Tag: Writing Challenge

You Must Be Crazy!: A Year-long Submission Bonanza!

Jaclyn12 Comments

Way back in July, I started my first Submission Bonanza!  This was an attempt to rack up rejections and embrace an aspect of writing that is difficult for me: putting myself out there.  My first Submission Bonanza was so successful and I learned so much from it that I resolved to keep it on the docket as something I did regularly.  I did another one in September and am starting to rack up more than just rejections from that one as well (news to follow!).

One of the habits that I resolved to develop in 2014 was to spend an hour a day on submitting my work to contests, literary magazines, etc.  I am hoping this means that I will be submitting something everyday, but there is a lot of work to do around submitting, so I’m not holding myself too hard to the number, more to the time I invest.  This, for me, is a year of forming habits over having goals.

In an effort to keep myself honest and also to share some great literary journals and contests, I’ll be posting a list here of where I submit to as I go.  Keep an eye on this spot for new magazines and competitions.  I’ll be updating it regularly.

  1. Classical Poets Contest
  2. California Genealogy Contest
  3. Glimmer Train
  4. The Paris Review
  5. Harper’s Magazine
  6. New England Review
  7. The Antioch Review
  8. The Southern Review
  9. EPOCH magazine
  10. The Gettysburg Review
  11. Yale Review
  12. Alaska Quarterly Magazine

My 500 Words Challenge

Jaclyn12 Comments

It’s amazing sometimes how the universe seems to be sending very distinct messages, as if it’s conspiring for goodness.  Pronoia.  After writing a post about forming writing habits and a post about writing word by word, my reading of Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life presents me with this food for thought, which she refers to as “comfort for friends discouraged by their writing pace:”

“It takes years to write a book, between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant… Thomas Mann was a prodigy of production. Working full time, he wrote a page a day. That is 365 pages a year… At a page a day, he was one of the most prolific writers who ever lived.  Flaubert wrote steadily…For twenty-five years he finished a big book every five to seven years.  If a full-time writer averages a book every five years, that makes seventy-three usable pages a year, or a usable fifth of a page a day… On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.” (13-14)

Then an email from Jeff Goins over at Goinswrites.com shows up in my inbox with an invitation to participate in a 31 day 500 word challenge.  Jeff’s advice echoes Annie’s:

“Here’s what I know about writing: It happens in small bites. Step by step. One little chunk at a time. You don’t write a whole book. You write sentences that turn into paragraphs. And paragraphs turn into sections that, then, turn into chapters.  In other words, it all begins with words. You don’t control the outcome, just the process.”

So, clearly, the cosmos are trying to tell me something and I figure that I don’t really have much choice other than to join the challenge.  I won’t be holding myself too strongly to the word count, but I’ll be working really hard to make sure my butt is in my writing seat for at least an hour a day, as per my New Year’s System.  And I’ll be using the My 500 Word Challenge as extra motivation.  Nearly 700 other writers have signed up so far, so it should be some excellent community-building.  I’ll be tracking progress here.   Feel free to join us!

My 500 Words Widget

January 1: 1087

January 2: 675

January 3: 940

January 4: 545

January 5: 629

January 6: 1201

January 7: 524

January 8: 0

January 9: 1152

January 10: 1398

January 11: 540

January 12: 513

January 13: 583

January 14: 503

January 15: 1159

January 16: 278

January 17: 0

January 18: 1097

January 19: 506

January 20: 537

January 21: 1302

January 22: 2173

January 23: 0

January 24: 0

January 25: 634

Prompt: Write Fast

Jaclyn19 Comments

I’ve been told recently that I write too slowly.  I will admit, my process is meticulous.  I follow in the footsteps of Tom Robbins (swoon)* in which I try to make the most perfect sentence possible before moving on to the next one.  There’s all kinds of research that happens and word-associations and trials and retrials.  I realize that this flies in the face of most writing process advice, which is to just get as much down on paper and then edit afterwards, but I have to admit, that’s just not the way it comes out for me.

Lately, I’ve been trying to exercise my “sprinting” muscles a little bit more and one way of doing this is with oneword.  It’s lovely for speed-thinking and writing and a nice little way to start a story.

