Your Marketing Plan is a Road Map to Building and Sustaining Your Freelance Writing Business

Plan to fail when you fail to plan. So said either Ben Franklin or Winston Churchill, probably both. Nevertheless, here are a few ways to ditch the 'fail' part:

Your Marketing Plan is a Road Map to Building and Sustaining Your Freelance Writing Business

I Reject You

mollyfletcher

Each year I vow to tidy up all the paper surrounding me. Each time, I make some progress then stop because tomorrow remains the superior day to sort paperwork. Anyway, I found a bag filled with story rejections from 1985 to 1988. Those years encompass my undergraduate days and shortly thereafter. Incredible. A pecking order of refusal existed back then.

1. Form rejection.

2. Form rejection signed by the editor.

3. Form rejection signed by the editor with a personal note.

Titles included Grue Magazine, The Horror show, and FACET, A Creative Writing Magazine. My submission sampler displayed progress from 1 rejections to 3, but never a sale. The amount of paperwork involved was daunting with multiple envelopes and postcards. (I should do a video on all that.) One time, a single rejection lead to two. 

Today, sites such as Duotrope list publishers, markets, and all manner of writerly statistics. Below are my short story submissions from 2009 to 2016. So many markets have gone the way of Grue Magazine, but more open all the time. A few keystrokes launches a tale, instead of envelopes within envelopes. But stories shall be told, and writers write, and editors reject—and sometimes accept. So it goes.

Should you cringe at rejection's bitter sting, speaker and author Molly Fletcher notes the upside.

A Fine Blessed New Year

Coming soon to a calendar near you!

Drink for you and bed for me,

Forgoing delights of the spree,

For when I've drunk and 

Shunned my bed,

The new year starts,

With a painful head.

A droll poem, yes, but fresh chances await us all. Happy New Year!

Rape Gangs Flourish When Authorities Hide

Broken and Betrayed: The true story of the Rotherham abuse scandal by the woman who fought to expose it by Jayne Senior
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Grooming often works in the following manner: a young man, a lure, befriends an 11 to 16 year old girl. Winning her trust, he then introduces her to an "older friend," usually a guy in his mid-20s. This older friend plies the young girl with gifts, car rides, compliments, attention, drugs, alcohol. He becomes her "older boyfriend." Eventually, he introduces her to sex. Next, the boyfriend manipulates the young girl into having sex with one of his friends. Eventually, the girl finds herself gang-raped, passed around, trafficked, kidnapped, beaten, degraded. She is threatened with physical violence should she refuse to play along. Her family may also be threatened.

Grooming was the fate of 1,400 girls in Rotherham, UK, between 1997 and 2013. Author Jayne Senior worked for a local program designed to identify girls at-risk for sexual exploitation. She witnessed the mass grooming of mostly working-class white girls by British Pakistani Muslim men. Police and social worker indifference and denial contributed to a rape crisis that has been called "industrial scale."

The story of Senior's fight to protect the girls, alert a willfully obtuse police and social worker bureaucracy, bring perpetrators to justice, all while suffering loss in her own family, is a story both hopeful and galling. Senior's battle shows the difference one committed person can make. However, the grooming toll of white English victims (along with Sikh and Hindu girls) continues at the hands of mostly Pakistani perpetrators. Since Rotherham, similar rape gangs have been discovered in Newcastle, Oxford, Telford, Rochdale, Darby. A situation most appalling.

A fast, somber read.

View all my reviews

Merry Christmas 2018!

Animaniacs Episode 49

 I remember when we previewed the above episode for Steven Spielberg. He liked it, and joked we'd have to animate a Jewish holiday. I suggested Simchat Torah, but didn't get a laugh. That might sum up my relation with the great director. People often ask if I knew Steven Spielberg. My answer is generally, 'Yes, the way you know a car-parker at a favorite restaurant.'

None the less, a Merry Christmas to all. Presents are nice, but loved ones are your greatest gift. Be a gift to them.

Important Sales Note

This is the one.

 For the next several days, you might consider an ebook of Fifty Shades of Zane Grey for less than a dollar. (That's market-speak for .99.) Lampooning one of the most popular novels in history, my book thrills you with gunfights, romance, one-armed doctors and all PG rated.

What Do Important Notable People Say About This Book?

Andrea Romano enjoyed Fifty Shades of Zane Grey, but I haven't got an official quote from her just yet. Nevertheless, this book is guaranteed funnier than my Simchat Torah quip of 25 years ago. Not a high bar, yes, you have me there, but don't you owe yourself a chuckle for under a dollar? Act now! I would, but I wrote the book and thus am prevented from acting now.

eStocking Stuffers That Will CHANGE YOUR ENTIRE LIFE PERHAPS!!

Your JP Mac stocking stuffers may be found at Amazon. (Most people want the Merry Christmas mug.)

Fun Fast Holiday Reads!

Pardon the click-baity head. I've been spending too much time online. But not all ethings are wasteful and vain. Note the above ebooks. One tells the tale of a man's battle with cancer and a confusing medical system, while the other chronicles a man's struggle to decide justice in an annoying criminal case.  Both are written in a humorous vein, making sport of the darker elements of our existence. 

Pleasing eBooks!

These non-fiction stories are low-cost, high quality and just right for a last minute present. Purchase them together. (A $4.00 value.) There is no discount for doing so, but don't be bullied by the loss leader of others. Do it because you have purchasing power! Whatever you decide, happy holidays to you, and to you, a Merry Christmas as well. 

Paul Rugg and I are Hired at Warner Bros. v.2

And I Have the Memories to Prove It

Today, December 16, marked 27 years since Paul Rugg and I were offered jobs at Warner Brothers TV Animation. We were over at Paul's house watching Zontar: Thing From Venus, drinking coffee, eating chocolate donuts, and smoking. We'd just turned in scripts for some new show called Animaniacs. (Mine was "Draculee, Draculaa.") Paul's wife was off earning money as a social worker, while my future wife was still employed at the magazine I'd quit two months earlier. Rugg and I were performing improv and sketch comedy at the Acme Comedy Theatre. (Along with cast member Adam Carolla.) Money was very tight. The payment for one script would really help out my Christmas. 

Then Kathy Page, Tom Ruegger's assistant, called to offer us staff jobs and the trajectory of our lives veered sharply into an unexplored cosmos.

We were amazed, stunned, numb. Walking outside, we smoked more and talked it over. Should we take the jobs or would they pollute our comedy pureness by turning it commercial? We would accept the work immediately. 

Now it all seems opaque. If it weren't for the Web and talking to Paul Rugg yesterday, I'd swear the whole experience never happened. But I'm glad it did. (Paul, too.)  So thanks to Tom and Sherri Stoner. (And her husband, M.D. Sweeney, our Acme director, who recommended us.)

Note: After thirteen years of blogging, I'm running out of life events to chronicle.