Once again, I will support your literary journal when you show me why I'd want to

While submitting stories to be considered for publication recently, I ran into this warning:

Before anything else, a special note:

If you are not currently reading/have not ever read a copy of (Journal Name Left Out), then:
perhaps you are a bit too parsimonious and short-cutty for us, as it is not that difficult to get your hands on our magazine, and it is a really good magazine (we promise) and also
the chances are maybe a bit high that you will submit fiction to us that is not what we are hunting for, because how would you know what we like to publish if you don't read what we publish. 

So, go on go on go on — just grab a copy and we'll post it straight to you, or even subscribe, and do yourself the favour of not wasting your own time, and do us the favour of supporting the magazine that you would like to be published in. We want you as a reader first, and as a contributor second, because do you know how beautiful a transition that is? 

(Really beautiful is the answer.)

I've posted about this before. Just like there are hundreds of writers submitting stories such that no journal particularly needs me, there are thousands of journals out there to which I can submit, so I don't particularly need any single one of them. These journals are largely similar in quality. Unless a journal has a stated aesthetic preference, such as for avant garde or queer or feminist or whatever, a story that could get published in one could get published in another. 

Notices like this are meant to sucker new writers into buying a subscription. Usually, I don't mind the soft sell--"the best way to know what we like is to read our journal." That's fine, I expect it. But there are thousands of journals out there. I can't subscribe to them all. I couldn't read all the content from more than ten or so of them. So does anyone really expect me to subscribe to every journal I am going to submit to? That's absurd.

This particular journal really jacked up its pitch more than other journals. They make it sound, without outright saying it, that they will not publish you unless you've subscribed or bought a copy. 

It's not short-cutty to submit to more journals than you can afford to subscribe to; it's literally the only way anyone is going to beat the odds and get published. Parsimonious? Please. I'm incredibly generous with journals--once they've published me. Just ask the journals who've published my stories. I gave one a year of volunteer service and a couple of donations. I turned down the award money from a few. I will push your social media on my social media. I will subscribe. Just publish me first. Because the best way for me to see that your journal deserves my love over all the other journals I could give it to--the best way for me to see that my tastes coincide with your editors--is for you to publish something I wrote. 

Summer is a terrible time to get motivated about submitting stories

I do things in cycles. I won't clean the house for six weeks, then I clean it all in six hours. I may have a mild form of manic-depressive/bipolar disorder. I make it work for me by doing everything when I'm up and coasting when I'm down. This summer, without nightly arguing over homework to occupy me, I've been trying to get serious about taking some of the very best stories I've got, making them look super shiny, and then sending them off. I mentioned a while ago that I'm going to take a scatter-shot approach and send them literally everywhere, but part of that strategy has been a commitment to including some of the top journals in the mix. A lot of them, actually. The top journals take more work, because a lot of them don't just work through Submittable. You have to use their separate submission service or once in a while even--God help me--mail it in. But I'm up for the task right now.

The problem is that most of the top journals are off for the summer. Their schedules really do not match the arbitrary nature of my gumption. They all seem to open back up at about the same time in the fall. Will I still have the will then to blitzkrieg my way through sending out submissions? Time will tell. In the meantime, I guess I'll busy myself with sending off more query letters to literary agents about the novel...that also won't get read because everyone takes the summer off.

What I'm getting at is what anyone who's been writing seriously for a while probably already figured out. You need to align your drives with the writing season. Fall and spring are where it's at. Align your biorhythms/chakras accordingly.

Spamming the A button FTW

My son tells me that "FTW" is old and lame now, but I don't know another way to user gamer lingo to refer back to my "spamming the A button" technique of literary submissions I recently decided to follow. Basically, I decided to submit a lot more.

I kind of needed a win. 2017 started off pretty good, with a story getting accepted in January and then I got the call about the book in February. Since then, it's been a shut-out, even though I feel like what I'm putting out now is the best work I've done.

But two weeks into my submit-your-ass-off technique, Drunk Monkeys just accepted a story, so I'm off the schneid.

Actually, this is a story that wasn't even in my head until Friday night. I was driving to a friend's house for a reading discussion of The Enchiridion, when the story just sort of came to me. Parts of it fell into place while I was stuck in traffic, and I was actually tempted to skip my quaff of Lyon's Rum and an evening of camaraderie to hurry home and write before I lost it. Instead, I wrote down what I knew of the story on a receipt lying on the floor of my car, spent the evening with friends, made it home by 1 AM and wrote the beginning of the rough draft until 2. The next day, I went into work to catch up on some work I was behind on, then came home and finished the rough draft.

I showed Mrs. Heretic the rough draft, talked it over, fixed it up, and then sent it to Drunk Monkeys' 24-hour response on Sunday. Today, I got an acceptance. So a story I had never thought of 76 hours ago will now have a home soon.

Let me here just put in a plug for that 24-hour response. It's three bucks, which is what a lot of journals are now charging as a reading fee in order to wait for six months.

Spamming the A button: the end of subtlety with submissions

I don't know why I've been overthinking how I submit stories lo these past four years. I try very hard to find the appropriate venue for each story. This doesn't mean actually--as every journal suggests--purchasing and reading a few sample copies of each magazine before submitting. That would be insane, and far beyond my budget or the budget of nearly every writer. But I do read at least some free samples, if available, and I try to gauge whether the journal's aesthetic matches mine. At most, I've only been submitting to maybe half a dozen journals at a time.

That ends now. Back when my son and I still played video games together (which was back when consoles still routinely made games that had split-screen as an option), he used to get really annoyed with the lack of subtlety I showed when playing. Rather than approach situations with finesse or a sense of style, I'd just whack at the enemy with straightforward attacks. "Spamming the A button," in his terminology.

The thing is, I actually got decent results from this approach. It's never pretty, but bit by bit, it does tend to level up a character until I can use it to get past the tough levels. I might have trouble with some bosses, because those usually have some trick to them beyond AAAAAAAAA. But we ended up beating most of the games we played together, and I wasn't always the weak link.

This is the approach I'm taking from here on out with submitting stories. I'm just sending out a lot. I might end up giving away opportunities in this manner, by publishing in a smaller journal when I might have landed a top-notch one, but I think getting in the big ones is so hard to figure out, I'm just not counting on that. I'll still submit to them, but I'm not going to do that thing where I submit to them first and then wait months to get rejections before I send to others. I'm just sending out lots and lots of submissions and hoping that it all works itself out.

There's only so much time I can give to writing. I need to spend as much of it as possible writing the best stories I can. Every extra second I spend futzing with the best way to handle submissions is taking time away from the thing I need to be working on the most. And it's just not useful time spent: who the fuck knows the right way to handle submissions? Who knows who is going to like what? Six months as a fiction editor has made it clear I don't even know what I'm going to vote for or why sometimes.

I'll still follow my resolution to support every journal that publishes me in some way, even if it's just to subscribe for a year after publication. I'll give them something. There's no reason to feel guilty that I'm drive-by submitting, any more than someone should feel like they're cheating on an eventual girlfriend by posting an online dating profile to thousands of people before meeting the one.

So, from here on out, head down, dwarf mace out, AAAAAAA. If that means I only get published in South Paducah Vignettes from here on out, so be it, and the folks of South Paducah shall have my gratitude.