TRY, TRY AGAIN

No doubt you have heard the old saying, “If at first you don’t succeed try, try again.” Well No one can accuse me of not trying. Actually, perhaps I need to reconsider how often I should keep trying.

In order to attract more viewers to my website, www.FunnyPhotosContest.com a photo contest for cute or funny photos and photo captions, I need to advertise. But I have a limited budget. And so to get some free advertising, I have submitted numerous articles I’ve written about the site and myself to many magazines. Alas, none seem interested. At the same time, my Mom cried when she read my story, “Forty Years of Multiple Sclerosis and Me” and several friends told me they really liked the very touching article.

So, yesterday I made another attemp. Oprah Winfrey’s magazine focuses on women. So there you go…I fit the criteria. But submission to her magazine is NOT easy. To begin with, I had to condense my 8,000 word article to 2,000 – not an easy task. Finally, when I finished the editing, I opened the magazine’s contact page on the web and proceeded to copy and paste my story into their form. However, I continually received an error message that I had exceeded the 2,000 word limit, even though I hadn’t.

Thus, I carefully scrutinized the form and noticed it had replaced my quotation marks and apostrophes with funny characters. Thus, I had to first remove all the quotation marks and then replace all the words that had apostrophes to something else. It seems like it took forever. But eventually I succeeded. Hallelujah, I should feel elated!! However, when I then read the fine print I discovered that it might take a couple years before they would even publish it, if in fact they didn’t reject it first. So much for trying again