Fugit walked back to his truck with the spring air crisp on his cheeks, an odd sensation for Spring in Florida. The fate of “Vanishing from Delta Finituum” is out of his control, at least for now. It’s been prepared, packaged, and shipped. He balked when first learning that the submission process for this particular publisher required a hard-copy. A what?! But now, with the process behind him, he thinks differently of the venerable process.
Strangely enough, it reminded him of Funny Farm …
… yeah, Funny Farm (1988), the Chevy Chase classic. Come on, you know you’ve both seen it and loved it a dozen times. The movers, the mailman, the duck pond, the testicle eating competition, the inspirational stuffed squirrel … it’s hysterical! Okay, moving on … Andy Farmer (Chase) decides he wants to become a writer, moves out to the country, and sets up shop in the upstairs den. He breaks out the typewriter and voila–the great America novel should basically write itself from there, right?
How does Fugit’s submission of “Vanishing from Delta Finituum” in hard-copy relate to Farmer’s hilarious antics in the rural town of Redbud, Vermont? Very loosely, of course. The format requested by the publisher is intended to emulate the way a manuscript looks and feels when prepared with a typewriter: Mono-spaced fonts, underlining for italics, using paper to display characters written with ink, etc …
Fugit wanted to note here that many-o’-hours of his early childhood were spent conjuring stories with a typewriter. Not because computer didn’t exist then, but because his family hadn’t made the plunge and purchased one yet (and wouldn’t for some time).
Sure it’s more time consuming, costs more, and requires several trips to office supply stores and shipping depots than just popping the similarly formatted .doc, or .rtf in a submission form or email and clicking a few buttons–but can you really care as much if that’s all it takes? Is the venerable process requested by this publisher a natural filtering process? Who knows … What I do know is that in the end, Fugit enjoyed the process and felt a certain amount of pride when looking at the stack of paper sitting in the manuscript box.
While rejection is the norm in this industry, and while Fugit fully expects his pile of rejection slips to be larger than his pile of checks, let’s hope–just a little–that this story doesn’t continue down the path of Funny Farm’s plot, otherwise; you guys will be reading Fugit’s wife’s blog about her successful children’s book series about various cartoon animals named and inspired after him!
Stay tuned for updated regarding the status of “Vanishing from Delta Finituum.”
Thanks!
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