So, here’s my challenge.  Go on oneword, write for the sixty seconds that they give you and use something you write in those sixty seconds as the start or end of a story.

Ready?  Go!

*It has recently come to my attention that for years I’ve been fostering a schoolgirl crush on a 77-year-old man.  I am not sure how I feel about it, but Switters would be proud.

Submission Bonanza!: Second Time Around

Jaclyn13 Comments

So, you might have noticed that it’s October 19th.  You might have also noticed that it’s not September any more.  In fact, it’s nearly three-weeks-not-September already.

Way back in July, I set myself a challenge to do a Submission Bonanza!  It was incredible and successful.  I learned so much, and I’ve been published in three magazines so far (more on that to come later!).  It was so successful that I resolved to do it again in September.

Some of my cohorts looked at me like I was insane — and with good reason.  In September, I started an M.F.A. program, began lecturing on writing at university, and moved to the frontier (Why, hello, Alaska!) all in the same month.

It’s true that I didn’t finish my 30 litmags in 30 days.  It’s an ambitious challenge amidst so much transition.  I have, however, finally finished!  It took me much longer than I had hoped, but I still got work out to 30 litmags and ok, it took me 50 days, but better late than never, right?

So, in true Submission Bonanza! fashion, I’ve pasted below links to all the literary magazines that I submitted to.  They’re all magazines that accept submissions online and accept submissions for free, because those are some of the restrictions that I’ve currently set for myself.  You’ll notice that some of the magazines here are quite ambitious for such a fledgling like me to be submitting to (cough, cough, New Yorker, cough, cough, The Atlantic).  One of the things I learned during my first Submission Bonanza! was that I needed to be more choosy.  Once a piece gets published, those First Time North American Rights that all the magazines are asking for are gone, gone forever.  Because of this, I figured I’d start with the big boys and get real about racking up the rejections.

So, here it is, ladies and gents:  an incredibly ambitious September Submission Bonanza! 30 litmags in 50 days.

1. Glimmer Train
2. Subtropics
3. American Scholar
4. Podcastle
5. Writing Tomorrow
6. New Haven Review
7. AGNI
8. Nashville Review
9. A River & Sound
10. Journal of Compressed Creative Arts
11. The Pedestal
12. Poetry Magazine
13. Kenyon Review
14. Shenandoah
15. Devil’s Lake
16. The New Yorker
17. The Atlantic
18. Tin House
19. Cincinatti Review
20. TriQuarterly
21. A Public Space
22. Bomb
23. Chicago Review
24. One Story
25. West Branch
26. New Ohio Review
27. Willow Springs
28. Third Coast
29. Southeast Review

30. Pleiades

Call for Submissions: The Round

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The Round is a journal of literary and visual arts based at Brown University in Providence, RI.

Published biannually, The Round accepts submissions in all mediums and from all sources, inside and outside the Brown community.

The Round is happy to accept submissions of both literary and visual art. In the past we have published prose, poetry, plays, and translations as well as paintings, drawings, prints, and photography.

Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis. Typically, for the fall issue, we read through October, and for the spring issue, through March. Issues are published at the end of each semester in December and May.

To submit, please send us a brief bio and your mailing address, if not on Brown’s campus, along with your work. Written submissions should be sent in .rtf, .doc, or .docx format. Please send visual art as high quality .jpg images and include a piece’s title, medium, and dimensions.

 

Please email all work to theroundmagazine@gmail.com .

 

September Submission Bonanza Challenge!

Jaclyn13 Comments

September is here, folks and that means it’s time to celebrate Labor Day by expending a bit of my labor on my writing career.  All this month, I will be working on my second Submission Bonanza!

In my first Submission Bonanza! I racked up a few rejections, got some things published (more info to come on some of those things as the publications come out!), and learned a whole lot.  It was incredibly successful in more than just my initial idea that I would start racking up the rejections to get my work out there.  I am reading more critically and closely.  I found lots of new magazines.  I feel part of a larger literary conversation.  I am inspired to write more.  Also, I am inspired to keep up with submitting and submit more.

Like last time, I will be working on submitting to 30 magazines in a month.  I have my pieces picked out and edited.  I have a list of magazines that I want to submit to. And I have a cover letter and bio template ready to go.

