Being Published

The Theme is Organization


Yesterday’s meme veered off onto the current fixation in my life which is how to harness myself, my creative energies and move forward as a person with tangible dreams and goals. It’s nothing to do with my personal life. I am quite content with husband and love and children, but a year out of teaching, I recognize that I need to work “at” something.

There is the bookstore idea. However I am not spending that kind of money on something that I haven’t given serious thought to or researched. I am not my mother who took her 2001 Malibu into the dealership for an oil change and left with a 2008 model. It’s not that I haven’t “jumped” when opportunity knocks – as Sondheim reminds us “opportunity is not a lengthy visitor”, but I can’t jeopardize my family’s financial outlook on a whim.

Writing is my true love as far as career goes. I spent time reading sci fi/fantasy magazines while recouping from my illness last week and, as I told Rob, this is the genre that most attracts me. Even though I am not a science geek, there is an element of the fantastic about some ideas that lures me. I also love to incorporate mythology and folklore elements into stories if for no other reason than it is fun. And I like to play with ideas that are hard to understand – like string theory – through fiction.

While tag surfing (again) at WordPress, I ran across a writer’s blog where he was discussing the need to plan and organize BEFORE beginning to write. Caging the muse so to speak as opposed to let her flit about and then wander away when the going becomes work and she is bored. Rob marvels at my ability to generate ideas and wonders from where some of them derive, but the ability to generate what seems to be an endless stream of ideas sometimes is not always a blessing. It can lead to chaos and a lot of unfinished stories. At least for me.

I currently have three short stories and one finished novella in need of a few changes and additions (from years ago) that I need to finish and submit by the time school starts in the fall. The shorts are all sci fi/fantasy/horror. I know where I want to submit. Apex and Analog. There are two other magazines in that same genre that I need to contact for guidelines and then comb my existing work for submissions.

The novella grew out of a seminar I attended one summer. It came from a story starter – Harris Burdick – which I am sure some of my teacher readers recognize. It’s a good story. Solid. Based more than a bit on my father’s family and the stories I grew up listening to but mixed with the Irish mythology I was reading at the time. I have never been satisfied with it despite the fact that it is not a bad story, but recently a way to fix things came to me and I think once I apply my ideas I will have a book ready to shop around. I have no clue where or how to do this and I need to do research. Worst comes to worst, I will self-publish and sell it myself.

One recommendation I have had through my reading is to map out my goals on a white board. To that end I priced a few options at the local Staples. I am torn between 90 or 120 day maps, but I like the idea of having everything I want to accomplish written in one place and visible.

I do really need to go back to Marsha’s post on organizing and employ some of her ideas too. They were wonderful.

One of the things I have come to realize recently is that my job is me. I am the thing that I have to sell and therefore I am what needs organizing and motivating and teaching.

Publishing Opportunities? Where? When? How?


I found this publishing opportunity via another blog called Mommy Writes. I am not the best writer on demand, although I am improving, but I thought I might be able to pound out a couple of pieces that would pass muster for this anthology. I have to say, I am in awe of niche bloggers. They manage to find topics that are so simple and yet so full of writing potential and therefore interesting to a vast audience. Me? I am too egocentric I guess. (What?! NO argument at all? Thanks, so very much.) I just write about any old thing that pops into my head, flits across the day’s headlines, dances in front of my eyes on the dvd. I am just a topic of the nano-sec kind of girl.

I run across writers too who spread their blogging out over several blogs so as to create a separate space for each specific type of reader. That way no one has to wade through blog entries on say…potty training when they really come to read about the blogger’s latest outdoor trysting spot with his/her significant other. It’s a really good idea but as someone who ran three blogs simultaneously – and was basically using the same post for each blog – I can’t wrap my mind or my meager talent around it. I have enough to do furnishing this blog with material and writing my fiction and creative non-fic for, hopefully, publication in a print forum someday.

