Car Colors

I've only owned three vehicles, each of them in a different color. Here are the vehicle colors that have thus dominated my life:

I didn't realize I'd owned the car I have now for so long (seven years). Hard to believe how much time has passed since I purchased it.

Number of Stories Accepted, Rejected, or Ignored per Year

I've felt like this past year has been one in which I haven't seen very many acceptances of stories for publication, and a review of statistics shows why. In 2009 and 2010, I had an unusual number of acceptances, it appears. The 2011 figures aren't completely in, since I generally give it one year before declaring a submission ignored, so those 26 ignores for 2011 may come down by some number by the end of 2012. Still, the chances of me seeing again the number of story publication acceptances I had for 2010 submissions is unlikely. (By contrast, I've seen quite a bit of poetry being accepted after a couple of years of total drought.) (Note, I didn't start logging whether a publication commented on a rejection until around 2000.)

Number of Submissions before Acceptance

I recently saw a blog documenting people's number of submissions before their first acceptance of a story by a publication. One guy had submitted a piece fifty-nine times before it had been accepted somewhere (and for pay). Some people put up some rather surprising numbers in terms of percentage accepted (in the realm of about 30 percent, whereas others were more in my realm of 2 percent).

Anyway, the blog made me wonder how many rejections each published piece had to go through before being accepted. I've broken it out by short stories and poetry. Let's look at poetry first:

Interestingly, if a poem is going to be accepted, it looks like it has the best chance of happening within the first three submissions. That said, as the number of times I submit a poem goes up, so too does the likelihood that an editor will note liking the poem but not accepting it.

Now let's look at stories:

Pretty much, the same rules hold up for stories as for poems, though stories appear to be much more difficult to have accepted, at least for me.

I Write Like

Having read how little analysis went into how this guy created this program (which can be found here), I don't think it can be taken too seriously. That said, I was curious to see how my own work would fare. So who do I write like? Well, if we're talking poetry, I write the most like James Joyce, as shown in the chart below:

The assorted others (each with one poem) were Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, H. P. Lovecraft, Chuck Palahniuk, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and Kurt Vonnegut. (I wasn't even aware some of the people wrote poetry!)


For stories, it's another matter. When I first found this site and pasted in single paragraphs, I kept coming up with Cory Doctorow, whose work I didn't know (but I plan to read, now that I know of him) and occasionally Dan Brown or David Foster Wallace (ironically, most often with letters).


Paste in full stories, however, and my writing most often resembles Chuck Palahniuk, especially my early published stuff. Later stuff trends more toward Cory Doctorow. Here's the breakdown:

As for this blog entry--apparently you're reading the work of H. P. Lovecraft.

Shirts by Color

My favorite color, I believe, must be blue, since it seems to be the color that dominates my wardrobe--or at least the button-down shirts in my wardrobe--as shown in the following chart:

Or perhaps a bar chart, where I can select the colors would be more expressive:

Of course, the chart could be broken down slightly differently. For "white patterned" I counted any shirt that was primarily white. Hence, a shirt with blue stripes was blue if the stripes made up 50 percent or more of the shirt, whereas if the stripes made up less than 50 percent of the shirt's color, then the shirt was counted as "white patterned." I suppose one could also conclude that white is my favorite color, but that is more a default safe choice for semiformal occasions. I try to have enough of those button-downs around to last me a week, were it ever to be necessary.