Hi all. I had the daily planner pages for the last week of June ready to go yesterday, but I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to talk about. And . . . I still haven’t, so I’ll let the pages speak for themselves.
It’s the last week of the quarter, so reach hard for those goals and make time to reflect on your achievements so far.
Have a good week.
How was your week? I hope you got some good writing done, enjoyed a good book, poems and stories and sent out some submissions. I had a pretty good week. I typed up my poems, worked on a story and read a lot.
This summer has already shaped up to be the summer of a house full of water and tiny black ants. It seems like this house is desperate to fill itself with water. Every hose that can bursts, the water tank got a hole in it, and this week I had mystery water creating a damp spot in the carpet that I have no idea where it came from. The ants, usually a creature that hangs out in a line, so you can see where they are coming from, seem to just drop down from the ceiling to appear, one at a time, on this computer, a table top, or my arm.
This week, I finally experimented with printing the pages as a booklet. I had to add an extra page at the front for everything to line up. I used the blank page to break down my goals for the week into achievable tasks. I like the idea of leaving the page blank, so I can use it in different ways each week.
I also tried out the writing prompts in my morning pages. I ended up with a good story idea and about a half of a story draft. I’m excited that the prompts I made up inspired my writing. I’ll continue to try them out in my morning pages.
This week, I had a tough time choosing journals for the planner. I’m not sure why, but I found it extra challenging. I ended up with an eclectic group of journals ranging from the well established like the Chicago Review which celebrated 50 years in print to the brand new Visions a graphically-oriented science fiction magazine that looks really interesting.
So here you have it. This week’s pages. I hope you have a great week.
Don’t forget to order your copy of America’s Emerging Fantasy Writers: Pacific Region for some fun summer reading.
Looking for some fun summer reading? I hope you’ll check out this new anthology of twelve fresh, fantasy stories from Pacific Northwest authors, including me!
Quick recap: I started the Planner Experiment at the beginning of the year with the intention to find homes for all my stories by learning more about literary magazines and increasing my submissions. I set a goal of 100 rejections this year in an attempt to change my feelings about each rejection and continue submitting through rejection after rejection. Toward this end, I designed a daily planner that organizes the year by quarter and month.
I post these pages as weekly experiments, making little changes as I come up with new ideas to see what works best to motivate me to write and submit my stories. My hope is that you will also try out the pages and share your experience, so that by the end of the year, I can compile the best planner to help writers get their stories into the world in 2020 and beyond. I hope you will join me in this experiment. You can hop in at any time. I look forward to hearing your experiences.
This week’s pages have writing prompts that can build on each other. I’m enjoying this idea. Did anyone try them out last month? Did it help you write a draft?
What do you think of the colors, background, fonts? Are you finding that you use all the different sections, or are only a few of the boxes getting filled in? Which ones are you finding most useful? Which ones would you get rid of/replace? With what?
This week’s pages start with a couple of heavy hitters that I highly recommend submitting to: Ploughshares is one of the top literary journals and it is open for fiction and poetry; and Granta is open for poetry for the next four days. Send them some poetry!
I hope you are feeling motivated.
My new focus on contests brought me to something fun. Literary Taxidermy is having a contest in which participants write a story that starts and ends with lines from a selected work. This year’s selection is Fahrenheit 451
Other interesting contests I found were:
Jerry Jazz Musician’s Short Fiction Contest This site is looking for fiction that incorporates aspects of jazz music.
Online Writing Tips Story Prize This contest is free and offers a £100 prize. There’s no theme or genre. Enter any story of 1000-4000 words.
I think part of my frustration last month and why I kept getting behind on the pages was I wasn’t making the time to use them. This week, I’m renewing my efforts to completely fill in the pages each day with the goal of three submissions every day. I hope you’ll join me. I look forward to hearing about your journey to publication. I hope the daily planner helps motivate you to submit your stories and poems.
Here we are at the end of the first full month of planner pages and looking toward the month of March. For these last few pages, I decided to try a background. I used a section of a painting I did for my niece for Christmas. I lightened it and set it as a graphic background in page format. What do you think? Is it too much? Do you like the white page better?
