Getting Published

Last weekend, on the way back from a great camping trip with family and friends, I checked my email (because, you know, it had been three whole days), and found a letter from the editor of The Writing Disorder, a journal that is literally at the top of my list.

It went like this:

Hi. We sent you an email a few weeks ago regarding your short story submission.

We would like to publish your piece in an upcoming issue. Let me know if you received it, and your decision regarding our publication. Thank you very much. I look forward to hearing from you.

Talk about a happy surprise. I scrolled down to check the date of his previous email – it was May 5th. I have no idea why I didn’t get that first email, but I am so glad they followed up.

I just finished sending in my author photo and bio, and then took a few minutes to contact the other journals I submitted to (numbers 3, 4, and 5 – number 2 on my list sent a very friendly rejection a couple weeks back) and withdrew my story from consideration.

There’s something so very satisfying about having it accepted by my first choice journal. It’s wildly encouraging. The truth is, I get very little feedback on my fiction, as I plug away on this novel (which, by the way, I’m diving back into this coming week).

It’s also nice to feel like this story finally came into its own and will now go out and find a home outside of my hard-drive. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I wrote the first draft two years ago, and then forgot about it, but I always knew it was close, and that I wanted to share it.

Now the question of how to celebrate. It’s not like I’ll be making any money off this (that’s not really the point), so I don’t want to go drop a bunch of cash on something like new shoes. More likely I’ll just go have a few drinks with my writing group, which is pretty much the same thing I do when the writing is going badly.

The life of a writer can be really cyclical sometimes.