Unabashed

Goals are very important. I believe that, and I’ve lived a lot of my life in pursuit of goals that I’ve set for myself. For the past few years, when it comes to writing, my single goal has been, simply, to get published. Well, this grand summer of 2007 that goal finally came to fruition. I have received affirmation (”Hey! Your writing doesn’t suck!”) not only once, but three times within six months. So what’s next?

Well, for starters, I really want to be published in Chiaroscuro. Not only do they pay a lot better for shorts than most markets, but they’re also an SFWA market, meaning a publication through them would move me one step closer to applying for and receiving membership into that elite society. Also, take a look at their guidelines. A lot of publications will make a vain attempt to reduce the size of their slush piles by incorporating a huge set of rules and bylaws to follow for submitters. I can’t imagine this tactic actually works, because a slush pile is what it is, and if the material is unacceptable then that’s just what it is. By complicating the submission process, forcing me to rewrite my story (for the twenty-sixth time) just to remove paragraph indents and add a line between paragraphs and remove formatting such as italics and add those little _italics specifying lines_ it just makes the writer more frustrated. Don’t get me wrong, I do adhere religiously to those guidelines when submitting, but that doesn’t make it any less of a hassle. Chiaroscuro’s guidelines are refreshingly simple. In case you haven’t seen them and don’t want to click over there, here they are:

• Dark.
• Well-written.
• 4,000 words or less.
• Rich Text Format (.rtf) or Microsoft Word (.doc) attachments.
• No reprints.
• A simultaneous submission is okay, as long as you tell us it’s simultaneous.
• No multiple submissions.
• Be sure to write your name and the story’s title in the Subject line of the email.

That’s it. Simplicity at its finest. Bravo Mr. Editor (Brett Alexander Savory, if you’re interested). But the most important reason I want to be published in Chiaroscuro is because I like the fiction they publish. I read the magazine regularly on my Palm TX. There are others that I like a lot too (Down in the Cellar is great also, and is publishing a story of mine in May, The Ghost of Tom Johns, but it is sadly not a SFWA-qualifying professional market), but Chiaroscuro is my favorite right now, so if they do accept a story of mine it would be transcendent.
So my short term goals are:

1. To be published by Chiaroscuro
2. To have three SFWA-qualifying professional markets accept material from me.
3. To gain admittance to the SFWA.
4. To get my novel published, therefore launching my novel-writing career.

And once that career begins rolling, what next? Well, I’m not foolish enough to believe I’m the next J.K. Rowling or Stephen King, I would just like to have a small, dedicated readership who like my writing and will buy enough books to keep me in publication. I have a good job, so I’m not dependent on the income for survival, and I’m not counting on making enough money with my writing to get me to quit my day job. The simple fact is this: the stories will get written anyway, because that’s what I do. In my free time I write. I always have, since I was twelve years old. It’s only in the past five years that I’ve really made an effort to get anything published, but I’ve always been a writer, and I guess I always will be. So for me, a fruitful, successful career would mean that the stories that would have been written anyway are being read by someone, and hopefully some of those readers will like what I’ve written.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Alexander, Brett, chi-zine, chiaroscuro, Matt Mitchell, Savory, SFWA