Road Trip!
Post-Trip Review: Failures
Alakazam!
Note: This is the twelfth in a series of posts describing my effort to get letters published in newspapers in every state and territory of the U.S.A. You can read the whole series here.
From reading my Road Trip blog posts you might come away thinking that all, or nearly all, of my submitted letters were published in newspapers. Au contraire (that’s gratuitous French—a topic that is well-covered here).
In fact, I wrote almost as many failed letters as I did successful ones. By “failure” I only mean that the letters did not get published. However, I think some of them are decent letters and some are so bad they are good. How can you tell the difference? That is surely a subjective matter, but the truly bad ones make me laugh because I know the conniving, pandering mindset in which I wrote them. I surely saw something in some local paper that made me think I had figured out their editor and I would worm my way into print. Or maybe I had a wild notion and wrote something kind of bad and then inflicted it on the next paper on my list without a care for their preferences. In my defense, it was a long road trip and sometimes random letters did better than the well-planned ones, and my value judgment became suspect. If I had gone a long time between quality submissions based on solid research, I was liable to just fire anything off to any newspaper. Rejection eventually brought me back to my senses.
In many cases, though, the failures were among my earliest efforts, and while they demonstrate some pandering on my part, the main thing they show is my early disregard for submission guidelines. I was still thinking that I could take the editorial pages by storm and be recognized as a potential columnist. So I ignored guidelines and just wrote and wrote and wrote until I thought I had covered a topic. In fact, those lengthy efforts were far too long even for a column, much less a letter.
Eventually, I realized that I was spending a lot of time writing for not much (or any) ink; meanwhile, puny little unworthy letters by others were getting published daily. I realized, too, that rather than distinguishing myself as a superior writer of concise humor, I was probably coming across as a bit of a loon.
I am, if nothing else, a quick study. And so after indulging in those long-winded efforts for a few weeks, I adapted to the world in which I was trying to get published, with great success as described in the other blog posts. Every now and then, though, I would still write something very long and unpublishable. However, even those works could be mined for ideas and expressions in letters that were published.
And so while these letters did not make it into print, they were valuable exercises.
Groom of the Bedchamber
This letter has everything: it conforms to guidelines for the local paper; it has local color; it is timely; it stokes the fires of town rivalries; and it has a real history lesson. All in 300 words! It took a lot of time to research and craft this one, and I was disappointed that it did not see print.
How to Act at the Pearly Gates
I submitted this only to the Anniston Star. I could have tailored it to other locations by tweaking the name of the radio station, but I knew the thing was way too long. I only tried it at the local paper because I had a track record there, and friendly editors. It was silently rejected. While I am not religious, I do enjoy gospel music. I considered this a fond and humorous take on gospel lyrics, but I imagine an editor in the Bible Belt would think it goes too far in poking fun.
The Few. The Proud. The Librarians.
Unlike many of my letters, this one is based on true events. I wrote it after applying for a job at the library in Anniston.
A good while later, in August of 2021, I attended the virtual conference of the Alabama Writers’ Cooperative. In one session conducted by a librarian who worked at a library in Birmingham, we were asked to do an on-the-spot writing exercise. Inspired by the librarian, I wrote a very short version of this essay from memory and then read it to the group. It was well received, especially by the librarian guy who conducted the session. You just never know when your writing exercises are going to come in handy.
Pretending in Baseball
I whacked away at three versions of this thing. Clearly, I wanted to relate that pretending that goes on in adult baseball to the pretending that we all do, especially in childhood. I don’t recall whether I submitted this anywhere. I hope I didn’t, but the multiple versions make me think I was cutting it down to fit within maximum length guidelines for commentary, not letters.
It has potential, but I should probably work it into a long-form essay about pretending. Compression is necessary for newspaper material, but not everything can be compressed and retain its good qualities.
Tooter
This landed with a dull thud. I wrote it in April of 2020. The last of my 15 letters in the Anniston Star appeared in January of that year. By April I was well into my road trip and did not need another Alabama publication. I guess the joke about Phil Tutor’s name was irresistible to me.
I should have resisted.
With most of my letters, I enjoy the mental image of an editor liking it and perhaps even reading it aloud to nearby reporters and other editors. Not this one. Once my humor haze cleared up I realized that the labored humor stinks, it was probably offensive to Phil Tutor, and it probably tarnished my rep at the paper.
Lost in the Transfer Portal
In what world, you may ask, would any newspaper publish an 854-word letter?
Why, in this world! And the paper is AL.com. It is an online-only publication, and while they do have length guidelines I have seen them publish some long commentary. And so, after having two successes with them (“Make Auburn Great Again” and “Move Space Force to Anniston”) I went full steam ahead with long-form humor.
This piece, and a few others I sent to them, were what caused them to eventually tell me that their readers don’t like satire. While that is debatable, what is not debatable is that this piece was not to their liking. I can see why. It is a rather labored piece of faux news, totally unsuitable for a mainstream news outlet. It crosses the line into pure satire, suitable for The Onion but not nearly good enough even for that publication.
