Do Yourself a Favor...

If you haven't yet, run out and get Kelly Link's short story collections Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners (or run over to Amazon, that's where I got my copies). Man her stuff is sooo good...

Never mind the fact I bought these a year or two ago and didn't read them till now. Not sure how these things happen but I am pretty sure that judging by my blog's sporadic posts it's pretty clear my time management skills aren't so great.

That said, although I am still super excited about the site Duotrope's Digest, in some ways it makes waiting for responses from magazines even more like watching grass grow. Not that I look forward to getting rejections, but something about seeing in black and white how a submission has been out for like, 94 days or whatever makes it a bit more frustrating! Still, it's worth it, what a great tool.

LLB

Happy 2007!

I find it a little bit amusing that my last post, back in September, was called "Sure is Quiet," and then I stopped posting for three months. LOL. The last couple months it's been hard to keep up with everything. But, let's get on with things, shall we...

However, in keeping with New Year's literary resolutions, I ran across a great (free) site, called Duotrope. If you're an aspiring writer, please check it out! It allows you to look up markets, according to a great many criteria, and just that part is cool. But even cooler, is, you can use its submission tracker to keep track of your submissions (duh) as well as easily ascertain if your pieces were accepted/rejected in, say, less than the average response time, or maybe more than the average response time, and it'll be alert you if maybe it's time to follow up with specific markets (due to your piece being there longer than average). Each market has great stats on acceptance vs. rejection ratios, the percentage that get personalized responses, etc.

This is an awesome tool that's long overdue what with all the community intelligence services out there -- and I have to say, the more of us who participate on the site, the smarter the Duotrope service will become. So let's all do it!

Here's to a successful 2007 in writing and all other endeavors!

LLB