Written Reality: Rants and Raves: I'll Take That Pen Now
I'll Take That Pen Now, Thank You Very Much
by Andrea M. Newton
February 19, 2008
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As part of my New Year's Resolutions, I resolved to write two shorts or sixty pages of a novel each month, and to submit each story within one month of finishing it. The writing part is going fine, but the submitting, well, not so much. Figuring out a good market for each story is tough enough; trying to make sure that I've followed each market's individual submission guidelines "to the letter" leaves me paralyzed in front the computer for hours.
Did this place say they wanted an exact word count, or an approximate one? How did they say to represent italics again? Should I put THE END at the end or not? Oh, man, did I misspell "Submission" in the email's subject line?!
It's not getting rejection letters that I'm worried about. I'm afraid I'll have something wrong and annoy the editor. I don't like making anyone mad, much less the person who has the say in whether or not my story ever sees the light of printed day.
To motivate me to click Send or drop the envelope in the mailslot, my husband made me a deal. Keep writing, send the stories out, and for each one that gets accepted, he'll buy me a fountain pen. Not a bad deal for him, really. I'd already convinced him to let me buy a second fountain pen right before that, because "it'd really be useful to have a second pen with a different color ink for marking edits." And I was eying more. So he could keep me motivated with the promise of pens while keeping from emptying our savings account buying them myself.
Because, really, it'd probably be at least six months before any of the stories I was sending out got accepted. Possibly even a year or more, depending on each magazine's response time. Right?
I got the first acceptance letter on Friday. The July/Aug/Sept 2008 issue of The Storyteller will include my short story Andantino for Pau-Brasil. (Copies of the magazine can be ordered here.)
True to his word, Chad took me pen shopping that night. But I decided to wait until the Raleigh pen show in June, so I can chat with people far more knowledgeable about pens that I am. I've only been using a fountain pen for a month, after all. And the pen show will have a much wider selection, including vintage pens.
Who knows? Maybe I'll even have a couple more pens coming my way by then.