It took a while, but it eventually dawned on me that the proper response to “our readers don’t like satire,” is not “Oh yeah, try this satire!” The proper response is to stop sending them satire.
Listen to editors. They tell you what they want, even if you think they are not 100% consistent based on what they publish.
My Favorite Things
I wrote this very early on in my “I’m a potential columnist,” days. I like it, but I see why it is not right for a newspaper.
A Question about a Dinner Roll
Obviously, I submitted this only to the papers in the nation of Samoa and the U.S. territory of American Samoa.
Just kidding about that “obviously.” I wrote this in January of 2021. I was into my road trip by then, and clearly I must have already figured out that the island territories were tough nuts to crack. I have written elsewhere about how the seriousness of the issues addressed in the territorial opinion pages prevented me from weighing in satirically as I did in other communities. And so I tried something completely out of left field.
It was a dud.
I like it for what it is, but clearly it has absolutely nothing to do with either Samoa and I have never seen a conceptual piece of this kind in any newspaper. It was worth a shot, though. As with playing the lottery, the enjoyment in writing for newspapers doesn’t only come from winning (publication); there is also much fun to be had in the effort and in imagining the outcome right up until you lose. And then it’s even fun to think, “Man, why did I do that? It was never going to work!”
Perhaps the willingness to attempt the highly unlikely is what separates us mens from them boys, eh?
Pandemic Housework
I like this as an essay, though it is way too long and literary for a newspaper. I will certainly use some of the stuff about my aunt’s bathroom cleaning requirements in a future story.
Paper Towels
This was not only another example of banging my head against the brick wall of AL.com’s no-satire policy, but it was also a sad example of columnist-envy.
You see, AL.com has a stable of regular contributors who appear in their opinion pages. They do write satire (they do, they do, I tell you!) and it irks me no end that the editors’ response to my submissions was not, “This is not very good,” but “Go away.” I mean, I read, “Our readers don’t like satire,” as “Go away"when I see them publishing satire quite often.
I know. Flog that dead horse, boy.
While I did learn to (mostly) not send satire to AL.com, I was triggered by a paragraph in a commentary piece by one of their stable of columnists. It made some jokes about modern paper towels. I thought, “So! You want some humor about paper towels!” I rushed off this piece, to which they replied, “Our readers don’t like…”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Message received.
And really, even if their readers do like satire (and I think they do), how cringe-worthy was it of me to try to one-up someone’s humorous paragraph with an over-long tsunami of paper towel humor? Very cringe-worthy, I say.
At least we can all laugh about it now. Har de har….*sob*
Rosies
This is the only letter that was not entirely written by me. The blog post tells you how it came to be written, and where I submitted it.
The newspapers at military bases are unique and interesting publications. There is usually a gung-ho article by a senior officer on the base. Then there are articles, with pictures covering recent military exercises, family-oriented events, changes in command, etc. There are also ads and public service announcements about the support that is available for military families—financial aide, food banks, money management, continuing education, suicide prevention, family counseling.
The gung-ho and mission-oriented articles are generally positive, but there is no attempt to mask the difficulty of being in the military. The publications prominently feature the information about the help that is available for service members and their families. From this you can surmise that that help is very much in demand.
As with the U.S. territories, I had held off on submitting any kind of humor to military publications. In fact, I would have avoided them altogether except that when Mom’s letter came along I thought some military news outlet would enjoy it. And if they had, of course, I would have booked more states with publications.
This is a case, though, where I lament the failure to publish not because of the time I spent on it or because I needed some hard-to-get states and territories, but because I think it tells a very compelling story. I will try to get it published in some form, some other time.
Dumb in Alabama
This was another shot at publication in AL.com. I already had many Alabama publications so I didn’t need this one. And yes, I had absorbed the no-satire message. This letter is not satirical. It is a rarity for me: my actual opinion on an issue.
I’ll Miss the Spanakopita
This letter is unique in that there is no letter! There is only the phrase “I’ll miss the spanakopita.”
That phrase leapt out at me from a letter where someone was lamenting the imminent closing of their favorite Greek restaurant. At the time I had been working on my Mad Libs and Niceness Bombs letters, and I realized: Hey, restaurants close all the time! Why not write a template lamenting the closing of <insert restaurant> and reminiscing about the time you celebrated your <life event> there and all the meals you and your <family unit> ate there, especially on the way to or from <place where events are held>. And it should always close with “I’ll miss the <multi-syllabic ethnic dish>.”
There is an open question in my mind as to whether such a letter must involve a chic or ethnic restaurant. Would “I’ll miss the hamburgers” or “I’ll miss the little bags of potato chips” ever see print, or does the food which will be missed have to be foodie-bait for hip editors. What is selling the letter here, the food or the sentiment? I could find out by road-testing many flavors of this letter, some with bland foods, some with more exotic fare.
Even now, long after my road trip ended, the potential of that variation on Niceness Bombs makes me want to sit down and start writing and researching to find going-out-of-business announcements.
