He started searching for places to submit to. It was as if there were an endless amount of possibilities. People constantly gave him different references. “This place has writers interested in the same things as you. The audience is practically already there.” He submitted. Waited a week. He waited another week. Then rejection came.

                Submission after submission, he decided to change his writing style. It was as if he had the voice of a whole new person inside of him, longing to bring out to an audience that pined for his unique words, his new sentence structure that took on a new role in his life, changing the way he stopped and smelled the flowers, the paper, the ink, and the keyboard, and the mouse, and the coffee. He submitted. He held his breath in an anticipation that the post office could only deliver him to salvation. The courier knew him by name, the only stranger so far who could recognize his writing. “You have really nice hand writing,” she said, as she handed him his rejection letter.

                That night he cried. He wasn’t lonely and he had friends who read his work. They all cheered him on, told him to keep trying. He changed his topic. Chinese life must be hard. They work longer hours than people in the United States, and switch jobs less frequently throughout their professional career. He littered his writing with interesting facts, about Harvester Ants in Arizona, communicating through pheromones, and how this might lead to the next world war. If it is drama and facts people want, conspiracy, then this is exactly what he would write. Submission was bound to be successful. They can’t reject me forever, he wrote.

                They did. Not forever but they rejected him again. And again. Which so far, was forever. Surely his writing had improved through this process. This was the path of the great writers. Rejection, submission, then after years, in his case months of rejections, he might still hope to find his voice, his audience, his … money(?). That’s not why I write of course, not money, but why not hope for money and meaning. Why submit to money or only submit to meaning, if I myself am not writing for the same reasons as those before me. So he changed his writing, in different ways, adding his philosophy into his stories, adding his critique for the way things are and his hope that things will be the same as they once were, into his writing. He submitted. They published him. They kept publishing him, still publish him.

                Change and acceptance, were very important things to him when he first started writing. Now he had a voice. He traveled the path of rejection and submission. He made it to acceptance. Where they had come to accept the person he changed into through the process of hoping to be accepted. Basically becoming a whole new person who writes the same things everyone already reads but with his own style, that was tailored into the same style of others, but with his own interesting topics, that were found by trying to find out what everyone else was interested in, but in his own philosophical and cultural critiques that were reached by submission, the same submission the writers before him went through.

                Writing is his passion, so he became a writer. It was long into his career before he realized the submission process and what exactly the writer submits to. Some writers have a way of holding on to the most important part of their messages and forcing them through the submission, bringing them with them into the writing world, like baggage, like a courier, an angel, or a voice. Like an echo he reread everything he ever wrote. He was searching for his message, what made it through the submission process; his devotion, his adaptability; his topics, cultural critiques; himself both monetarily and mentally. Whatever makes it through must have something new to say to the world, must have a writers legacy to be reread by an English class. He was looking for his one chance to be taken seriously, not by an audience but by himself. Where had he affected the world, instead of just the world affecting him?

                His first published article was a third person critique on submission writing. He wrote it in hopes others would understand what publishing really is. It may or may not have really been understood. It surely was not cherished as much as he cherished the acceptance. It outlined exactly what he thought in his moment looking back, what it was that was important about writing, about publishing, about the message he wanted to share with the world and with the English majors who would read his work. The article had hung on his office wall his entire career, and at one time it was just an acceptance letter, now it became a filter through publishing. It was filled with some of his worst writing, forced morals, meta-narrative, but it meant much more to him at the end of his career than any other writing he had ever done. It was proof that publishing was a way of deciding which voices are important, not a way of suppressing voices. It wasn’t a submission processes, it was a super ego process, a natural selection process, ultimate communication with language and the universe.

                He made a publishing company just so he could read submissions, write rejection letters, and become the filter process for more voices to come. Sadly though, the economic system rejected his ability to run a business. He started writing political satire on what it meant to be free in a world of publishing or capitalism. He lost the public’s interest when he point out that graffiti artist invented the field of graffiti art, they did succeed but only because they made the system they disliked wider. They were not against capitalism, not for making things legal, not against the aristocratic art world. They just found a new way of doing the same thing, through the same dislike the previous generation had for the previous aristocratic art world.