More adventures as a writer: one job, one refusal.

I received a solicitation from someone who found me on Monster.com, asking if I were interested in applying for a position as editor with a marketing company.  Excited, I leapt through all the hoops, tuned up my resume, contacted my references, and gave three strong interviews.  It wound up in success and I was hired!  I went in to work last Friday, a slow day for the office, and practiced my chops on a couple proofs.  It felt good.

But my boss kept referring to me as a contractor, which confused me.  No one at any point of the interview or application processes suggested this was anything but a permanent hire.  I'm meeting with HR on Monday so I'll have to get the definitive answer then.  I may have to research what it means to  be my own business.

And I submitted a short story to three periodicals I found on this site.  I set up markers in my online calendar as to the earliest dates I could expect to hear from each of them.  There's been no word so far from two; as for the third, they returned my unopened manuscript back, heavily stamped REFUSED.

I don't know what that means.  Did I do something wrong?  Was I ineligible to submit, being out-of-state?  Was my envelope not pretty or professional enough?  Am I too fat?  The only feedback I have is some angry Sharpie.  I came here to look the publication up again, find out if I missed anything in their requirements, but the search function is down and apparently the directory is too.  It will be some time before I can investigate this mystery further.

In the meantime, I wrote a successful blog post on Open Salon.  Unlike other material I post there, it was popularly received and still garners some attention.  It's been a very positive experience, but a concerned friend of mine e-mailed me to suggest I not throw my best material away like that.  She said it could have easily been published (and I could have been paid for it), and that's true but how was I to know?  I think I've written much better stuff and posted it, and it's been completely ignored: I have no idea how people are going to respond to my material.  And I could have written it and sent it out for publication in a local magazine or newspaper, and after it was systematically shot down or ignored I could have posted it online, and it would no longer have been timely.  It wouldn't have gotten the attention it did when it was fresh.

I really don't want to argue in defense of my weaknesses.  Maybe I should have dressed it up and sent it out, but the thought really didn't occur to me.  I wouldn't know where to send it around here, and I couldn't imagine that it would survive the slush pile to actually be scanned by human eyes, and if it got that far there's no freakin' way someone would've said, "Yes, we need to print this."

On the other hand, I ran it online and a couple dozen people have been highly complimentary.  I feel better as a writer after this experience.  What would I have gotten if I'd run it in a print publication, ten bucks?  Less?  I'd rather have 24 hours of feeling good about myself.