July 11, 2020 admin

No more delays. I have a list of places to submit to this week. I have a basic cover letter. I know my manuscript is formatted correctly. All I have to do is go on Submitable and pay a couple of bucks to submit my work. This is going to be easy! Let’s do the Harvard Review first. Wait… what? I literally just checked this earlier in the week. I could have swore they said… No matter. People change their minds. And there have been several notices on the Harvard Review website talking about the increasing adjustments they’ve had to…

April 27, 2020 admin

So I wrote a cover letter. I wrote a cover letter for my first choice publication. Then I copied that draft into an email, put the publisher’s email address in the ‘to’ box, and attached a copy of my story to it. I was ready to intentionally, and with malice aforethought, actually hit send. When I was a young kid, I got to go on a class trip to Europe. We ended up in some medieval town, and we climbed to the top of a historic tower and when I tried to climb down I almost fell off. To this day,…

April 20, 2020 admin

Well, writer’s block can hit you at any time, and it ran me over like a MAC truck this week. This #publishpath entry should have been about reviewing my written cover letter and the problems most people have when sending their short fiction out for the first time. But between a family emergency and dealing with the issues surrounding the quarantine, I find myself still working on that cover letter 30 minutes before my deadline. I’m going to have to leave the house for some essential errands, and I know I’ll be away from my computer all day today. So…

April 13, 2020 admin

I’m feeling pretty confident right now! I know where I’m sending my work, when I’m sending my work, and I’ve got detailed instructions on how to get the manuscript from Point A to Point B. Now all I have to do is figure out what I’m going to say to each publisher when I query my short story. Wait… what am I going to say to those publishers? Is querying for short fiction more difficult than querying for novels? Or agents? I know how things used to work back in the day, but have they changed in 2020? Well, after…