writingforyourlife

Yesterday I said I need to be more diligent with submitting work to magazines and journals.

Today, I give you…  THE BIG LIST of LITERARY MAGAZINES !

By the time you finish looking through the links, you’ll have 1800 less excuses for not being published.  Here’s my strategy for getting through this massive list:

1. Start at the top of the list and use new tabs to open 5 links at a time on your browser.
2. Quickly look at each site.  In a text document, copy and paste links to the ones that seem to meet your requirements.  Close each tab as you finish with it.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 until your eyes shrivel. Make note of where you’ve left off.
4. Sleep.
5. Repeat steps 1 to 4 until you have your own personalized list of appropriate places to send your work.

A quick note of caution:  when looking at links, I didn’t bother wasting time on any magazines that had dodgy looking sites, or those that were obviously not my type of writing.  I immediately closed any tabs with pictures of vampires on them, or those that had very poor quality design.  If their website looks terrible, what does that say about their magazine?

Also, make sure you understand whether a magazine/journal is offered in print or only online.  Many websites make it difficult to tell.  Being offered publication online isn’t as prestigious as having your work accepted in print.

If you have used other lists, please send us the link.   Best of luck!

I haven’t been diligent enough with submitting my writing lately.  If a piece is rejected, I tend to think it isn’t good enough and I start writing something else.  This is entirely the wrong attitude.

So, yesterday I spent a couple of hours searching the internet for print magazines and journals (as opposed to online publications), that publish short works of fiction.

I managed to compile a list of those in my own country, which will require only small postage.  I also made note of overseas magazines that accept submissions via email.   Obviously, email is easier on the wallet.

In any case, I’ve created a hierarchy list of magazines.  I will start by submitting to the ones I’d most like to publish my writing, and work my way down until I run out of print options. If I’m not successful, I’ll continue the process using online magazines.

I believe having a system in place will force me to submit pieces to all my options.  It will be time consuming, but worth it.

What do you think?  Is getting published just a game of numbers?

This week, I came across a call for submissions to a new literary magazine in my area.  I was excited, because Australia (where I currently live) has VERY few of these.  By contrast, my home country, Canada, is overrun with them!

This particular magazine has recently released its first quarterly issue, and it sounds like a promising place to send some of my writing.  Because they’re a new organization, they haven’t yet become jaded by slaving over millions of unpublishable manuscripts.  They are even offering some degree of constructive criticism on submissions.

There’s only one problem:  because I’ve been working on my novel for the last few months, I haven’t written any short stories recently.

So, I sorted through my computer files and came across a couple of short pieces I wrote for a contest over a year ago.  I never got around to polishing them and sending them to other magazines.  When I read through them with a fresh perspective, I could see they had definite potential, but were in no condition to be submitted just yet.

As I went through the first story with a fine tooth comb, I was able to pick up on areas where I could have been more concise, and passages that could have been eliminated completely.  In fact, just in my first edit alone, I’ve culled about 1000 words.  Though I’ll be going through it again and making further changes, I can already tell that the story reads more clearly.

Next time you see a potential market for your work, you don’t necessarily need to reinvent the wheel.  Dig out something old and revise it or rework it.

When I began planning my novel, I had a beginning, a middle and an end, plus a handful of characters.  I knew one of these characters wouldn’t  enter the story until between one-third and one-half of the way in.

So, I set to the task of actually writing my book, starting near the beginning.  Consequently, for the longest time I put off naming this particular character who hadn’t yet turned up.

I can’t explain my motivation for this unforgivable procrastination, except that I may have thought there were no names that were adequate.  I daresay I was afraid of the whole idea of naming this character.

In the end, I managed to do the dreaded task, and I’m pleased with my choice.  However, I didn’t pull it straight out of thin air.  I made a list, played around with first names and surnames, shuffled and re-shuffled until I had one that felt right.

When naming your characters, don’t be tempted to slap a title on them too quickly.  Stop and think about the connotations of every name you use.  Research their ethnic origins and meanings.

For example, the character of Briony in Ian McEwan’s Atonement   (click here to see my book review , film review ) accuses an innocent young man of sexually assaulting her cousin, and spends the rest of her life trying to atone for her crime.  The name Briony comes from the plant bryony , which is a poisonous climbing vine.  It’s the perfect name for this character.

When you name a character, you should be able to explain why.  If you can’t, maybe you haven’t got the right name.

Here I am again, posting on the dilemma between writing a novel in the present vs. the past tense.

My blog is still getting quite a few hits on my former posts about the same topic, so I assume there are many other writers who share this concern.

When I started my novel, I found myself unconsciously drifting toward present tense narrative.  However, at about 10,000 words in, I recognized that it was bad, bad, bad.  There was simply no reason to use present tense in this case.  It’s a bad habit, a hold-over from the time when present tense was new and experimental, when it set a work apart from the masses.

Now, it’s become so commonplace, editors and readers are getting sick of seeing it.  People don’t want an ordinary story packaged up as something extraordinary on account of the verb tense.

For a while, I thought I could do some parts of my story in past tense and some in present tense, because it time-jumps quite a bit.  I realized that wasn’t necessary either, and I was only trying to rationalize the use of present tense because I didn’t want to give it up.

So, with all these thoughts in my head, I made the decision to write the entire novel in past tense.  It was a good choice, and I haven’t been tempted to switch back again.

Thoughts?  Please share.  I hope you’re not all as confused as I am.