Real Life News

How Many Dead Medium Publications Do You Write For?

If only every publication was like this one

So you’ve finished a brilliant piece on 19th century flower arranging, and are about to send it to Flower Heaven Publications, when you realize no one has written for it for two years.

I once had a short-lived publication called Pitfall. Did you write for it? I doubt it — no one wrote for it except me. I asked for contributors but no one bothered.

The tag line was Watch the Gap!

I wanted readers’ experiences of how they had fallen through the holes of modern life, and now find themselves lost in a no-man’s land of despair and hopelessness.

Pieces like

“I Lived Off Dog Food For Eight Years!”

I had no takers, so I shut it down like they shut down Treadstone in The Bourne Films.

Flower Heaven Publications should have been shut down like this. Not left to linger like a half-wilted display of lilacs. They should have told people. Put a notice up.

I don’t know about you, but I hate wasting time. It stems from school. I once wrote a project for A-level geography on Glaciation in Welsh Valleys that took me most of the term. Only to be told by my teacher that I must have got confused, and that I should have been writing about Population Demographics in Welsh Cities.

I had a week to rewrite it, and failed the course. This meant I didn’t get my grades to study medicine, and ended up studying Plant Biology, which kind of fucked up my life, because I suffer from hay fever.

I therefore hate wasting time, especially writing. Which was why I was so annoyed with Flower Heaven Publications. Where else was I going to place an article on 19th century flower arranging? Except The Pub, as they accept anything.

In fact, I’m thinking of sending them Glaciation in Welsh Valleys. Which is actually very informative and full of rich Welsh history, and contains an index of famous Welsh people like Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Jones, Catherine Zeta-Jones — and of course, Bonnie Tyler!

It’s 110 pages and contains hand-drawn images of glaciers, rivers, and mountains. Unfortunately, as it was written with a black ink pen nearly thirty-five years ago, parts of it are smudged, and some images have faded. But you get the drift of what is happening, which is that 15,000 years ago they were glaciers in Wales.

If you want a copy, write “GLACIER ME IN” in the comments box.

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