I have begun my new round of lit magazine submissions. My initial goal was to select 30 targets, and I ended up with 27, which feels fine. Eight submissions are done, but this is going to take a couple of evenings to finish. Four stories to spread amongst those 27, so each will get six or seven shots. And if two get picked up in that whole batch, I am going to feel well-proud and thoroughly-accomplished. I am more and more convinced that I am going to publish a collection of these stories in some form this year, so it’s not like they will never be seen by friends or family if I don’t score with all of them here.
The momentum of this is invigorating. Ideally I could repeat this process with another four stories in six months (since most of these magazines are university-based, they don’t do much reading during the summer). I have two new stories that aren’t included in this batch that could be polished up – Homam, the Very Helpful Genie and The Staring Man. So if I can finish even two more decent stories in the next few months, then we’ve got ourselves a regular and persistent assault on the reading masses here.