Feel free to join me in this journey.  I loved doing this in July and I am excited about all the magazines opening their doors to submissions this month.  I would highly recommend that anyone who is wanting to grow and develop as a writer think about doing this in some form.  Maybe you don’t want to do one magazine every day.  Maybe you want to do one every other day, one a week, or even just one.  Maybe you want to do three a week or three a day.  Whatever the case may be, set a reasonable goal or yourself and get going.  Your work isn’t going to read itself.  If you do decide to join, please let me know.  I would love to be able to support and encourage each other as the months go on.  Good luck!

6 Tips for Perfect (Professional) Cover Letters for Literary Magazines

Jaclyn21 Comments

By now, if you’ve been following my Submission Bonanza! series, you should have picked the pieces you want to send to magazines and compiled a list of magazines that you want to submit to.  It’s time now to write a cover letter to send along with your submissions.  As Michael Nye, Editor of the Missouri Review says, sending a cover letter with your submission is “like wearing a suit to an interview.”  Don’t let your submissions to literary magazines show up naked!

It’s easy to feel stressed about this part of the process of submitting to literary magazines: the cover letter  (duh-duh dun….).  It’s understandable because this can be the first impression that you are giving to the editors of the magazine.  We definitely want to put our best foot forward and present ourselves as professional, competent writers.

But also, keep in mind that you are not being judged on your cover letter.  Editors want solid writing.  So make a nice, neat little cover letter and spend the majority of your time stressing about whether you should put that extra comma in your new creative nonfiction piece.

So here are some things to think about when writing a cover letter:

1.  Follow the guidelines of the literary magazine.

This seems self-explanatory, but a lot of literary magazines ask for different kinds of information in the cover letter.  Some of them want word counts or genre.  Others want a short bio about you.  Some even ask for no cover letter at all.  If you are submitting simultaneously, you’ll also need to note that.  Make sure you follow their specific guidelines.

 

2. Address the letter to a person.

This is not a “To Whom It May Concern” letter.  It’s pretty easy to find most of the staff at a literary magazine under their masthead.  Some magazines even tell you in the submission guidelines who to address it to.  Be as specific as possible.  If you’re submitting poetry, address it directly to Ms. Sally B. Poetryeditor.  If you can’t pinpoint a specific name, you can address it to the editor.

 

3. Keep it short and simple. 

Don’t forget, a lot of editors are reading hundreds or thousands of these.  This is not a query letter, so you don’t need to describe your piece to them.  You don’t need to tell them how you came up with the idea or list the twenty-seven other literary magazines you’ve been in.  For example, the Colorado Review suggests this cover letter:

Dear Editor,

Enclosed is my [fiction/nonfiction/poetry] submission “Title of Manuscript.” Thank you for considering it for publication in Colorado Review.

[*If submitting via mail] I’ve included an SASE for [response only/the return of my manuscript].

Your Name

Full Contact Info

 

 4. Keep it professional.

Naturally, you want to make sure that the grammar and punctuation are flawless and that it is in a professional format.  But also, you don’t need to be cute or catchy to get the editor’s attention.  Let your writing do that.  That’s what they are looking for.

 

5. Add a short bio (Optional).

Some magazines ask for a short bio or you may feel that it’s in your best interest to include one.  This should only be a line or two of relevant information. Don’t tell your life story, just one or two tidbits that are interesting or pertinent.  Don’t include a whole list of the hundreds of places you’ve been published.  Just pick 3-5.  Also, if you haven’t been published, don’t be ashamed to include that too.  As Nye suggests:

If you’ve never been published before? Say so. “If accepted, this would be my first published story.” All literary magazines love being the one to publish a writer for the first time, so acknowledging this possibility can only help.

 

 6. Add a note about what you read in the magazine or how you know the magazine (Also optional).

If you want to personalize it a bit for the magazine, some editors might like to know that you did actually take the time to read past issues or that you have had past correspondences with them.  But again, this step could be optional.

 

In the end, I really like this bit Nye’s advice really calmed me down:

A professional cover letter is all we ask, and even minus that, if the work is excellent, we don’t really care. We want to publish the best work we read, regardless of whether or not you’re an emerging writer or an established one.

