Archive for July, 2009

When it rains it pours in letters land.

As it turns out, my little experiment about sending the exact same gushy letter of praise to both Shape and Self simply could not have worked better. Here are the results:

It’s like a cosmic game of Telephone. I say something and then it appears two months later in completely different forms. If you recall, Self was the one that sent me several emails asking for confirmation and verification of information. They edited beyond recognition. Shape did not acknowledge the letter to editor at all (though they did send me an email about something else), yet they featured an intact letter with happy bold, orange (my favorite color) type.

I suppose the lesson to be learned here is that everyone, even magazines, wants love. And when they get it, they want to shout it from the rooftops.

OK, all two of you that read this will by now have noticed a rather long delay between posts here. I’m still trying to figure out where I want to be going with this. I think it’s a bit of a Catch-22 situation with readership. Of course, any bloggy type person wants readers, but of course if any newspapery/magaziney editor type people became readers, they would (I think) be obligated not to print my letters.

The obviously solution, which several friends have suggested, is to write the letters to the editor under a pseudonym. That makes sense, of course, but I really don’t love that idea. Perhaps it’s pure narcissim, but much of the point of the blog was to see MY name in print, not a nom de plume. (And I have to say here that this is definitely the first time I’ve ever written nom de plume in a sentence. I like it. I’m going to try to do it more often.)

I’d like to go out and toot (or tweet) my horn about Mrs. Dogood, but I can’t see how that won’t eventually prevent me from ever getting any letters printed. If anyone has any brilliant ideas, I’m all ears.