So, I'm thinking that its time to get published in something... I have done a lot of writing recently and I am broke, so any money will help. Problem is though that I don't really know what to submit any work to. I have been looking around and, really, I would *love* to get published in the New Yorker (but this is a pipe dream)... other than that I am not sure exactly where to send my work. Much of what I have written recently is not science fiction per se, but Sci Fi mags seem to be a dime a dozen... so sorting out the *good* ones for any scifi work is not easy.

Ramble Ramble... anyway, the point of this thread is this: If you got to choose which magazine or journal, literary or popular, that you might be published in, what would it be?

Furthermore, it might be nice to know what mags of this sort that anyne here READS... as audience is always important.

Discuss!

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Problem is though that I don't really know what to submit any work to.

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Apologies if you already have this. If not, acquire one post-haste.

I hate to be a burden, but postpone that haste. The writer's market is highly recommended, and highly criticized. The primary problem is that they don't verify any of the data. That's just a compilation of questionaires sent out to potential markets.

Just some sites off the top of my head:

ralan
speculations
black hole

These are all writer resource sites, but they're genre specific. Submitting non-genre material to genre markets is a waste of time. Mind, the definition of genre is a bit broad these days. As long as it's vaguely speculative you should be okay.

That said, you will get published in whatever you goddamn well can. When I started this 'time to get published' thing two years ago I had pretty ambitious expectations. Time has washed that clean, my brother. My rejection ritual these days goes Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (because they have wonderfully short reject times), Scifiction (because Ellen has always been very encouraging and verbose in her rejections, and I firmly believe I will one day sell to her, even after two odd years of rejections) and then I trickle off into maybe asimovs, maybe strange horizons, maybe chizine. At that point it depends on the story.

I don't drag my stories through the muck. I'm not that desperate yet. There are some pretty dodgy pubs out there, and I don't really want my name in their bylines just yet. If I'm still doing this in five years, I'll think about it.

If you, or anyone else, wants to talk about this sort of thing, I'd be willing. I'm a near professional reject these days. I have a gmail account, with shadoth as the username.

When I first started my journey towards getting published I decided, right off the bat, to not fiddle-faddle with grandiose illusions. I said to myself, "I'm gonna go earn me some rejections! Yeah! I'll get myself a good, solid pile of 'em, dump 'em in a box and then, years later when I've got some big-shot reporter coming to my house for an interview, I'll break that box out and show 'im where I REALLY came from. Dig it, baby. I'm gonna use my past rejections as a form of passive-agressive sympathy jive!"

....or something like that.

The very first story I sent out was indeed rejected (as I prophesied), but it was a personal, handwritten rejection from the Editor in Chief, and he listed a few names of editors and publications who might find my work more interesting. He'd also gone on to say that he personally enjoyed the story very much, but he couldn't publish it because it didn't fit the format of his magazine (they had a strict adherence to "hard" SF while my stuff was strictly speculative/socielogical). Ah, the bitter sting of technical rejection- it's the worst; "I'd LOVE to publish it, but it won't fit with our other stuff and the publisher will give me strange looks. Sorry."

Stupid me. I still haven't followed up on that list.......

I've decided to just end-run-around the whole mess and submit my rough-draft script for "Galaxy Quest 2" to Dreamworks SKG.