Stepping into Submission

In recent years, most of my writing has been centered around novel-length work, and none of that has been edited sufficiently yet to consider shopping around. Since joining the Slug Tribe writers' group where I've had the pleasure of reading and critiquing many dozens of quality short stories, however, I got the urge to dabble a bit in that format. One of those efforts finally reached my level of satisfaction to deem it worthy of trying to find it a home.

I've found the trickiest bit of getting that first story out there is figuring out where to try to submit it. The various markets all tend to have certain types of stories they buy - not just by genre but tone and style and such. I, unfortunately, haven't done a whole lot of reading in these short story markets, so there was a lot of poking around and consuming to be done. I think I read more short stories in the last month than I had in the past few years.

I finally settled on one for my first effort and the story is officially out. Now I get to sit back and wait for my first rejection letter. This all has a very rite-of-passage feel to it.