I have run across online opportunities that seem challenging and fun, but nothing has come of them yet either. Rob reminds me that I shouldn’t expect too much too soon. Good (or not so is my fear at times) as I might be, everyone starts out at the same place and that is what “aspiring” means. And okay, my aspirations are great and varied, so it stands to reason that my doubts sometimes match. But I am working on a great story idea now, courtesy of a conversation with my husband about the current food shortage in the world, and I have solved a problem with my serial sci-fi stories and just need to sit down and apply my solution. I saw an opportunity to write for a feminist/activism blog (yeah, I know I say I am not a feminist but I have been quacking too much of late) that if I am lucky might allow me to write a piece or two. I sent a query and am waiting to hear back and waiting and waiting and feeling a little like the red-headed step-child in the process.

The realist in me therefore is planning for the fall and applying with the school district for a library assistant or teacher associate position. Anything but teaching in my own room really. Applying for a teacher’s license is doable but only if I want to take a Mickey Mouse course or two to satisfy some Franco requirements that the province just added to the to do list of new teachers. The course requirements variation from province to province (state to state back in the U.S.) is the worst kind of pandering to regional universities. It’s all about sucking a few extra bucks out of you and not about helping you be a better educator. Digression though. Rob thinks a job will also help “socialize” me a bit and it probably will but I have always found that for the most part, work friendships often don’t survive the job by much. There have been but a handful of exceptions in my life to that rule and I treasure them, however, they by and large are situational.

I am also going to put in an app with the city of Fort Saskatchewan. I am still bummed about missing out on that cool museum job but I didn’t have my work permit in time to apply. My massage therapist tells me to inquire about the posting to see if it was filled. Her husband works for the city and apparently many of their postings go unfilled due to the lack of qualified (read “educated”) applicants. We are still in a boom economy up here and anyone with the tiniest bit of education is working for the oil companies in some capacity. However most of the jobs that go begging are in the service industry or the medical fields.

It’s dumb to be glum about what is really a great life just because I can’t write for anyone but myself, my husband and the handful of people who come to this blog (and thank you, thank you my loyal followers and commenters especially – I love comments. They make me feel less like an idiot screaming into the vacuum of cyber-space). I just want a chance. Catch a break. That miserable Catch-22 of “experience” is biting my bum in the most unfair way.

Rejected Again. This is Becoming a Bad Habit.


Well this is starting to be a running theme. The Pike’s Peak Flash Fiction Contest I entered back in January got back to me with very nice comments on the two pieces I entered but basically – I didn’t win or place or even show. That leaves, I think, only two other writing contests I am currently still waiting on. One should be decided soon but the other is part of the CanWrite workshops that take place in July at the University of Alberta. Since we are going to be here now that we’ve passed on the Texas, I am thinking I will try to attend. I have to check the dates again because Katy and I are going to be in Iowa for a while after her school gets out. My mom is overburdened with care-taking and I am going to help out for a bit. Not anxious to jump back into that mode. Every time I have visited since my late husband’s death little things have brought back the memories of taking care of Will at home for those first 15 months of his illness. Oddly the biggest reminder is the towel my Mom keeps wrapped around the base of the toilet to catch the “dribbles”. Between his unsteadiness and dimming eyesight, Will couldn’t hit water standing up and wouldn’t sit down. I was always mopping up pee when I wasn’t stepping in it. Dad is the same way and when I see the towel I remember to check for wet spots to avoid sopping up anything with my socks. Urine soaked socks. Now there is a memory.

I sent out another two pieces last night and today. One a reworking of the tooth-tooth blog for the Globe and another on how Rob and I met for Ladies Home Journal. I really hate entering contests when I can submit for free to publications, but it’s not easy finding opportunities for basically unpublished writers. Magazines are asking asking for clips (of previously published work) with queries and submissions. The big Catch-22. 

The flash pieces are going to be resubmitted to a web-based site called Quick Fiction which specializes in the mini-genre of fiction 500 words or less. Mine had to be 100 or less for the contest and so are on the ultra short end of Flash, but it is a fun and exacting exercise in creativity. 

So all in all that will be seven pieces out for consideration between contests and magazines (still waiting to here on my sci-fi and should probably send an e-mail soon.) Oh no, wait – I resubmitted The White Boots at FailBetter. Eight of my babies are out on the street corner trying to make mama a name.