The highest accomplishment of my writing career

I'm a dummy sometimes with Submittable, the tool most literary journals use to accept and manage submissions. By and large, it's idiot-proof, because you can keep reusing your personal information and your bio statement over and over. So if you get it right once, you'll get it right forever. But occasionally, Submittable decides on its own to do something different or it plays a trick on you.

I was entering Glimmer Train's "Family Matters" contest the other day. When I started to fill out the block for the title of my story, Submittable decided, for reasons I'm not sure about, to pop up my own name in the auto-fill spot instead of the title of the story. I didn't notice it had done that, because it had, to my knowledge, never done it before. I got through the whole process of submitting the story without realizing what I'd done. It wasn't until I was looking at all of my submissions together that I realized one of the stories I'd submitted said it was named "Jacob R Weber" instead of "Jajangmyeon."

I had two options: pretend I'd done it on purpose, which might look stupid but would at least keep me from having to go in and ask the editors of Glimmer Train to let me fix something (thereby letting them know what an unprofessional moron I am) or ask to fix it. I couldn't stand looking at it over and over, so I asked them to release the story to me to edit it.

It took a few days, but I heard back from the editors.

If you don't know, one of the interesting things about Glimmer Train is that it's run by two sisters. I have no idea how they do it, but they seem to do a LOT of the work themselves, including editing off the slush pile. Based on my year of editing at a literary journal, I have to believe they do an insane amount of work. I'm guessing they get way more submissions than we did, because everybody wants to be published by them. Still, they seem to do a lot of it on their own. I can't imagine how they ever do it.

So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised--although I was--that one of the two sisters personally took care of my request to change the title of my story from my name to the correct one. But this little anecdote about Submittable--which I fully acknowledge is a pretty shitty and dull story so far--gets much better. Look at what one of the Glimmer Train sisters wrote at the bottom of the instructions for how to fix the file:

"Looks good." One of the Glimmer Train sisters said my story "looks good." That's quite likely to be the most impressive line on my writing bio I'll ever get. Now I need to revise my whole bio statement I use. Usually, I use this one:

Jake Weber is a translator living in Maryland. He has published fiction in The Baltimore Review, Bartleby Snopes, The Potomac Review, and The Green Hills Literary Lantern. He won the 2016 Washington Writers' Publishing House Fiction Contest, and the winning book 'Don't Wait to be Called' was published in fall 2017.

Now, I'm going to have to change it to say "Jake Weber has published at some places and also won a contest and put out a book but also one of the damn Glimmer Train sisters once said his story 'looks good.'"

Behold and tremble at the meteoric rise of my writing career!

Glimmer Train is amazing

Actually, what this little vignette tells me has a lot more to do with the magazine itself than about me. The sisters who run the magazine have always claimed they read every story themselves. I always found that hard to believe. But here is one of the sisters herself, going into Submittable on her own to handle some administrative thing caused by a writer being stupid. Not some intern. Susan herself.

They've been running this magazine for thirty years. They announced not too long ago that next year is the last year for them. After thirty years, they're still reading every story from every schmo who submits to them on their own, and still taking care of all the annoying extra work dumb writers cause them on their own. And they even find the time to add an extra note of encouragement to the same idiot who caused them ten seconds of extra work when they've got enough to do.

I really have to marvel at a life well spent like that.