Publishing Progress:

9-17-02

None, zero, zilch.  Have done nothing.  Man, 4 months and I've done absolutely nothing.  Sigh. 

5-29-02

Wrote to NPR for submission guidelines on the advice of a few readers.  I think some of my essays might be pretty good on the radio, provided they were shortened a bit and read by someone with a better voice than mine. 

...and I just got an auto-reply.  Looks like they want items to be under 350 words.  UNDER 350 WORDS?  Fuck me.  I'm usually still setting up my first damn joke 350 words in.  Anyway, I'm editing a few things down, like a Spider-Man essay (kinda topical), something I wrote about enjoying your job by acting like a professional athlete (which I can make topical by mentioning the looming baseball strike), and something I wrote about ineffective anti-smoking ads.  I'll send them tonight, once I whip them into shape.

5-23-02

I suck, and that's about all there is to it.

4-10-02

Submitted same piece to the SF Chronicle.  Whoopee.

3-17-02

Queried the San Francisco Chronicle and the Sacramento Bee about Op-Ed stuff.  I don't really think what I'm planning to send them could be considered op-ed by any stretch of the imagination.  It's basically sarcastic humor about stuff that bothers me.  This is probably a waste of time, but I think Dave Barry's first published thing was an humor/op-ed of some sort that he sent to a paper. Which is a dumb reason to do this, but fuck it.  Can't hurt and it doesn't take long.  Most of the Sac Bee op-ed stuff looks really short, like 400 words or so, which sucks.  I like editing my stuff down, but I'm not good at hacking huge chunks out, unfortunately.

No response from the Alameda Times-Star.  Fuckers!  This small-town paper could use some bug-fart jokes.

3-13-02

Edited "Alas, Alack, Alarm".  Redid the beginning and dropped some stuff out of the middle including kind of a major joke that just wasn't working.  Couldn't get it phrased right and just took it out.  Took out the swear words and changed the ruder references a little. Cut the piece from 653 words to 581.  Still more or less the same piece.

Wrote to an Editor at Ang Newspapers, he gave me the correct e-mail address to submit op-ed stuff for the Alameda paper.  Also confirmed that they like a word-count of about 600 words for op-ed.

Submitted the piece via e-mail to the Op-Ed person at the paper.

Note:  First actual joke in piece involves an insect farting.  Golly, could this hurt my chances?