Last week, I found out that my story, “The Sexton-Lily
Intersection,” is going to be published in Oblong Magazine this August. This is
fun and exciting and cool news, of course, but at the same time, I want to be
realistic about what this “means” for me and my potential career as an author.
First, though, here’s the story of how I got to this
position: I used Twitter. There’s a bit more to it than that, but not really
all that much. I follow a bunch of writers and literary magazines on Twitter,
and one of them mentioned this new magazine that was looking for stories. I
checked out the website, and it turned out I had a story that seemed like it
fit what they were looking for. So I submitted “The Sexton-Lily Intersection,”
and a few days later (five, to be exact), they emailed me to say they wanted to
publish it.
Now, a few reasons I’m trying to temper my excitement about
my “big break”:
-My story will appear in the first issue of Oblong. Literary
magazines trade on their reputation, and since Oblong hasn’t had time to build
one yet, we don’t know how popular it will be or how many people will read it. Also,
the best way to figure out what kind of magazine you’re looking at (and whether
you would want one of your stories to appear in it) is to read what they have
published, and I obviously didn’t have that option with Oblong; they mentioned
several writers I like on their website, but that was really all I had to go
on.
-Oblong is focused on only publishing a certain kind of
story, flash fiction. Any genre can fit into the flash fiction form; it’s a
form that is defined by length, not content. In the case of Oblong, they only
want stories that are 1000 words long or shorter. Flash fiction is a growing
market, especially on the internet--on sites such as Flash Fiction Online or SmokeLong Quarterly-- but it’s still one that isn’t very well
known outside of English departments and literary journals.
-Oblong is based in England (the Brixton area of London,
according to their site). I’m not sure how this will affect the availability of
the magazine where I live (in Indiana), or if it will cost more to ship copies
across the pond, for example. For all I know, it could open up an international
market for me that I’m not even aware of yet.
So yeah, I’m not sure what getting this story published will
mean in the long run, but I’m interested to see how it turns out and what I can
learn from it. I’ll post updates here as the process moves along.
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