But at the time I saw that phrase and the idea occurred to me, I had just about done all the Niceness Bombs I wanted to, and I was ready to switch over to issue-oriented and local-themed one-off letters.
As it turned out, after noodling around for a while I returned to mass-produced form with my astroturfing efforts, and “I’ll miss the spanakopita” style letters would have been perfect. But I hit my goal of nationwide publication so I never got around to exploiting the soon-to-close restaurant idea.
Show Territories on the U.S. Map
Yes, I was pandering to the territories, trying to find a non-life-altering issue to write about. I couldn’t weigh in on drug use, crime, human trafficking, rising sea levels, domestic abuse; those things were covered every day, and they were serious issues that a pretender should leave to the people actually suffering from them. So how about making a case for more respect on the maps of the U.S.?
Obviously, I was desperate for territorial ink. I submitted this only to papers in Puerto Rico and American Samoa.
Denied.
Cary Grant’s Pants
The epilogue of this post tells the story behind this letter.
Eco-Drifting
Sometime in 2022, a good year after my road trip ended, I got nostalgic for the road and for the endorphin rush of getting published. I didn’t take the time to see what people are writing about nowadays and I didn’t try to come up with a brand new topic. I thought instead that it would be easy to resurrect the persona I used when I wrote my letter about pickleball and handball for the Paducah Sun. I like the sincere yet clueless tone of this letter but it takes too long for the more obvious humor to emerge. Also, it was quite random—there was no discussion of drifting in the paper at that time.
Denied.
Voting Rights Cynicism
Voting rights do not take up a lot of space in my head. However, I had great success getting my James California Condor letter published in many papers, so I tried to address another aspect of voting rights for the Washington, D.C. newspapers.
D.C. may have some small newspapers but I couldn’t find them. That left me with big mainstream newspapers. I never saw a glimmer of humor in their editorial pages, so I went into serious mode.
Denied.
OMG, Virginia
Most honest commentators know that public K-12 schools were in fact trying to teach critical race theory (and they continue to do so). As happened when parents objected to yoga instruction because of the religious component, parents who objected to CRT were called stupid for not realizing that just because CRT was taught in colleges of education, and just because it was built into K-12 lesson plans, and just because the bibliographies behind many K-12 lesson plans included CRT texts, the actual CRT concepts were not actually being taught to K-12 students.
This is rather like saying that if a general science course teaches about gravity, but it does not teach every element of calculus, then it wasn’t really teaching gravity. We’re just telling you how it is, you see, not promoting an agenda or a way of thinking. I mean, it’s an immutable law and all that, but we’re not saying you have to agree with it. You pitiable dumbass. (They actually do say that last part, which, if I were trying to convince people of my good intentions, I personally would leave that part out.)
I was my high school’s valedictorian. I was accepted to Yale but did not attend. I worked for nearly 40 years in the field of data processing, using the logical side of my brain to design and implement systems that have been in continuous operation for decades. I am a thinking, reasoning being of proven intellect. I have seen examples of the materials that were taught to K-12 students, and to my possibly Alabama-dumb yet demonstrably rational way of thinking, they are exactly CRT concepts. Not derived from, not tangentially related to, not used as examples of potential ways to think, but actual CRT concepts as the main points of the lessons.
Whether you agree with CRT or not, it is disingenuous to try to teach it and then, when taken to task for it, to call your accuser stupid for thinking that the exact thing you said in the lessons was what you were actually teaching. If you think something is a proper matter to teach to students, and you build it into your lesson plan, you should be proud of it and you should stand up and call it what it is.
In researching the controversy, I got a heavy dose of CRT. In this letter I applied it to a holiday favorite and you know what? “Yes, Virginia” turns out to be an ideal Mad Libs template for any persuasive essay on any topic—but especially an essay aimed at persuading children of something fantastical that they might otherwise question.
I do not know whether anyone has ever read my take on CRT, so I don’t know for sure if this was a clever way to make a point or if I’m just being, you know, dumb as shit.
Just Short of Perfection, But Happy Nonetheless
In this and other posts I have mentioned the unique problems of getting published in the territories and in Washington, D.C. My “Flaunting Related Injury” PSA got me into three of the territories, but I never was published in American Samoa and Puerto Rico. I also never found a way into Washington, D.C.
I think I could have gotten published in those three places had I chosen to imitate the letters that they were publishing. But as I have stated before, the papers in those areas were always dealing with extremely serious issues. I would like to have injected some humor into their proceedings, but my random humor fell flat there, and I was not going to try to write humorously (or seriously, for that matter) about their special problems.
I was willing to lie about my home address, and I was willing to write fictional letters with some fictional opinions, but only in places where I thought it would do no harm.
So, while I did not achieve 100% of my goal of nationwide publication, I think my three failures were for honorable reasons.
Perhaps if I ever have a solution for any of the problems of the two territories and D.C., I will write that up and try them again.
Boing!