So don’t stress too much about your cover letter.  Get it done, and make it professional, so you can get back to your craft.

 

So, the goal for this week:

Make a template of your cover letter and bio.  Have them ready and at hand when you want to submit.  I personally made a template that had all the information I could possibly want to send to and editor (word counts, genres, bio, etc) and then cut or edited from that for each literary magazine.  Once this work is out of the way, you’ll be nearly set to start submitting!

 

Need more help?

You can read Michael Nye’s article on The Art of the Literary Magazine Cover Letter.

You could also look at advice about what not to do by Michael Kardos at Writer’s Digest. 

Or take a look at this sample cover letter from The Review Review.

Call for Submissions: Hoot Review

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Hoot Review

I love the idea of this mini-litmag on a postcard and the challenge of staying under 150 words.  Also, they have online workshops where they will help you edit your work before you even submit.  This one is definitely worth sharing.

Here are their submission guidelines:

We accept fiction, non-fiction, memoir, poetry, and book reviews year-round. Graphic fiction/non-fiction also welcome, but it must fit on a postcard.  We publish only one (1!) piece in print form each month– we publish 1-4 pieces in our online issue.

We accept work on a rolling basis–you can expect to hear from us within a month to six weeks, if we’re on schedule, which we are about 50% of the time. We do pay for pieces published on postcards (more details on this below).

  • ALL PROSE: <150 words. We’re not going to count them, but…we mean it.
  • ALL POETRY: <10 lines (if it’s more, be open to “creative reformatting”), but still <150 words.  Remember, it has to fit on a postcard!
  • BOOK REVIEWS: These will be published online, or on the back of a postcard when possible. Still <150 words. Must be of a recently published book (within the last year). The book must be published by an independent or small press. You are welcome to query before submitting if you would like our feedback on the book you are reviewing. If you would like your book reviewed by us, please send a query letter to info@hootreview.com.

You may submit as many works as you like, but two per submission. All work must be previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are, of course, allowed–but please let us know if your work is placed elsewhere.

We will read all types of work. However, we especially like work that is audacious, surprising and zesty. Furthermore, we want this postcard to be shareable. As you’re submitting, remember the Refrigerator Rule. Ask yourself: “Would someone want this hanging on their fridge?” Work that’s about the depressingness of gloomy alcohol clinking on the bottom of a shadowy glass in the gloaming after a father’s death wouldn’t work as well hanging from a fridge or tucked playfully in someone’s lunchbag.

That said, if you’ve got some melancholy work that is surprising and zesty and GOOD then we would be very excited to check it out.

See our “ISSUES” page to read samples of the work we have published in the past.

We will also read your work, and give you detailed feedback, BEFORE you submit. (We must be crazy.) Bring your piece to our super friendly online workshop, held every other Wednesday.

Depending on how generous we’re feeling, we also often give feedback with our rejections, especially if it is requested.

Note: We do not solicit work — and we read all of our submissions blindly (we don’t look at cover letters until we decide to accept/reject). Every submission we receive is given the same consideration, and is read by at least two, but up to four people, and often out loud (while we consume delicious items, like raspberry tart and/or dumplings.)

COSTS & PAYMENT:

To use our online submission manager, it costs $2 to submit up to two pieces of work. We also accept submissions by regular mail, for no fee. All pieces are considered for both our print (postcard) and our online issues, unless you specify otherwise.

You may submit as many pieces as you like, but you will need to pay the $2 submission fee for every two submissions (your two pieces must be in the same document, or Submittable will charge you twice!)- or, if you submit by mail, you must mail every two pieces separately, with their own return envelope (you mustinclude a SASE for a response.)

As for payment– it is sort of like we hold a mini-contest every month (but it’s not exactly a contest, as our submissions are rolling). The author we publish on a postcard receives 30% of all the submission money (after Submittable takes its 52% cut) for that month, from the 20th of the month two months prior publication, to the 20th of the month one month prior (guaranteed minimum of $10!), along with five copies of that month’s issue. For example, if we publish you in October, you get 30% of the money we received between August 20th and September 20th.

