WIP: Last Week's Ghost

As a follow-up to Sylvia’s guest post about Submitomancy, I asked David Steffen, who’s working on a similar project for a Duotrope replacement, to write about his Submissions Grinder. Here’s David:

The announcement in late 2012 that Duotrope was going paid caused a (relative) uproar in the writing community. The problem wasn’t that they wanted money. It was that requiring a subscription fee to use
the site drives away the most valuable asset the site has to offer–submission data. Everything else that Duotrope had to offer could be found somewhere else, but their submission tracker combined with market listings and statistics aggregation offered a tool for writers. Even for those people who are willing to pay $50, they are now paying $50 for what even Duotrope estimates will be perhaps 15% of their prior user base.

Anthony Sullivan and I have created a replacement, called the Submission Grinder (http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/), with the intent of milling your submissions into something useful… Because we’re hosting this new project as a subodmain of our zine Diabolical Plots (http://www.diabolicalplots.com/) we wanted the name to sound like something the mad scientist of our site art would invent and use.

We are starting out with the promise that we will never charge a compulsory fee for subscription. We think that’s the primary way where Duotrope has gone wrong, in driving away the data. We may open for donations at some point, and may run some kind of Kickstarter campaign. But rather than ask the world to donate to us for a theoretical product, we would rather provide a concrete product that people can use, soon enough after January 1st to allow a decent handoff, and then ask for donations from people who like what we have provided at a later time.

Phase One of our project is complete, in which the goal was to create something that could replace Duotrope’s functionality as close to January 1st as possible. And we’re there, with market listings, a submissions tracker, and compiled statistics. The site is in beta right now as we resolve some issues, but it gets better every day and there is daily development work being done on it. We are the first site aiming at the Duotrope userbase to become available for use.

The next phase involves adding new features that Duotrope has never provided, including new statistics based on only your own works, visualization of submissions data (rather than only numbers), and more!

Do you want to help? Here are ways that you can help right now.

1. Register on the site.
2. Did you get an export file from Duotrope? Import that into your account. You can pick up right where you left off and it gives more data to provide more robust statistics, as well as giving us new blank market listings for the markets you’ve submitted to (which we will fill in as time goes on).
3. Suggest new market listings.
4. Submit bug reports, and suggestions for new features/enhancements. We’re writers too, and anything that you suggest that would be useful (or at least something that appeals to statistics-lovers even if not
   strictly useful) will get us excited. The comment thread at this link would be a good place: http://www.diabolicalplots.com/?p=3176
5. Help us spread the word. The more the merrier. The more writers import and track their data, the more useful the statistics will be, the more useful the site as a whole will be, the more users will come. Blog posts, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Stumbleupon, posts on writing forums, emails to writer friends, sky writing, bathroom graffiti, any other way that you can think to share this link with the world.

This post marks a change-up in my Patreon campaign – I will post content publicly. If you’re enjoying it and want to make sure it continues, please consider supporting my ongoing attempts with this publishing model! There are several levels of possible support, but you can do it for as little as a dollar a month.

I’m enjoying on retreat in California right now, which will explain what provoked this piece.

California Ghosts

When you walk in the hills in southern California, through stands of pine and tall grass, up shaly mountains where the sides fall away steeply and the rock splinters rather than crumbles, you can hear the sound of the wind in the treetops, making them sway, making them creak. Stand still and you will hear the little noises, the sound of a deer’s delicate steps, far away a Stellar’s jay scolding some interloper, the click and tap of falling rocks.

There are ghosts out there in the hills, walking the ridges, slipping among the trees, but they are mostly animal ghosts, the memories of deer and mountain lions, a flicker of rattlesnake among the grass stalks, an eagle’s shadow floating over the earth.

If you find a human ghost alone out there while walking, approach it with caution. Groups of ghosts are left behind by villages and tribes, and many of them died peacefully, among those they loved. Solo ghosts are usually ghosts who came to a violent end, blade or bullet or even bared teeth, and they do not want to be disturbed.

If such a ghost blocks your path, stand still enough to hear the protests of the pines, the slide of dust downhill. Do not look them in the eye, but at a point past their shoulder. At first they will know this for a ruse, but give it time and they will falter. Finally they will turn away and vanish, because you can never see the back of a ghost, and you will be free to move further.

There are other dangers in the hills, but you know if you keep walking towards the sunset, eventually you will find the ocean ““ perhaps cliffs dropping down, perhaps sand and rock sloping. There are more ghosts in the ocean than anywhere else, but that is because it is so very large, and most of them are fish and gulls, whose ghosts pay no attention to humans. Sit on the shore and listen again. You’ll hear it say, Why go on walking? and Who knows why the wind blows?

And when you realize that the only sounds you cannot hear are your breath, your heart, your body, you will know you are a ghost yourself, ready to go down to the sea, and swim there in the water, in the waves alive with noise.