MFA Ranking, Applying, and other nonsense.

2013 GrassRoots

So I'll start off by telling you guys, I'm not sure if I already have, I got the Senior Co-Editor of GrassRoots. For those of you who haven't read this before, it's the job I applied for a while back that is co-running the undergraduate literary magazine at my college. I really wanted this position and for me it's like a dream come true!

I think of this job as, it has always been my dream to see my name in a book and if I can't do that, I want to make others come true and give that to them. (My name does appear in this book through, twice on two of my works and once under staff, a smaller position.) I want people to feel that same feeling I had when I found out my name would be in print! So here's hoping to a great year.

On top of wondering what all is going to come with that job this Fall (my senior year might I add) I have been working on my MFA applications. As anyone out there who has ever applied to MFA programs, you know how stressful this can be. There are so many questions you have to take into account. Do I take the GRE? How much money will I need to apply? Is this program right for me? Will I want to shoot myself living in such a small town, even if their program is ah-mah-zing!? (Yes, there is one of those on my list.)

This is proving to be even more stressful than I had originally thought, and trust me, I thought it was going to be EXTREMELY stressful. I'm now worried that even if I do get into a program what if their stipend isn't enough money to survive off of? What if I end up living on the streets? I can't live in a cardboard house! Urgh!

Only time will tell.

Rejection

picture by nathangibbs

So, I'm sorry if I've talked about this before, but it's weighing on my mind. I thought about coming up with a clever title for this, but there's not clever about rejection is there? It's just... well, rejection. No clever titles. No glitter to mask it. Just rejection.

It sucks. Let's get that out of the way right away. There's no happy party "Yay I got a rejection!" You do that when you get a yes.

And probably a whole lot of this.

But they're not the end of the world. They really aren't. I've had enough of them to know that they won't brutally murder you like you think. They won't make you go into a deep depression and cry until your eyes fall out. Yes, you'll be sad. You might even get angry and want to tell of the people that rejected you (BAD ADVICE! This will completely cut you off from future submissions to that source).

I got some great advice from a teacher once. She is the head of the MFA program at Southern Illinois  University, Allison Joseph. I took her intro to poetry class as an Undergrad (which I still am) and she really is a great woman. She's a genius and knows what she's talking about. One day we talked about rejections. She told us that when she first got rejections, she gave herself to be sad/angry/whatever else she wanted to feel. As time progressed and she got more rejections, she told us that she gave herself a week, then a day, and then an hour.

The idea here, if you didn't pick up, is that you don't dwell on them. You give yourself a little bit of time to be sad/angry/whatever then you move on. Just because one magazine didn't like your poem/short story/etc doesn't mean a different magazine won't. It doesn't mean it's bad, or that you should scrap it. It means you write. You continue to try new magazines, new poems, new short stories, and you move on. Don't let anyone stop you from writing. You write no matter what others say because in the long run, you aren't writing for others; you're writing for you. You're writing because you love it.

Facing the Facts

Photo owned by Scott Beale

So I found out some news about my stuff being published, and I guess I should have seen it coming, but why didn't I? I was walking around in a perfect little world where nothing could touch me or my writing. Wrong!

It turns out that the literary magazine that is publishing me gets to decide what to edit in the story and what to cut out. I don't know why this surprised me, but it did. Then I read the changes they made. It wasn't anything astronomical, but one little line they cut out just got to me. It's still bothering me, almost a week later. I plan on emailing them right after and asking them to put a line back in, but it's just weird. It's weird to think that someone else has domain over my writing; someone that isn't me.

I've accepted what they've done and just plan on asking for that one line to be added back in, but then my poem came up. They added in an entire stanza. A stanza I'm not particularly fond of. I'm going to tell them to take it out or it's not being published. Some of you may say that's stupid of me, but it's my work and now it just feels like a frankenstein baby! When an entire stanza I did not write makes its way into my work, it's no longer mine.

But I have to face the fact, that if I want to get published there will be an editor and a publisher that ultimately has say in everything that goes out there, and as much as it sucks, that's my life. I'm okay with it though, people are reading what I've written and that's all that matters... right?

Happiness Is A Warm Pen

Hello all!

Late Thursday night, and Friday morning, were both just full of awesome things for me. Thursday night I finished the first draft of my work in progress, which I have mentioned before. I am very excited to be able to say I've written a novel all the way through. I know it has a lot of work and it will take a long time, but that doesn't mean I didn't finish.

Then on Friday morning, while brushing my teeth, I opened an email that basically led to this GIF.

My happy dance. (Also my best friend reacted the same as Amy Poehler.)
Picture own ed by SNL.

My school's undergraduate literary magazine, Grassroots, emailed me to inform me that they are going to be publishing one of my short stories and a poem! I was in shock at first, then the rest of the day I was Tina Fey. This will be the first time I will ever be published and that's, just, pretty exciting, haha. There's no other feeling like being told that your work is being selected to be published.

This really set the wheels in motion for me and I have fallen back in love with my writing. A little thing that bothered me was, I had JUST edited the short story they chose a few days before so now I feel like they don't have what was really meant to be seen! But that's okay! Happy dance^^^!!

So, because I'm happy, I am going to post another excerpt for Divided We Fall. I would like to remind people that everything posted is subject to be changed, and most likely will! Enjoy!

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          Then something caught my eye. Five stories up I saw her, standing in a floor length window that was on the far side of her office. Helen stood, arms crossed, staring down at us. I couldn't see what expression she was making, but her stance looked guarded, almost angry. As I stared at her, the ground started to shake. I grabbed onto Winnie and the violent jerks beneath us continued. I heard yells and screams from the other side of the wall, telling me we weren't that far away from other people.

          “Fi, what's going on?” Winnie whimpered. He his voice cracked with fear. I felt Adler as he wrapped his arms around us, trying to protect us.

          “Just hold onto me, okay? I won't let anything happen to you.” I looked up at Adler who looked just as confused as I felt. Behind him on the wall the chimeras ran back and forth frantically while the harpies batted their wings as if they were about to take flight. Some of the looser bricks began to fall off the wall, crumbling as it hit the grass below. Then it stopped. The ground stopped trembling and there was no more screams. I turned to look up at Helen but she was gone.

          “What is she?” Adler asked to no one in particular.

          I gazed at the window. “I don't know.