has to be richer than most people she knows to go about her daily life, which is really pretty ordinary.

Though Puntitas is also ecstatically happy to report that work has picked up this past month, a perusal of her accounts indicates that it has only picked up enough to cover those two expenses plus one month’s cell phone bill and maybe a falafel plate at the local Mediterranean place.

When Puntitas is in one of these moods, she is not at all sympathetic to the struggling independent publisher. Sales are low because struggling writers can not afford to buy every lit mag or book ever published, nor do they want to as reading them only feeds their sense of being passed over by less talented souls who don’t mind putting out. Today Puntitas has been especially vindictive since her skimming of previous contest winners produced list upon list of fine Western European names, which prompted her to meditate on her own more southerly name, her own unconventional subject matter, and her money that buzzes and fizzes from her savings account, like a farting balloon.

Puntitas reads _Lost Girls_ by G. Shuman.

Hard to Publish

Puntitas doesn’t remember when she last posted or what particulars she was rambling about. Lately, She’s been coming out of the residual funk of quitting her job. Some decisions require grieving even when they’re the right ones.

She’s been revising the incoherent poem (yes, that was one of the topics of her last post), a task she feels she’s close to completing, and she thinks she’s finished revising one of the poems that sprang from reading someone else’s blog. She likes the new poem very much, plans to send it out, in fact, but she’s not sure it’s all that different from the source, and she suspects it lacks the punch and clarity of the original.

Which brings another topic to mind.

This new poem is likely to be labeled a poem about “disability.” Since Puntitas has one, the subject falls into her list of themes. She’s got a number of such poems, enough to fill a chapbook, which she’s organized and also plans to send out. The interesting thing is that only one of the poems in said chapbook has been published, even though Puntitas thinks others are well written and worthy of appearing in print.

She’s made the same observation about her poems on “ethnic themes,” and she wonders what, aside from submitting to specialty publications, she can do to make this type of work attractive. She’s not convinced that saving it for the book, like the lesser songs that make an album, is really an option since this work takes up large chunks of her manuscripts. She hasn’t even found a way to think about the problem or coincidence. She’s certainly sending out the work as often as she does pieces on other subjects, and she’s tying them to the journals’ themes and wants as much as she can. Puntitas has some mulling over to do.

Oh, Puntitas changed the title of one of her manuscripts after adding the newly finished poem. She’s thinking she’d like to finish another poem and use a line from it instead.

Puntitas reads _Scandal Becomes Her_ by S. Busbee, _God’s Middle Finger_ by R. Grant, _The Art of Setting Stones_ by M. P. Keane.

Record Keeping

Yesterday Puntitas received another rejection from her February mailings: Postit note sized, pleasantly neutral message. She might have been more disappointed if she’d had any memory of submitting or if the Peter Robinson she was reading hadn’t been at such a crucial place.

She did think, after the Robinson and before the Beaton, that she should come up with a better system for keeping track of her submissions. The current method is to send cover letters–which list date of submission, name of journal, and titles of poems—to her Submissions folder, then to delete said cover letters when she gets the rejection. The problem is that she often forgets to move the letters to the right folder, many getting lost in Knitting and other obscure directories, or to delete the letters when the rejections arrive.

Writerly friends have suggested a spreadsheet, but Puntitas isn’t clear about how this works. She imagines that each row starts with a poem or story title. The next three columns list journal, submission date, and turnaround time. The fifth shows the response: rejected/accepted. Once the work is rejected, Columns II through V compress into a single note reading: “Boulevard Aug 2009 rejected.” Puntitas can’t think of a faster lane to suicidal ideations than a well maintained catalog of publishing attempts gone bad, but she supposes that her present denial-by-deletion campaign isn’t any healthier psychologically. She’ll try the spreadsheet approach once she figures out a less destructive layout.

Puntitas reads _In This House of Brede_ by R. godden, which she is enjoying very much but takes a break from to do some mental relaxation, _Aftermath_ by P. Robinson, and _Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death_ by M. C. Beaton.

