So I came across an interesting Web site that breaks down people's lives in weeks. Looking at the charts on there was sort of humbling, seeing how short our lives our and how long periods of time are really just a set of weeks that we string together.
Having looked at those charts, I figured I'd do my own. First, I plotted out some major points in my life--beginning dates were circled. That kind of points out important times, but to get a real feel for how long certain things have been as relative to my whole life I opted to color the squares.
When I do, some things become really evident. I've been at my current workplace a long time--longer than just about any other string. I have been there longer than I went to grade school through high school (when I add in college, however, I have still spent more of my life in school than at my current employer).
If I look at the color blocks at time in particular states, the blue is formidable, but it still has a long ways to go before catching up to what the California bar would be--pretty much all the boxes before the yellow section. But if I put the yellow, green, and blue together--time out of California--it looks like more time than I've spent in Cali. That's an illusion, caused by how much I've broken California time up. Still, I'm getting close; give it three more years, and I'll have been out of my birth state longer than I was in it.
School life it appears still takes up more of my life than work-only life, but if one considers that I was working during the time I went to college, then the story is quite different.
Anyway, below are the charts.
September is generally the beginning of submission season, given how many journals don't take submissions in the summer. Each year, after a few months of submitting materials to publications, I begin to become anxious. It feels as if I will not get any acceptances this year. I wanted to see how real that observation has been in the past, how long that anxiousness usually stays in place. Below is a chart showing when the first submission (after September 1) was accepted for each year:
The worst I've done since I started submitting in greater amounts, it appears, is December--my first year. Prior to 2008, I submitted only seven things at a time, which meant I usually submitted about twenty times per year (and had no acceptances between 2001 and 2007). In 2008, I increased that number to about forty things out at once, which meant I collected about 140 rejections (and a handful of acceptances) per year. Surprisingly, in that six-year span, acceptances came in September three times.
However, since 2013, publication has been very spotty (some new published works appeared in 2014, but they were accepted quite a bit of time before then; no new work has appeared this year). This is for several reasons. The year 2013-14 was not itself a good year for acceptances--I had an acceptance in November, but the publication went out of business before publishing the work it had accepted, so my first acceptance leading to actual publication after September 2013 wasn't until January of 2014. Further publications through 2013-14 proved slim (just one more acceptance), and publications/acceptances in 2014-15 were nonexistent.
The latter was mostly because I stopped submitting for fifteen months starting in April 2014 (which is usually when my submission period for a given year begins to wind down anyway), after my marriage, deciding to devote a year to just being with my new wife (which is one reason this blog has become irregular and infrequent in its postings). She's gone off to law school now, and I've managed to carve out a tiny bit of time to write and submit again, so I got back to the submission process this September, but with sending out just about twenty things at a time instead of forty to make the workload more manageable. This, however, will probably mean even fewer acceptances.
Alas, what I've written since 2013 has mostly been longer work or kids' stuff, so there aren't a lot of new stories and poems, which have made up the bulk of my acceptances, to share. Plenty of good pieces I've never managed to get published are still going out, at least as I see it, but perhaps there are reasons editors haven't liked these particular works. (Then again, some works have been rejected repeatedly and then found amazing homes, so it does seem something of a whim what gets accepted and what not.)
I'm not sure I completely agree with these scores, but there's some truth to them. Somehow, though, my Mississippi residence felt more walkable by far than my Texas residence did. And while my new Georgia residence does lack for walkability, in many ways it feels more walkable than Texas did. I think it comes down to how at home one feels in a location as well.
As I noted a couple of weeks ago, with so much going on in my life now, I've decided to stop updating this blog on a weekly basis, especially as I only have about two readers who check the blog out regularly. Instead, I'll be sharing charts as my curiosity takes shape and demands a new chart. A large reason for the change is that I now have a girlfriend--and marriage is likely. When I look at the subject of charts over the last couple of years, reading and writing were certainly two of the most popular, but most popular of all, in terms of the types of charts I created (and those that people read most often) were those related to dating, which for me is now finally, after forty-three years of life, coming to a close, other than with one lady with whom I've been blessed to connect.
I figured it would be a good time to update this blog to see what sort of chart types I tended to prefer over the history of this blog:
As my life is likely going to go through significant changes this next year and time no longer allows quite as much time to devote to certain odd passions of mine, I'm going to probably stop updating this blog regularly. It takes a lot of work and relatively few people read it, as seen in the table of relative popularity of my blogs per entry:
Here's the breakdown by genre of what I read this year:
