Who Exactly Judges Quality in Writing?

"Vocal does not accept stories that contain excessive grammatical or formatting errors, spam, or incorrect facts. Please check your story for proper grammar, sentence structure, and overall clarity, and resubmit."

And here I thought Vocal would accept and publish just any piece crap of 600 words or more anyone submitted. Given the overall terribleness of most of the garbage they do publish I had good reason to believe this. It turns out however, I was mistaken. It is possible to write a story so terrible, so awful, so full of excessive grammatical or formatting errors, spam, or incorrect facts that even Vocal will refuse to publish it. Incidentally how can a fact be incorrect? What makes a fact a fact is the fact that is correct. Otherwise it is a lie or at best a mistake or error if one wants to be generous. In any event, yours truly recently submitted a piece for publication which was rejected on the grounds listed above. It is a pretty terrible story to be sure. It was intended to be a humorous plea to an ancient God to help a friend of mine who was struggling to make ends meet sellings solar panels. The irony obviously went way over the heads of the Vocal editorial staff, as it likely will any reader of it. While it may be terrible, and not funny it does not have any formatting errors I am aware of. Nor is it spam, nor does it contain incorrect facts. All of the facts described in the article with respect to the ancient God(s) referenced are accurate. There are no major grammatical issues, and the sentence structure seems fine to me. As to overall clarity, well that is a bit of a judgement call. I would imagine Ra would find it perfectly clear. Others, perhaps not so much. I will let you be the judge and so below find the rejected story, unedited, in its entirety. Enjoy! lol!

An Intercessory Prayer for my Friend to the Sun God Ra

The Strongest and Wisest of all the Sun Based Deities

O great sun god Ra, truly you are the wisest and most powerful of the sun-based deities. Some have claimed that Huitzilopochtli is the strongest among you. They are fools, I bet if you asked, half of them could not even pronounce his name, let alone worship him properly. He prefers to be called the Dart-Hurler but everybody knows his name really means southern hummingbird. A hummingbird? Seriously? What a lamewad right? And wtf exactly is the Codex borbonicus? Apparently there are some illustrations of him in this so called divine book. I saw one, he looks like a smurf in a goofy helmet. They should call it the codex boobonicus. That piece of crap couldn’t hold a candle to the first Pyramid Texts. He didn’t even have any cults that worshipped him. Meanwhile you had an entire cult center. I mean you had so many God damn (sorry) cults they needed their own center of organization and power. Your chief cult center at Iunu, the “Place of Pillars”, later known to the Greeks as Heliopolis and today located in the suburbs of Cairo, was a site to behold. Today it’s dump but I mean it’s Cairo so what do you expect. Have you seen Mexico City these days? Be glad your Egyptian. Anyway Ra you kick ass and my friend needs a favor and since it involves the sun I thought you could help. She sells solar panel installations for a living. Cool right? I thought you’d like that. The problem is she sells them in Ohio. Not exactly as sunny as your old stomping grounds over there in Egypt I know. Even so she does a really great job and since tons of hippie dippie type people with gads of disposable income live in the area she does a brisk business usually. Hippies normally are pretty cool with any kind of ancient Gods and crystals and new agey crap like that so most of them probably think you are the fire. That said some probably have no idea who you are and spend all day sitting on their non shower taking smelly asses smoking bongs and hookahs. Plus some of the chicks don’t shave their legs, or their armpits, gross right? I know you liked the hairless look, I mean totally hairless, even no freakin eyebrows. That is hardcore bro. Anyway my friend is a hippie but she showers and shaves and is generally super sweet and pretty hot too so that’s a bonus. Sorry Ra I’m rambling I know but my point is she is doing great under tough circumstances but needs a little extra help this month due to some unforeseen financial difficulties. She didn’t exactly say what but I’m guessing her crack addiction has flared up again. It doesn’t matter why but she needs the money Ra, not really. It could be for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all. As a deity of the ancient world, about which I know actually very little, I am going to assume one can ask you for intercessions on their behalf whenever they like, for whatever reason and you will be cool with it. You are just happy for the attention, any attention you can get these days. Therefore, please use your glorious and magnificent powers to send her some money. Probably the easiest way is to just help her close the deals she already has in the pipeline. She’s already done 90% of the work for you. Thanks bro.

Yours in everlasting worship and reverence,

Dan D.