So I thought starting a creative arts journal was going to be relatively easy. I guess I have just been blessed with friends who are decent writers or something. Because a majority of the submissions we've gotten so far (around 50 or more) are mostly crappity-crap-crap. That's worse than your normal, run-of-the-mill crap.

 

To give you a "for instance," take Ms. Idaho (name is changed for protection of the guilty, and no, Idaho is not where she lives). Ms. Idaho sends us her resume. Why? We're not lookin' to hire anyone. In addition to her resume, she sent us a news press release for some sort of boring malpractice suit. Apparently it was her idea of creative non-fiction? It was journalistic writing. That isn't creative in the slightest.


So I have a question to post to everyone: What's wrong with normal fonts? Like Times New Roman, Georgia, Arial, Verdana--heck it's not my favorite, but I'll take Courier over freakin' Matisse any day of the week. I kid you not, someone actually submitted a work of fiction written in Matisse. Do you know what this horrible font looks like? Open up Word and copy & paste a paragraph in there and change the font to Matisse--do you see how hard that is on the eyes? What kind of a person writes in Matisse? Of course I changed the font after I got done laughing/crying, but apparently the choice of font was the least of the writer's problems.

 

The other thing we keep getting: e-mails from people who want us to slog through their blogs, websites, etc. and choose something to publish. This seems like the highly lazy and highly shady way of getting us to read more than 3 submissions. I don't want to waste my time picking something out from someone's website to publish. That's why writers are supposed to submit to the magazine. Unless it's the kind of situation I have with two people at the moment; I actually approached a couple individuals to submit something because I was already at their website on a completely unrelated visitation relations, and I liked what I saw.

 

So all in all, it's proving harder than previously thought to start a journal. There actually isn't as much good writing as I had hoped out there. Or at least, the good writing isn't finding us via Craigslist. Although Lorie and I have sifted through, and found a few gold nuggets amongst the sluice, it's still a little disconcerting. Maybe I was just lucky in my writing programs at college, being surrounded by students whose work I actually enjoyed and respected. Maybe I should contact them and ask them to send their work to us.



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