Ten Ways I Found Homes for My Work (And Became a Better Writer)

"Whatever method you have of submitting may be comfortable, but that doesn’t make it the most effective."

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

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1. I Dove Head-first Into Chill Subs.

I can’t say enough good things about Chill Subs. Picture this. It was the Year of Our Lord 2022, and though I had earned my MFA from West Virginia University in 2009, I was a largely unknown struggling writer with only about 25 short fiction publications to my name and no book. While I realize that this wasn’t a terrible end of the world Hunger-Games-type tragedy, I also knew that I, like the dreaming heroine in the Lady Gaga film A Star is Born, wanted something more. Somehow, somewhere, some way I wanted to be in those publications that I had been submitting to over and over again for years, and I also wanted to find other publications that might appreciate my particular brand of wild, weird, what-on-earth writing.