Well, poo.
Tuesday, December 31st, 2024 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizvogelI gave myself a year after I left the library job, and then lost the next two and a half months to the condo, and then did NaNo. So I decided December was my month of rest, and I would start my year proper in January. I'm getting a bit of a jump on that by revving some things up this week: yesterday I exercised, for the first time in ages. Yay! And I cleaned some things. Yay! And I also set myself to create a list of sources to check for open short story markets, because Monday is going to be writey-biz day, and subbing short stories is a significant part of my writey-biz.
I didn't quite manage to get a story sent out yesterday because I ran out of day, but no problem, I could do it today. A quick glance at my pile of stories easily identified which one to send first, and I could fire it off to F&SF because they're always open.
Except F&SF is closed.
Now I think on it, F&SF was closed when last I was subbing things, too. (It's been a long year and a bit.) I'd forgotten that, in the press of other things. But now they've been closed for a year and a half, and by all reports there are major internal problems at what used to be a reliable market, and writers not getting contracts/checks/notifications that their stories are being published. You can google the details yourself if you're as out of the loop as I was, but basically it sounds like a train wreck that's best watched from a distance.
And dammit, F&SF was the right place to start for this story. Now I've got to figure out where else to send it first, and worse still, where it might fit that's actually open. And this reminds me of why I'd grown to hate subbing stories so much, because just finding a market to submit to is a nightmare these days.
Rejection isn't the problem. It sucks, but it comes with the territory; there's no way to predict what story is going to work for which editor, so all you can do is make your best guess and get your work out there. And keep it out there until it sells, is the wisdom. But so many pro, and semi-pro, and even halfway-respectable token markets have ridiculously short submission windows, scattered across the calendar, many of them unscheduled and unpredictable. More than a few have no open windows at all; they're either solicited-only, or have some sort of back-channel submission process that I'm just cool enough to know exists, but not cool enough to have access to. It is legitimately difficult to find more than a small handful of markets I even could submit to, and then there's the winnowing of matching story to submission guidelines. My cute little dragon vets story is not a good choice for magazines seeking dark fantasy or hard SF, no matter how good it is or whether I can catch them when they're open.
And this wasn't supposed to be the hard part. I'm willing to do the work, both craft and business, and I'll take my lumps in the slush piles. I get that the process isn't easy. But it's not supposed to be impossible, either, and it's getting damned close to that. How am I supposed to do my part if there's nowhere left for me to do it?
I didn't quite manage to get a story sent out yesterday because I ran out of day, but no problem, I could do it today. A quick glance at my pile of stories easily identified which one to send first, and I could fire it off to F&SF because they're always open.
Except F&SF is closed.
Now I think on it, F&SF was closed when last I was subbing things, too. (It's been a long year and a bit.) I'd forgotten that, in the press of other things. But now they've been closed for a year and a half, and by all reports there are major internal problems at what used to be a reliable market, and writers not getting contracts/checks/notifications that their stories are being published. You can google the details yourself if you're as out of the loop as I was, but basically it sounds like a train wreck that's best watched from a distance.
And dammit, F&SF was the right place to start for this story. Now I've got to figure out where else to send it first, and worse still, where it might fit that's actually open. And this reminds me of why I'd grown to hate subbing stories so much, because just finding a market to submit to is a nightmare these days.
Rejection isn't the problem. It sucks, but it comes with the territory; there's no way to predict what story is going to work for which editor, so all you can do is make your best guess and get your work out there. And keep it out there until it sells, is the wisdom. But so many pro, and semi-pro, and even halfway-respectable token markets have ridiculously short submission windows, scattered across the calendar, many of them unscheduled and unpredictable. More than a few have no open windows at all; they're either solicited-only, or have some sort of back-channel submission process that I'm just cool enough to know exists, but not cool enough to have access to. It is legitimately difficult to find more than a small handful of markets I even could submit to, and then there's the winnowing of matching story to submission guidelines. My cute little dragon vets story is not a good choice for magazines seeking dark fantasy or hard SF, no matter how good it is or whether I can catch them when they're open.
And this wasn't supposed to be the hard part. I'm willing to do the work, both craft and business, and I'll take my lumps in the slush piles. I get that the process isn't easy. But it's not supposed to be impossible, either, and it's getting damned close to that. How am I supposed to do my part if there's nowhere left for me to do it?
