Another Professional Project Is a DANDY Idea

I'm sure you all recall my recent post (the last one?) about the difficulty of determining which literary agents to submit work to. Well, something similar, though easier in my humble opinion, goes on with seeking out markets for short-form writing. There are hundreds of possibilities to sort through. So much to read and decide which journals/sites would be interested in your work.

During Lent this year, I took on a daily short story reading project that I thought would teach me something about writing short stories. It did not. Soon after starting it, I gave up any hope that it would help me in checking markets. My efforts were totally unfocused and random, and I was just trying to get the job done.

Which I did, but for what?

So, of course, I got really excited yesterday when I came up with a similar plan for researching short-form writing markets.

The Kind-of-Daily Market Research Project

I have this Ranking of 500 Fiction Litmags by Erika Krouse. Oh, my gosh. She's got one for litmags that only publish creative nonfiction, too. Now I'm really excited. 

So, the new project is to just casually check out a magazine from the list, read a few things, look at their submission guidelines, and consider whether or not I have something I can submit there. We're going to be calm about this. Which means:

• No reading for the sake of reading. 
• No reading to meet a daily goal.
• Just familiarize myself with some new publications and be grateful for whatever I get done.

Today's Research Project: Five Points

Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art doesn't make all its material available on-line. And what it does offer isn't a complete story or essay. But it has a pretty incredible blog. Consider:

• "Help Eleanor Come Home": The Queer Horror of Hill House by Eve Clark. If I had all the time in the world, I'd read The Haunting of Hill House again. (I have a copy, so I could!) That would be for the third time, since I read it once as a teenager and once after the Netflix series.
• Pride and Prejudice & The Awakening: What is food if not domestication or temptation? by Karen Sims. This is fantastic! I didn't care for The Awakening when I read it sometime after college. Again, if I had all the time in the world, I'd read it again. (I have a copy, so I could!) Food and eating appear in a lot of my own writing. I'm going to be paying a lot more attention when I read it in other writers' work now. "Domestication or temptation."