On an average week, I send two letters to The Economist. And they publish three of my letters a year, which they space out as best they can. This means that my success rate is about three percent. Not bad, given that I write all these letters for my own enjoyment. Or so I am fond of saying whenever the subject comes up in conversation. The truth is ever so slightly different, as witnessed by my predicament today. I just received the last issue of the mighty newspaper, and it contains a letter of mine. Which means that there is no chance that my letters written this week or the next few will ever get published. The probability of success will start growing a couple of months from now, and it will grow ever faster until the next letter gets published. February 2009 is my best bet, I reckon. On the average, my letters appear in print every three to four months. In short, no matter how many letters I manage to write this week, they will not come easily to me. Or at least not as easily as the last few blessed weeks.

Addendum (October 24, 2018)

Now that the habit of writing letters to editors is squarely behind me, it is interesting to look at my success rate with The Economist. Between 1999 and 2011, the mighty newspaper had published twenty-five of my letters to the editor. Of these, five appeared in the online edition only. And here are all these letters by their original title with the date of appearance in parentheses:

On the English Language (January 9, 1999)
Salon des refusés (April 26, 2003)
Greater Europe (January 17, 2004)
Battling for Brains (October 9, 2004)
Suspiciously Like Communism (February 19, 2005)
Stagnation Can Be Fun (October 8, 2005)
Culture, Schmulture (February 18, 2006)
Alexander Zinoviev (June 3, 2006)
Our Prehistoric Baggage (October 7, 2006)
Jean Baudrillard (March 31, 2007)
Free Speech (November 3, 2007)
Russian Mythologizing (March 1, 2008)
Corruption in Eastern Europe (June 14, 2008)
Emperor Franz Josef and the European Union (September 27, 2008)
The Real Maverick (November 15, 2008)
Capsaicin Craving (January 10, 2009)
The Curse of Economics (May 16, 2009)
Taxpayers’ Largesse (September 26, 2009 - online edition only)
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia (December 12, 2009 - online edition only)
Geographic Labelling for Beginners (January 30, 2010)
Emerging Protectionism (May 8, 2010 - online edition only)
Work, Leisure (September 4, 2010 - online edition only)
Stuxnet Be Praised (October 16, 2010)
Show a Little Confidence in China (November 27, 2010)
Seasteading (December 31, 2011 - online edition only)

As can be seen from my book entitled Letters to The Economist (2017), I wrote one-thousand one-hundred and thirty-five letters to the editor between 1994 and 2014. By the way, the book is available for free on my Ca’ Bon Gallery website (www.cabongallery.org). In short, I have been successful a bit more than two percent of the time. Pitiful, to say the least. Luckily for me, letters to editors suited me fine at the time. As a literary form, it cannot be neglected. One way or another, I relished it for decades.