She Lives!

Puntitas is officially well now. She’s been well since Monday, and she knows she’s well because she’s interested in reading, knitting, and eating–three activities she engaged in without much vim or vigor.

She’s also avoiding work, a project which is long over due. Bad Puntitas. Her goal is to work on that today and to officially submit Big, Ugly Translation, which she still hasn’t finished because of a few words that will most likely turn into explanations, rather than translations.

Puntitas current obsession is to get the overdue editing job out of her life and to prepare for an interpreting exam, which she is not optimistic about passing. Puntitas knows this is not the attitude needed to slay the dragon, so in addition to reading in general and reciting probable vocabulary, she will tell herself she will do well, and well she will do.
Needless to say, no official writing is on the agenda for Puntitas. She has had ideas in her head and some desire, but both are probable avoidance mechanisms, especially since both intensify whenever she thinks about editing or studying. It really is a pity that Puntitas’ self-discipline didn’t come back with her good health. Then again, “back” suggests prior existence, no?

Puntitas reads _Bitter Sweets_ by R. Farooki.

More of the Same

Puntitas has been away because she’s still being a diligent little translator. She is about three fourths of the way through her big ugly translation, and she is starting to feel that it will all be over soon.

She hasn’t gotten any writing done (well, except for three lines of a poem this morning while testing her netbook), but she has received another poetry book rejection, which was impersonal and, therefore, much less shattering than the previous one. She knows she must send more poems and books out, but she’s not going to bother about either proposition until the translation and an editing job are out of the way, which means she’ll go to the post office after July 1.

Puntitas has also been trying to update her computer skills, No mean feat for one who can fairly be called a technophobe. She is still slowly learning her translation software. She is additionally learning to use a netbook, which is set up differently from her desktop unit, and the experience reminds Puntitas yet again that she has developed very specific notions about what makes a comfortable writing environment. The netbook will be a good friend to Puntitas once she has adjusted to the keyboard, conquered the Office 2007 learning curve, fine-tuned her screen reader, and accepted that her new device is not a clone of her current one, the beloved George/Jorge, depending on the language they’re communing in. Puntitas pledges to issue an upcoming post from her new mini bad boy.

Puntitas reads _The Winthrop Woman_ by A. Seton, _Phantom Prey_ by J. Sandford, _Heartstones_ by R. Rendell, and _Sexstrology Anthology_ by S. Giron.

One Rejection and One Submission

Puntitas received another rejection on Friday. It came from Triquarterly. The form letter was less generic and sterile than most. It was printed on a strip of paper as wide as a standard 8-1/2×11 sheet, but only one third that height.

Puntitas must be producing additional layers of skin because the rejection caused only a brief sting. No mental depictions of cruel and unusual demises followed, and neither was there any frantic rush to the PC to record the event.

Puntitas is also too preoccupied with other things to obsess properly. She’s got some editing to do and more translation both due soon, and her job situation is nearing a head. Fortunately, Puntitas is sleeping better now, more hours at more sleep appropriate times, so she is lucid enough to do what she needs to and avoid the stuff she really shouldn’t dwell on anyway.

Much of today has been spent scanning a bilingual legal dictionary. Puntitas has managed to not-scan this dictionary for a year, but this morning she woke up thinking that it would behoove her to devote one or two days to scanning so that, over the next couple of weeks, she can just look terms up rather than continue her current method of reading four or five texts on a subject to figure out what something means, then reading twice as many to figure out how to translate it. Puntitas will probably have to keep doing some of that, but reducing the number of occasions is definitely a move toward efficiency.

Few things are as tedious to Puntitas as scanning a book. Yes, one positive way of framing the activity is remembering that it takes less than a minute to magically turn a page of dictionary into nice searchable text on the hard drive, but Puntitas, being cranky, rarely frames things positively when she is sitting lump-like at the computer for hours, pressing an open book down on a flatbed scanner, waiting forty-five seconds for the image to be captured and converted to text, turning the page, and repeating the process, and repeating the process, and repeating the process until she’s done and can spend three times as many hours ridding the scan of most of its errors (e.g., revising “judliciai” to “judicial”).

