After spending a very listless and uninteresting afternoon watching the Tigers lose another baseball game and whining about lacking the money necessary for a good therapeutic shopping trip, I got a call from Finny which, although it didn’t really even consist of much writing discussion, served to remind me that I was being a lazy jerk, and that all those lit mags I’d intended to submit to at the beginning of the summer (and had then been infuriated to learn that most of them had closed submissions until August) were taking works again. So I buckled down and worked my way through A-L section of lit mags at Newpages. I was stymied in my efforts by only having five stamps on hand (SASE’s are a bitch!), but in the course of two hours I got through eight submissions (the last three of which were electronically submitted) and bookmarked a good 7-8 more that I’ll finish up with once I acquire stamps, before I move on to M-Z, and 4-5 more that aren’t taking submissions yet but will be soon. So far I’ve covered:
I sent Fever to the first five, and another short piece called Chinook to the next two. The final accepted up to two submissions at once, and thus I sent both. Originally I intended to split the two more evenly, but for some reason Alberta likes having lit mags I could see myself getting accepted to – and Chinook is set in Calgary, where I have never been and yet presume to know all about thanks to things like Wikipedia entries about freeways and national parks. Needless to say, I do not feel ballsy enough to try that quite yet.
The turnaround on most of these is about 4 months to a year, and the acceptance rate is somewhere around 3% – but I feel good about both of these pieces and the feedback I’ve gotten on them, so here’s hoping!
