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,…
When you’re querying your short fiction you’re going to get rejected. A lot. Stephen King once famously mounted a railroad spike on his childhood bedroom wall when he started submitting short stories as a teen. Each rejection letter King received got impaled on the spike. After a while, the weight of the paper was so heavy it started to warp the railroad-grade iron. You’re going to have to assume that no one is going to immediately declare your work a masterpiece, and buy it off of you for one million dollars. Which means, even from the start, you’ll need to…