Authors published in our online issue do not receive monetary compensation at this time, but will receive five copies of the corresponding month’s postcard.

OTHER STUFF

  • You have to be okay with having your work ‘creatively’ formatted—so that it will both look cool and fit on a postcard.  Which means—we might paint the words on some wood and photograph them, or photo-edit the words onto an interesting-yet-appropriate thing, like a medicine bottle label, or a paper napkin, etc.  If you are submitting a poem, this sometimes means we have to change line breaks…though we try not to do this, and we always do it tastefully (at least, we think so.) Do not submit your work if you are not okay with this.
  • We are often asked about what informs our decision regarding publishing a piece on a postcard versus publishing it in our online issue. Choosing pieces for postcards vs. online is not a matter of “which ones we like best.” We love all of the pieces we publish. Factors include- what pieces we have for other months (we try to balance poems and prose, as well as keep style and content varied from postcard to postcard), appropriateness for sharing (see the Refrigerator Rule above), and illustration potential (both imagery and length of the piece factor here, as longer pieces are much harder to work with.)

READY TO SUBMIT?

Click here to go to our online submission manager.

Submission Bonanza! How-To Step 2: Finding Literary Magazines

Jaclyn17 Comments

Submission Bonanza! How-To Step 2: Finding LitMags

One of the lessons that really hit home during my Submission Bonanza! was that I need to be more choosy about the literary magazines that I submit to.    Now that I have a few acceptances under my belt, I realize that I may have sold myself short in my submission process.  Before starting this challenge, I was just excited to have my work ‘out there.’  And in some ways I still am.  But after my first acceptance, when I had to contact all the other magazines I had submitted to and ask them to withdraw the submission that was accepted, well… I was kind of sad to be withdrawing some of those.

Don’t get me wrong, it was great to get acceptances and I’m looking forward to seeing the publications, but next time around, I will be a little more thoughtful in choosing which literary magazines I submit to.  Many magazines are looking for unpublished pieces so that they can have first time rights and once you give those away, it’s much more difficult to find places that will want to publish a piece.

Here are some general things to think about when looking for magazines:*

Do you want to get paid?

My own Submission Bonanza! challenge started as a labor of love and I wasn’t at all thinking about getting paid.  But now that I have racked up some acceptances, I’m a little more keen to be compensated for my work.  A lot of magazines offer contributors copies as payment.  Others offer a small, token payment of $5-20 USD.  Still others pay by word, line, or page.  One of my favorite payment systems is automatic consideration in a contest, which means the chance of a bigger monetary prize and a contest to put on your CV, in addition to publication.

 Are you willing to pay to submit to magazines?

A lot of magazines that I found asked for a small ($2-3 USD) reading fee if you submitted online.  This means that you don’t have to spend the time/money to print your pieces, get envelopes, and pay for postage for your submission and your SASE for the response.  This could be a reasonable trade-off, especially if you are looking to get paid, or if you are submitting to magazines abroad.  If you do a month-long Submission Bonanza!  at the end of the month you will have spent about $90 USD and have 30 chances to get paid and published.  On the other hand, there are plenty of magazines out there that don’t charge a reading fee, even some that compensate writers, so you just need to decide what you are comfortable with.

 Do you want to be in print or online?

There’s something really satisfying about seeing your work and your name in print.  A lot of print magazines have years of prestige and awards behind them.  But, as brightonsauce said, there are very few people reading print literary magazines these days.  Perhaps you could reach a bigger audience with a small online magazine than you could with a small print magazine.  There are also a lot of litmags out there that have both print and online editions.  This is just something to give some thought to as you look for magazines.

What kind of rights are you willing to give up?

I am not a copyright lawyer, so I am not going to try to explain the legalities of the different kinds of publications rights.  But, I will direct you to this article and this article, both of which I found useful when I started thinking about publication rights.  What’s on your blog seems to be a little bit of a gray area.  I found magazines that specifically said personal blogs counted as being previously published and also found magazines that said that this kind of publication was not considered by them to be previously published.  Just to be safe, I took down the pieces I was submitting from my blog, but it was something I had to wrestle with a bit.

Are you submitting online or by mail?

