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…
Well, I promised you I was going to Caithy Weaver this post, and show you each step of sending out the next two queries. Here’s how that went: Monday, May 18th 6:29 – With only 30 minutes of writing time left before I have to grab breakfast and take out the trash, I decide to go to the simple route. Just find the simplest template for a short story cover letter, and create the simplest draft possible for each of the publishers. I’ll be changing them 20 times, anyway. 6:36 – Basic templates created! 6:39 – Start reading the submission…
Life during a pandemic is rarely predictable. Of course life, in general, is rarely predictable. As we discussed last week. Or was it two weeks ago? The days are starting to blend together. Anyway, this week(ish) I got hit with a massive schedule change due to my primary client reopening after securing a federal loan, requests to make 10 elastic masks on my finicky sewing machine with no elastic available in the state of Ohio, and a resurgence of some of my favorite clients coming back for basic services. So, all good stuff. Then I misfiled piece of government paperwork…
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,…