How To Get Your Pixel Scroll Title Published

…Plus A Comprehensive Bibliography of Steve Davidson’s Pixel Scroll Titles

Steve Davidson, Famous Pixel Scroll Title Thinker-Upper

By Steve Davidson: I think that we will all agree that one of the things that makes File 770 so much fun (and so popular) is the interactive nature of the enterprise.  Comments, of course, but also crowd-pleasers like reader-submitted pictures of their cats laying about on all manner of genre material, (honorary SJW credentialed dogs too), regular contributions from other fans and, of course, the famously infamous Pixel Scroll title.

I’ve submitted quite a few titles over the past few years (wow.  Years.  Yes, years), collecting a good handful of rejections along the way (not to mention a few copied by someone else who managed to get to the patent office before me….)

In fact, it wasn’t until I twigged to Mike Glyer’s apparent fondness for mashed up 60s, 70s and 80s song lyrics that I became a successful Pixel Scroll Title Submitter.

I remember the day my first title was accepted for publication fondly.  Mike doesn’t send out formal acceptance notices (daily fan news being too immediate of a thing to allow for such), so it wasn’t until I sat down with my coffee to begin my daily reads that I discovered that I had become famous.

It had been a cold day that February 12th of 2016.  A Friday if the calendar is anything to go by.  I’d been reading the Pixel Scroll® for a number of months and had been despairing over ever getting anything published, the absence of rejection slips exacerbating my ennui.

Despite my self-loathing, I managed, somehow, to force myself to try yet one more time.  I’d noticed that many of the successful Scroll titles had some connection to popular songs.  The spark of an idea formed somewhere in my snow-bound brain.  I feverishly researched past Scrolls and determined that “Yes!” no one had yet offered a mashup based on a song from one of my favorite bands.

“Surely”, I thought, “Mike, being a baby-boomer contemporaneous with myself in time, HAD to not only be familiar with the band, but likely as fond of them as I was.”

I managed to locate a discography for the band in question.  I selected several likely candidate songs, found and studied their lyrics and then spent a fair amount of time constructing a substitution algorithm that would insert the words “scroll” and “pixel” where other nouns had been. (Future refinement of the algorithm would eventually see it expand to include pronouns, a limited number of verbs and even some adjectives.)

Studying the results, I became convinced that THIS time I would be successful.

And so I was.

February 13, 2016’s Pixel Scroll title was mine.  It had to be.  I’d written it just the evening before and the title on the screen before me greatly resembled the words I was pretty sure I’d remembered from the night before.

A quick scroll down to the credits confirmed it: “Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.”

Wow.  I was FAMOUS!

But then the seasonal affect disorder kicked in. Perhaps there was another Steve Davidson out there submitting scroll titles.  There are quite a few of us.  With there being so many, it’s not outside the realm of probably that there is another fan reader of File 770 who has taken it upon themselves to submit scroll titles in a cruel bid to rob me of my fame and success.

With some trepidation, I emailed Mike and queried him.  Was today’s scroll title submitted by me, Steve Davidson or by a Steve Davidson who was some other, ersatz Steve Davidson?

“No ersatz” came the reply.

I chose to take this to mean that I was in fact the Steve Davidson of the title credit.

Joy, joy, oh happy joy!

Of course, like any successful author who had just discovered an editor who liked his work, I quickly inundated Mike with numerous additional submissions, many of which, the vast majority of which, have been accepted for publication.

Which is how I can now claim to be able to help you, would be author struggling in rejection slipless hell, to achieve Pixel Scroll Title success.

The algorithm will only cost you fifty bucks.

On the other hand, by studying the following list of my successfully published Pixel Scroll Titles you can probably develop your own algorithm. It may just take you a little longer to achieve the same kind of success I’ve enjoyed for the past couple of years now, but you will save fifty bucks.  Good luck!

Steve Davidson’s Pixel Scroll Title Annotated Bibliography:

  • 5/6/18 If Pixels Were Zombies, They’d Want To Eat Your Scrolls
    (inspired by zombies eating brains all the time)
  • 3/25/18 The Unscrollable Molly Pixel
    (inspired by the film The Incredible Molly Brown)
  • 1/28/18 I Say We Take Off And Pixel The Entire Scroll From Orbit – It’s The Only Way To Be Sure
    (Inspired by the movie “Aliens”)
  • 1/24/18 You Can Get Anything You Want At Filer’s Pixel Rant
    (Inspired by Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant song and film)
  • 1/21/18 Right Here In File City, Trouble With A Capital T, That Rhymes With P, And Stands For Pixel
    (Inspired by the film The Music Man)
  • 11/28/17 Peering Into The Scrolloscope, I Perceived The Pixels of Mars
    (Inspired by H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and Edison’s Conquest of Mars by Garrett P Serviss)
  • 10/25/17 Blue, Blue Pixels Behind The Stars, Yellow Scroll On The Rise
    (Inspired by Neil Young’s “Helpless”)
  • 9/27/17 How Do You Get Down Off A Pixel? You Don’t, You Get Down Off A Scroll
    (Inspired by an old joke)
  • 9/4/17 Little Miss Muffet Sat On A Pixel. Along  Came A Scroll.
    (Inspired by Andrew Dice Clay’s fractured nursery rhymes)
  • 8/15/17 She Said She’d Always Been A Filer, She Worked At Fifteen Blogs A Day
    (Inspired by the Beatles “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window”)
  • 6/12/17 Avoid The Green Pixels, They’re Not Ripe Yet
    (Inspired by the film A Fish Called Wanda)
  • 3/6/17 Holy Pixels, Scrollman!
    (Inspired by the 60’s television show Batman)
  • 2/5/17 It Is Dangerous To Be Pixeled In Matters On Which The Established Scrolls Are Wrong
    (Inspired by my favorite quote from Voltaire)
  • 1/4/17 Four Scrolls And Seven Pixels Ago
    (Inspired by Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address)
  • 12/17/16 Side Effects Include Pixels, Pixellation, Scrolls, Curled Edges And, In Extreme Cases, Death. Ask Your Medical Provider.
    (Inspired by every freaking subscription commercial on TV)
  • 10/24/16 I’m Free. I’m Free, And Waiting For Scroll To Pixel Me
    (Don’t remember where this one came from.  Must have been a slow day at the File)
  • 10/18/16 Talkin ‘Bout My Pixelation
    (Inspired by The Who’s “My Generation”)
  • 7/9/16 Snort, Harlequin, Said the Ear, Nose, Throat Man
    (Inspired by the Harlan Ellison story of the same title)
  • 6/5/16 Scroll Sung Blue, Everybody Knows One
    (Inspired by Neil Diamon’s “Song Sung Blue”)
  • 5/23/16 Ralph 124C41Pixel
    (Inspired by Hugo Gernsback’s terrible SF novel Ralph 124C41+)
  • 4/23/16 A Scrolling Class Hero Is Something To Be
    (Inspired by Marianne Faithful’s cover of the John Lennon song “Working Class Hero”)
  • 4/6/2016 I Saw A Scroll Drinking A Pina Colada At Trader Vic’s, His Pixel Was Perfect
    (Inspired by Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London”)
  • 3/30/16 I Was Thinkin ‘Bout A Pixel That Might Have Scrolled Me, And I Never Knew
    (Inspired by The Eagles’ “Take it to the Limit”)
  • 3/15/16 At The Age of 37, She Realized She’d Never Scroll Through Paris With The Warm Pixels In Her Hair
    (Inspired by Marianne Faithful’s “The Ballad of Lucy Jordon”)
  • 3/8/16 I Want To Tell You About Texas Pixel And The Big Scroll
    (Inspired by The Doors’ “The Wasp”)
  • 2/28/16 Little Old Lady Got Mutilated Late Last Night, Pixels Of London, Again
    (Inspired by Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” – my first sequel!)
  • 2/24/16 Happy Jack Wasn’t Tall But He Was A Scroll
    (Inspired by The Who’s “Happy Jack”)
  • 2/15/16 Cause Pixels Like Us, Baby We Were Born To Scroll
    (Inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run”)
  • 2/14/16 Imagine All The Pixels, Living In A World That’s Scrolled
    (Inspired by John Lennon’s “Imagine”)
  • 2/13/16 He Feels The Pixels Scraping, Scrolls Breaking On His Brow
    (Inspired by Jethro Tulls’ “Locomotive Breath”)

16 thoughts on “How To Get Your Pixel Scroll Title Published

  1. Your 10/24/16 submission was inspired by The Who’s “I’m Free” from the rock opera “Tommy”.

  2. Bah!

    Pixel’s just another word for nothing left to scroll…

    ( pretty sure it’s been posted and maybe used before)

  3. I think the key is a healthy combination of nostalgia and cleverness.

  4. I have to say, “Pixel Scroll Title Submitter” is reminiscent of the legendary Great River Shore Picture Painter, from one of my favorite R. A. Lafferty stories, “All Pieces of a River Shore” (1970).

    (After posting this I realized “All Pixels of a River Scroll” might be at least adequate, especially given the appearance of actual scrolling in the story… which makes me think it was used already, but perhaps not.)

  5. So presumably something like “I kissed a pixel and I scrolled it” is unlikely to make it because it’s much too recent a reference?

    I guess the idea is that understanding Mike is the true key to title success – shades of Ready Player One, perhaps…

  6. David Brain on May 14, 2018 at 1:50 am said:
    So presumably something like “I kissed a pixel and I scrolled it” is unlikely to make it because it’s much too recent a reference?

    Whereas Pixelo Danaos et scrollas ferentes would be going too far in the other direction….

  7. @Steve Wright: I like it, but I’m not management here, just another filer.

  8. “The algorithm will only cost you fifty bucks.”

    LOL!

    Reader, I scrolled.

    [ETA: This was a lovely meta-File770.com post.]

  9. @Kendall. When Mike accepted this piece and said it was “genius”, I was a little flattered, but then I figured he was just being nice and had a hole to fill. Your comment, however, (you need at least two data points to make a line) now allows me to accept that assessment. Thank you!

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