I was fortunate enough to do my Submission Bonanza! from a tiny island in the Caribbean that did not have a post office.  So, this made this particular decision quite easy for me.  A lot of literary magazines that I found charged a fee for electronic submissions but not snail mail submissions.  I also found quite a few that no longer accepted submissions by post.  Just something to consider as you search.

Do you want to submit this piece to other magazines?

Luckily for us writers, most of the literary magazines that I looked at accepted simultaneous submissions, which means you can submit that piece to other magazines as you wait to hear back from them.  If you plan on submitting your work to more than one magazine at a time (which I highly recommend!) make sure that they all accept simultaneous submissions.

There are a lot of tools out there to help writers find magazines that they can submit to.  One of the most popular is Duotrope.  You can currently use their free trial to give it a go, but they have recently gone to a paid subscription service.  It’s $50 USD per year and helps you keep track of deadlines and submissions, so a lot of writers find it invaluable.

If you don’t have the funds to invest in Duotrope, never fear!  There are lots of resources out there for writers who are looking for markets to be published in.  The one I’ve personally used the most is Poets & Writers, which has a free search function where you can search by payment type, genre, or format of the magazine.  (This one is also recommended by Mary MacAvoy.)

You can also take a look at The Submission Grinder, which is another one of my favorites.  The platform is still in Beta mode, but their database is growing rapidly and they are quickly becoming a good, free alternative to Duotrope.  This one is easily searchable using lots of different criteria, so it’s incredibly useful.  One drawback is that it only looks at magazines that accept fiction, so if you’re looking to submit nonfiction or poetry, you could still use it (since a lot of literary magazines accept multiple genres) but you’ll have to do a little more research to weed out the magazines that accept your genre.  (And Rachel K. Jones finds this one useful, too.)

There are also lots of lists of magazines.  For example, I personally was interested in magazines that were affiliated with Writing M.F.A. Programs, so I used this list.  Maybe you want to be in a Top 50 magazine, so you could use this list.  Perhaps you know you want to submit electronically, so you could use this list.  If you’re looking for magazines that are particularly edgy, you could look here.  Maybe you just want a giant resource of lots of magazines, so you could look here or here.  I personally was looking for magazines that accepted online submissions, did not charge a reading fee, accepted simultaneous submissions, and were reading in the summer months, sothis is the list I came up with.

Goal for this week:

Compile a list of magazines (I would recommend double the number you are planning to submit to) as possible candidates to submit your work to.

*More info on how to match your specific pieces to magazines will be coming in a future post.  For now, keep your eye out for magazines that publish the genre of pieces you have, match your criteria from the questions above, and that you like the feel of.

Submission Bonanza! How-To Step 1: Choosing and Editing Submittable Pieces

Jaclyn15 Comments

Submission Bonanza!

How-To Step 1: Choosing and Editing Submittable Pieces

It feels like a big decision:  when is a piece done?  We all want our work to be ‘perfect.’  Naturally, we want to put our best foot forward and make sure that anything we submit is the very best it can be.  But don’t forget, this challenge started with one of The Copybot’s 100 Ways to Become a Better Writer: #66 Rack up Rejections.  You can’t wait until you know that a piece will be accepted to submit it.  You need to submit it first to find out.  Even the very act of submitting, whether they are accepted or not, will make you grow and learn and develop as a writer.

Of course, you want to send out solid, professional pieces.  Make sure you are submitting work that you are proud to attach your name to.  Ask yourself, if this comes out in print, would you share it with people?  Would you be proud to have your name in the byline?  To me, this is the most important criteria.

I personally am a big believer in the idea that if you wait for perfection, nothing you write is ever going to make it out the door.  No piece is ever really finished.  Your ideas about each piece of writing that you create will grow and change, just as you do.  You can always look at your work from new, fresh, different perspectives.  Some pieces will look good to you one year and like garbage the next.  And it’s really a doozy to try to predict what will appeal to different readers or editors at different magazines.  So pick pieces that you like, right now.  Chances are that if you like them, others out there will too.

