Writing and Submitting

One of the things that I find hard right now about writing is finding an audience. I could simply publish my fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry on one of my blogs. Not here, perhaps my Wordpress site, but somehow that just feels like when I was in school and my stories would be passed around among my friends and classmates. It’s like this blog too or even my writing groups. Just not enough.

There are writing contests aplenty. Between my two writing groups and a few magazines I have looked through, I have found more than enough contest opportunities. Currently I believe I am waiting on four contests and have three more I can enter. Good. But still not enough. I want to see something with my name on it in a newspaper or magazine. I am plaguing the Globe with one Fact and Argument piece a week now. I submitted one of the stories from my Sci-Fi series of shorts to a Sci-Fi/Fantasy magazine based out of Edmonton. Literary magazines of any genre are hard to find though and many will not take submissions from unpublished writers. So, what’s a frustrated writer to do?

Submit online.

Yes, apparently there is quite the sizable and respected community of literary magazines on line. I discovered this through an article in Writer’s magazine. The editor of failbetter.com wrote a piece about his and others’ online collection of tomes. Quite a list and one that goes back into the late to mid-90’s in terms of longevity. There are even literary awards for online lit mags. Cool.

I made my first submission to a site called Our Stories which looks for emerging writers and promises feedback for submissions within 3 weeks. More than cool. I sent a story I wrote for Rob called The White Boots. I based it on an anecdote he told that was first told to him by Shelley, his late wife. Seems that when she was in high school, there was a boy a bit older than she was whose pick up line was stealing girls’ shoes at parties and leaving his white cowboy boots in their place. Rob said it had happened to Shelley once but that he didn’t know the outcome. I found the whole idea intriguing enough to get out of bed in the middle of the night and jot down the basics of what became a pretty decent short story. When I let Rob read it, he thought it was strange to see personal details of his high school days and meeting Shelley fictionalized but he liked the story a lot. My Fort writing group liked it too though none of the women got the reference to “Aunt Flo” and I came to find out that it is apparently an American slang term for one’s period and not a universal one. Our Stories accepts submissions year round, as do many of the other lit sites do, and like them it will take only one submission per category a quarter. I am working on a few other things that I will look at sending in after March 31st.

Failbetter.com will take novel excerpts, so I was looking through my novel last night while I sat with Katy in the living room. She wanted to watch Quest for Camelot, an old feature length cartoon that proved a bit too scary. The main character’s father is murdered within the first five minutes or so and it really doesn’t get any better from there, so we switched to Curious George and I went back to surfing through my novel. Now that time has passed since the first draft, I am able to be a bit more objective. It’s pretty good in places but there is revising to be done.

I was telling Rob this morning that I had yet another dream where my wallet (sometimes purse) was stolen and when I found it again, the contents were gone. An obvious loss of identity theme and he wanted to know why I felt that I had lost my identity. Too much cooking, cleaning and laundry? Well, there is that. My mini-inner feminist is disgusted by the extent to which I am really finding joy and fulfillment in making a home for my family, but there is also the issue of teaching. Less and less do I miss the actual job but more and more I realize that I am in between having been a teacher and being an actual writer - partly because of the whole getting published issue. And of course this is just an issue of patience but there is a sense of fibbing when I tell people I am a writer because I am not published and my two biggest works are incomplete.