Submitting A Story: That Horror Film Feeling
The Terror
While
my boyfriend plays guitar, crows are circling outside over the snow-sifted
rooftops of the apartment buildings. Swathes of clouds blow in, then over, and
finally pass through the sky. However, despite the serene reality, a couple of
minutes ago, my every muscle was tensed and my head hurt from my unintentional
brow furrowing.
I
could almost here the futile cries of moviegoers, “No, don’t do it! It’s a
trap!” The violins tremolos are growing
louder, with intermittent piccolo shrieks and cello and base glissandos
see-sawing up and down the staff between the lowest and highest lines.
I
was about to hit submit on a story I wrote a while ago. It’s about two people
arguing in a train station over whether time exists. While I don’t know if
there is a moral to the story, they, Casey and Aidan, discuss the fact that
time controls everyone’s life. That’s especially relevant during finals week,
which just finally ended (Yay!). However, now time doesn’t have nearly as much
power over my life. I woke up at 10am and it’s 4:45, as I'm writing this, but that doesn’t feel late
or early it just feels like now. In my head I always picture the characters as
dudes, but I kept their names, pronouns, and descriptions non-gender specific,
because I want the reader to be able to imagine them as anyone, including
themselves. While the story isn’t long, only 1922 words, and despite the fact
that I wrote over a year ago, I want to send out my best work or at least close
to it. However, I worry that my best isn’t good enough, which is placing way
too much emphasis on a mere 1,922-word story I know.
My Previous Experience
Submitting
something I wrote is a lot of emotional work, a good bit of time, and the
returns are not very promising. I know, I know.
Rejection is part of writing and if I want to be an author, I need to be
ok with it. Several years ago, I took part in a program called The Institute of
Children’s Literature. It’s a writing-mentoring program that I got to take part
in for my birthday present from my parents, while I was still in high school. I
learned how to better craft a short story and work on dialogue and it gave me
practice with writing a cover letter, a query letter, and all of that stuff. The
last assignment was to write a short story, do market research, and find 2-3
magazines that I would submit it to. Well I found them and submitted everything
to my instructor. She encouraged me to submit my story to the magazines right
away. I let it sit for almost a year. Finally, I worked up the courage to
submit my little story about Gus the ladybug to a children’s magazine. They
didn’t get back to me for about a month and when they did it was a ‘no’. I
tried to prepare myself before hand that more likely than not they were going
to reject my story and it would take multiple submission attempts to several
magazines to get it published. Therefore, I wasn’t devastated, but I was
discouraged for a while from trying again, especially when it’s so easy to just
say, ‘I’m too busy.’ or ‘I don’t have enough time.’
I’m
going to be in State College over the summer and I want to have a job make
money work on getting out of the large amounts of college debt that I’m already
in. I still plan on getting a job, but before I sat down to write this post, I
read an article about a freelance writer. He’s made a living out of writing.
Recently, he did a challenge where he ‘started over’.* He made a pseudonym and
within 2 months had made over 2 thousand dollars in freelance writing, without
any of his contacts or name notoriety that he typically has. He just used his
know how. He did what I’m terrified of (submissions and proposals) 30-50 times
per day! Forget willing to put in the work, which I am willing to do. That’s
freakin’ terrifying. Heck, I could barely convince myself to start this blog
over the summer. Even though I’ve gotten used to posting every week, and this
blog is small and relatively ‘low-risk,’ according to my brain, there’s still a
bit of an anxiety-driven adrenaline rush each time I publish a new post,
including this one.
What I’ve Learned
I
like the idea of being a published author and having people read my work, but
like many people I’m afraid of the actual work that takes. More specifically,
I’m terrified of putting myself out there and laying my work out for axe murder
and rejection. It’s like everything in me is saying, “No don’t do it.” However,
I don’t want to leave you, readers, without some bright side to this. I did in
fact submit my story, Time Terminal, to a science fiction magazine. The worst
they can say is no and I’m pretty much expecting that. But even if they do say
no, I’ll try again with a different magazine. I’ve got to detach myself as a
writer from my work. At the very least, I need to get into the mindset of
submission editors aren’t judging my story. They are just trying to think of
whether it will fit in with the next issue of their magazine. That’s less
stressful. As I said when I started this blog, one way or another I will write.Now I’m just adding that one way or another I will submit what I write.
Notes:
Image Credit:
“Houston Chronicle” by Ed Schipul
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