Newbie Writer

I’ve been working on a short story pretty hard lately. Annealing it. I’m going to send this one to a literary journal, see what happens. I expect it will be rejected, and even as I type that word it sounds harsh and defeating. There’s quite a lot of competition to get short fiction published. I’ve been combing through my copy of the Writer’s Market (2011) and see that the top journals receive two to three hundred manuscripts a month, not all fiction, but still. Of those they may accept eight to ten manuscripts for eventual publication, it varies. Most of the journals don’t respond with a formal rejection, and those that do usually don’t comment on the work, but occasionally they do, and that would be helpful, but I understand they don’t have the time and/or money to comment on every manuscript they reject. Most of these journals operate, it appears, on pretty slim budgets.

I said “top” journals, which reveals my assumption that literary journals, like science journals, where I am published, must have impact factors. I haven’t been able to find that they do, but just reading around a lot it seems to me that some lit journals are more prestigious or challenging to get published in than others, which I guess is a tacit indication of their “impact”. Ploughshares, for instance, seems to be pretty highly regarded.

I’d considered sending this story to a national magazine but few of them publication fiction anymore — The New Yorker & The Atlantic (once annually) are two I can think of. For a new (fiction) writer like myself it seems like the chance of getting my first story published in either one of those is roughly equivalent to having the result of my first lab experiment published in Science. Occasionally people knock it out of the park on their first swing, usually not.

I’m new enough to this that I don’t know if sharing a paragraph or two of the story on this blog would jeopardize publication. I doubt it would, but I’ll hold off just in case. I like the story. To my ear anyway it has the language and pace I was trying to achieve. It’s sort of a professional coming of age story with a tragicomic end. A few of the characters are loosely (very loosely) based on people I’ve known. The others are entirely fictional, as are, for the most part, the events in the story.

The Happy Wife is traveling to Phoenix for work soon. I’m putting the manuscript on her Kindle Fire. She’s a good reader, I’ll get good feedback. Turns out, by the way, that formatting the manuscript for the Fire was a snap. I wrote it with Microsoft Word using (mostly) a 12-point Times Roman font with normal indents. I e-mailed the file (as an attachment) to the e-mail account associated with the Fire and Voila!, it was automatically reformatted, perfectly. I also reformatted it myself to a .pdf file, and sent that to the Fire, but it didn’t render nearly as nicely as the MS Word version.

Who reads literary journals? Mostly wannabe writers I think, plus agents looking for new writers, so I’m told. But also people who just enjoy reading short fiction, creative non-fiction (e.g., essay), and poetry. The number of paid subscriptions to these journals varies widely. One I really like is Zyzzyva (ziz-i-vah). They publish work by west coast writers only.

So here I go. Wish me luck, or leave a comment if you have advice for this newbie.