Your work doesn’t need to be perfect to be out in the world.  Obviously, it’s important when polishing work to think about details.  But there is a difference between meaningful details and minutiae.  I personally spent days wondering if I should put one space or two between lines in a particular poem I was sending out.  Finally, I had to admit to myself that if an editor liked it, they liked it and if they didn’t, an extra space wasn’t going to change their mind.  No editor was going to pour over this poem for days the way I was.  They just don’t have time for that.

So I think of it as a process of polishing.  Your bits of creativity are diamonds.  Maybe they start as diamonds in the rough, so of course they need to be polished.  You want them to shine and shimmer and be as clear and beautiful as possible.  But if you sit there polishing them for years, they will wear away until there is no diamond left.  It will become just a pile of dust that you can’t sell or use or share with other people.  Or worse, you’ll have a nice little diamond sitting in your desk drawer collecting dust instead of sparkling.  Diamonds need to reflect light in order to shine, and so does your writing.  It’s not going to shimmer in the darkness of your desk drawer/computer hard drive/recesses of your brain.  It needs to be out in the sunlight. So, by all means, polish your diamonds.  It’s necessary.  But don’t chip away at them until there’s nothing left and don’t let them sit in darkness unable to sparkle.

To me, the easiest way to think about these decisions is to realize that in the end, it’s not my decision if something is ready to be published in a particular literary magazine.  I only have to decide if I would be proud to see this piece, with my name on it, in print.  If I would, I’m sending it out and the readers and editors at the various literary magazines that I’m submitting it to can decide if it’s ‘perfect’ enough to print in their publication.  Do you want this piece published?  If you do, then send it out.

Perhaps the most practical reason to submit something that might not be quite ‘perfect’ in your eyes is that you might get feedback on it.  Last year I submitted to Flash Frontier and got a lovely letter back saying they liked the piece, but suggesting ways that I could make it more solid and clearer.   (You can see the before and after pieces.) It was invaluable advice.  I took the advice and it did polish that tiny diamond I had.  And, they ended up publishing it.  I found that many of the literary magazines I looked at offered to give writers feedback, if you asked for it and were willing to wait a little longer for a response.  Some venues (like Hoot Review) even have scheduled workshops and are willing to work with you on a piece before you even submit it.

One more thing I’ve had a lot of comments about from people out there is that they don’t have enough pieces or work finished to do this challenge.  Many literary magazines are happy to accept simultaneous submissions, which means you can send your piece to more than one litmag at a time.  You could send just your favorite piece to 30 different magazines all at the same time.  So, if you have just one poem or one book review or one flash fiction piece, you have enough to do the 30 day challenge.

Organizing:

I personally chose about 15 of my strongest pieces, gave them a little polish-up and made sure they were ready to go out into the world.  Once I knew which pieces I was ready to submit, I made a handy little spreadsheet so that I could keep track of what I submitted to where and when (see below).  This is incredibly important because when your pieces get accepted (yes, when, not if) you may need to withdraw them from other magazines.  One of the pieces of info that I knew I needed was word count because I planned to submit some flash fiction, and I listed that below the title of each piece.  This spreadsheet  is also how I kept track of my responses.  You can see in this image that Camroc Review sent me my first rejection (in pink), so then I knew that those pieces could be sent out to even more places or maybe that they needed more polishing.  At the bottom of this spreadsheet, which you can’t see, is a total of how many times I submitted each piece, just a sum of all the 1’s I input to show that something had been submitted.  It’s a really good idea to make this spreadsheet now so that you don’t have to do it while you are doing the work of submitting later on.  You don’t need to know the litmags just yet, we’ll take care of those next week.

 

 

So, this is the goal for this week: collect one, a few, twenty pieces of writing that you like.  Polish them (gently!) until you would be proud to see them published.  Get yourself organized so that you keep track of your little diamonds, whether you are using Duotrope, a notebook, a dry erase scoreboard, or a little spreadsheet like mine.  And get ready to rack up rejections – and probably some acceptances too!

 

 

 

P.S. Thank you to everyone for the comments and suggestions.  Definitely keep the questions coming and feel free to suggest issues that you want to see addressed.  I’ll do my best to respond to all of these.  Keep in mind also that I’m learning as I go too, so your knowledge and experience is appreciated as well!