Days spent this way are made up of more hours than ordinary days. They also prompt Puntitas to hurl invectives at publishers, who don’t make all books available electronically to people who can’t just grab and read because they can’t see the print, process the writing visually, or hold the book and turn the pages.

As she invects, Puntitas remembers to mention that she sent out one more batch of poems last week—the writerly act of the week.

So far, only one book rejection. More should be coming soon.

Puntitas reads _Bloody Secrets_ by C. Garcia-Aguilera and _Mistress Bradstreet_ by C. Gordon.

More Rejection

I received another rejection today, another Postit sized form letter telling me my work had been read closely but regretfully not accepted. This one came from the Mid American Review, to which I’ve submitted in the past, and it was for a group of poems. There was no hand written scrawl anywhere, so the rejection was just a rejection.

I’ll need to tally up my responses to be sure, but so far, I’ve heard from at least half, probably more like two thirds, of the editors I’ve sent work to. I’ve only heard from one press regarding my books, but in a couple of cases, I think I’m supposed to check a web site, something for another day.

I’ve been updating my laptop lately to be able to translate on my patio or in the comfy chair in my room. It’s been so long since I’ve used it that “updating” took three or four hours. Firewalls, virus and spyware checkers, screen reader, PDF reader, Microsoft components and service packs—there was a short time when I thought I’d never not get an “update now” message.

The machine is much bigger and heavier than I remember. Having worked with the paperback book sized note taker recently, that’s become my standard of portable, so dealing with a three-ring binder sized box, which must weigh seven or eight pounds, has been an adjustment.

I just had a conversation with a friend about how different life and choices become when we think about the need to make money rather than simply do something for its intrinsic value. I’m experiencing this all too clearly with my slow translation and my accumulating rejections. The feelings are all the stronger as the end of my current employment contract approaches and as I’m facing the double realization that I really don’t plan to return and that my extremely useless boss and superiors have not extended renewals to me or any of my coworkers, something they would have done by this point in the year. I still haven’t finished all of the dental work that needs to be done, so some of it will have to wait. Most other expenses have been dealt with, but we’re still short a new vacuum cleaner (the current model smells scarily of sulfur when it’s switched on), and the insurance is due yet again. The life of a writer can be most unwriterly.

Puntitas reads _the Abduction_ by M. Gimenes.

When Even the Muse of Awakening Is Away

Puntitas is having an especially unproductive day. She had one appointment this morning, which was neither taxing nor long, but she’s made minimal progress on her big, ugly translation because she keeps falling asleep while reading the endless pages of research, parallel texts that are dreamy examples of fine, dry insurance prose. Even the coverage and exclusions that involve genitalia sound like A/c filter options.

So Puntitas has been reading small chunks while surfing the web for knitting patterns, historical factoids, and audio book downloads. Where these last are concerned, she’s filled her hard drive with the sort of mindless crap that features “strong language,” “violence,” and “explicit descriptions of sex.” Let’s hear it for genitalia that sounds like genitalia.

I’ve been meaning to post here about several writerly things: a talk that a friend and I attended on the humor of Mark Twain, my plans for sending more poems and book manuscripts out, one or two observations on technique from some of the stuff I’ve been reading, general giggling and happiness over my humble acceptance.

But what keeps coming back to me is the conversation I had with my accountant—well, mostly his observation that the writing has to generate an income for it to be an official profession. This is obvious, to be sure, and it’s something I know, but somehow I hadn’t really faced the fact that I still don’t treat it like one. More and more, I ask myself how to find jobs that will turn writing into pay and what I can do to squeeze revenue out of my sad collection of poems and close-to-ready short stories. Definitely food for thought, and once I get the translation finished, I will try to come up with a plan.

Puntitas reads _La Reina del Sur_ by A. Perez-Reverte and _The Yosemite Murders_ by D. McDougal.