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Category: Submissions

Submitting daily

I don’t make new year’s resolutions, but I set a goal for myself of mailing a submission every day for the month of January. The reasoning behind this is two-fold. One, I simply want to get my submission number higher, and this is a good way to do it, and two. I’m hoping to increase my habit of submitting on a regular basis. I set myself two guidelines for this. One – if I miss a day, which will happen, I have to make it up. Two – I can’t work ahead, or “bank” submissions. If I submit extra, great, but I can’t go ahead and do the following day’s early*. So far I have missed one day, which I have made up, and have a total of six submissions for five days. Now to just maintain the numbers for the month.

*I count the day ending at midnight for this, so I can submit one day’s before midnight and the next day’s after midnight – a concession I made because of my schedule.

 

2 Comments

Oh no

Well, when you submit as much as I do you are bound to screw up, and I do, and this time I did!

I have a story out to a magazine that bumped it up for a second reading. All well and good. But I was looking through my rejection letters and realized that I submitted it to the same market last year where I received a personal rejection to it. Oh no!

So then the question was do I write and tell them I realized what I did, or wait and see how they responded? They are a super-fast market and I knew I would hear within a day or two.

I sent them a note apologizing for the mixup, and hopefully they won’t blacklist me. The market just looked like a good fit! Hopefully they have a good laugh over it and no hard feelings. I’ve made this mistake once before, oddly with the same story, and the editors were not happy with me at all – that time I didn’t know until they pointed it out to me. Not a good thing to annoy editors.

The funny thing it I use Duotrope religiously, and somehow missed in the tracker that it had already went to that market – and I am usually very careful about double-checking so I don’t do this.

Ah well, I’ll laugh at myself and hope the editor does the same.

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