Wow, two weeks since I've blogged about my writing and a month since I've said anything over at After Hours. I'm a bad blogger.
To be fair, I've been busy, but over all, it's not been a great couple of weeks in the writing realm. I spent a week working on a project only to have the hard drive on my desktop die the final death and take a week's work with it. I've spent the last week and a half trying to recover from that, but it's slow and painful going.
Today's lesson? Backups!
In other news, the next two articles in my Civil War series are up, Chikamauga and Shiloh. You may recall that I had two articles rejected for re-editing. These were the ones. Back when I talked about it a couple of weeks ago, I said that I'd be a good little writer and do what I was told.
Yeah, well, screw that.
The complaint that got them kicked back to me was that they "needed sourcing." Even though those had been the fifth and sixth articles I'd submitted in the series and the first four had sailed through without a source to be seen....and that five more had been published after that hadn't needed it either, I resolved to "give the client what he wants." So I spent a bunch of time to add links to everything that could possibly be a source to the Chikamauga article and re-submitted it.
A week later it was rejected. You want to know why? "Too many long links."
I swallowed my curses, deleted all the sourcing I had done and then resubmitted it exactly as it had been the first time, along with the Shiloh article, which I'd never gotten around to fixing in the first place. And guess what happened?
(Well, since links to the published articles are in this very post, I suppose you don't really need to guess, do you?)
In short, the Yahoo editing process is terrible. The comments they make when they review your stuff are so ambiguous as to be worse than worthless, and when you try to follow them anyway, a different editor bashes you for the changes. There are apparently so many editors out there who don't communicate with one another that there's no fixed standard for submissions at all. Ergo, the only sane strategy is to write what you like and then keep submitting it until you get accepted. It's a cynical procedure, I grant you, but no less cynical than Yahoo itself setting up a no-win scenario for writers trying to do as they're asked to do, is it?
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