Writing Contest/Journal Submission Advice

So, if you're the kind of person who enters writing contests or submits to journals, here's a short guide that I just made up to assist you in your literary endeavors as someone who's read a decent number of contest and journal submissions in her time:

1. If your story is single-spaced and/or in an unusual font and/or unreasonably long, here are a list of things that I will likely do to procrastinate reading your submission (no matter how awesome a story it may be): give my cats baths, go to the DMV and have my license renewed even though it doesn't expire for 2 years, clean the grout in my bathroom with a toothbrush, give other people's cats baths, reorganize all of the things in my pantry alphabetically and then by size and then by color, learn to reupholster furniture/reupholster all of my furniture, give my cats baths again because they've probably gotten dirty again by now. When I finally start reading your submission, I will be tired and cranky from all of the procrastination chores I was forced to do, and I will want so badly to not be reading it that I probably won't even get through the first page of it before deciding that I hate it.

2. Proofread your submission. At least proofread the first page. If you are illiterate, extremely lazy, or otherwise incapable of proofreading your work but still for some reason feel that writing is your true vocation, hire someone to proofread your work or have a friend do it. If you're too shy to have someone edit your work because you don't want them to judge you for not knowing the difference between "your" and "you're" but for some reason are not too shy to submit your work to literary journals and contests where strangers will read and judge your work, keep in mind that I, stranger judge, do not know you, I do not love you, and I will not forgive your misspelling of "there" because I don't know that you're really funny and a nice person and that you volunteer at a homeless shelter in your spare time and that you didn't finish college because you had to take care of your grandmother who was dying of lupus. I am judging you HARD. But I'm not judging you for your poor grasp of the English language; I am judging you because you're an idiot who doesn't appreciate that total strangers are taking time out of their days to read your shitty story enough to at least read it over before excreting it into a Word document and sending it out into the world.