After the recent Horror Writing Intensive, I decided that I should definitely try to find a market for the resultant short story. I even put it on my To Do List so I would feel guilty if I didn’t get around to it. Four hours later, nothing else had been done, but I did make progress in my attempt to get published.
While looking for places to submit my tale, I also found literary agents who accepted horror. Many of them claimed interest in other things too, things like my novel Cordell’s Rebellion. This meant that I stopped each time to see if the agent was a potential fit and what they wanted from a submission. Since it is traditional to be rejected by the first million agents you solicit, I submitted Cordell to a handful of them.
Eventually, though, I knew I would run out of day and still need to get to other things on my list. I made note of an assortment of further agencies to review later, but did not submit. They will get their turn at rejecting my novel later. Instead, the focus went back to finding a place for a horror story.
When I was younger, horror magazines were everywhere. You could find them in magazine stands at grocery stores. Now the survivors have mostly gone digital. Some of the giants are still in print, but I’m not sure if my fish is big enough for those ponds yet. I stalked the smaller venues instead. I only submitted to one; but I imagine the turn around time on a rejection will be faster here than in the case of an agent. I can do more submissions later.
That was my productive day, at least in terms of attempting to get my writing out to the world. Quite honestly, I have been writing on the other days; mostly touching up old stories or roughing out ideas for new ones. That’s probably productive too, but without it getting to the world, my writing will just become an oddity for some future archeologist to find. That’s all the more reason to write weird stuff.