2019 Planner February Week Four
Please download the free planner pages and let me know what you think. Each page is full of valuable information and planning ideas. I look forward to your feedback, so I can implement your suggestions.
We still have five days left for you to submit. Here are the February and March 1st deadlines:
Look at all those opportunities to find homes for your stories.
If you are new to The Planner Project, information about each of these literary magazines, including who the editors are, the reading dates, and whether they pay and take simultaneous submissions is available on the daily planner pages I’m designing. If you are interested in downloading the pages for free you can learn more about the project and find the pages in my previous posts:
See into the future: no more missed opportunities
Realistic Goal Setting vs. Creative Chaos
The Deadlines: Collecting and Organizing
Here Comes February- the first week of planner pages
Fantasy, Horror and Sci-Fi, Oh my! (week two)
The Planner Experiment: February week three planner pages
I hope you’ll join in my experiment to design a daily planner that helps writers get ahead of the game when it comes to submitting their stories and poetry for publication.
One of the tools I liked from Write Your Book in a Flash: The Paint-by-Numbers System to Write the Book of Your Dreams—FAST!
Toward this end, Julie Reeser of patreon/abetterjulie, inspired me again. She invited readers to follow her on patreon as she reads and analyzes 300 published short stories to get a better understanding of what magazines are publishing. As I am also reading in hopes to understand what each literary magazine is looking for and publishing, I tried to come up with how I could analyze the stories I’m reading to come up with the information I’m looking for.
Using some of the ideas from The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
In my continuing quest to be a consistent blogger, I will be posting on Sundays and Thursdays for the foreseeable future. Look for the February wrap-up and new pages for March this Thursday. I hope you are enjoying this experiment as much as I am and I look forward to hearing from you.
Galactic Unions photo by Maria L. Berg
Just when I thought I had run out of paying markets for the planner, I happened upon Locus, a journal that reviews speculative fiction journals which expanded my knowledge of available paying markets.
Speculative fiction includes: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Horror, Slipstream, Weird, Bizarro, and more. Curious what slipstream is? Here’s an article that coined the term: Slipstream by Bruce Sterling
And among all these genres and sub-genres there are markets for short stories, flash and poetry. Yes, that means I have a ton more short stories to read to get to know these magazines, but it also means that my weird monsters might find good homes.
One of the magazines in the speculative fiction genre, Neon, not only has a great incentive to get to know their magazine before you submit–pay what you can to download an issue, then mention you donated in your cover letter and get editorial feedback– they also turned me on to new listings of paying markets:
Most of the poetry I’ve written over the last couple of years is up on my blog. These poems were created in response to prompts from dVerse poets, NaPoWriMo, OctPoWriMo and MoSt poets. Imagine my disappointment when I found that literary magazines won’t accept any poetry that has been previously published, including on my blog. I understand that this only means I get to write new, better poems that I don’t put up here on Experience Writing, but I was still disappointed.
However, through my research, I have found a few magazines that will take poems that have been published on a blog, including Neon, so I am excitedly reading these magazines and scouring through to find my very best poems to submit to them.
I am incredibly happy to say that I’ve submitted my poetry to four different magazines.
I have been obsessively researching and collecting literary magazine deadlines for short stories, flash fiction and poetry. I have almost finished selecting the 365 for the planner. So I’ve updated the February deadline page. February plan page right
I made one major change to the pages for this second week. I thought the margins were a waste of space, so I changed to quarter inch margins and made the text larger.
Here are the pages for the second week (plus a few, I like to plan out the week on Sunday as I seem to energetically attack projects on Monday, so the next group of pages will start on Sunday). 2019 Planner February Week Two
I’m finding that the journal descriptions and themes influence my writing prompts. I think that’s fun, but what do you think? Are the writing prompts creative and fun, or too on the nose?
So far, the experiment is working for me. I am learning so much and reaching my goals. I am submitting to two magazines every other day, so my goal of starting out at one a day is kinda working.
Have you tried the planner pages? Did you print them out, or are you filling them out in your word processing program? I liked filling the planner out by hand.
Tomorrow on Fictional Pairings enjoy the music they pair to “Your New BAM-AG Home”
Almost every writer dreams of getting published. Most likely, that dream is the scene that comes after (and does not include) the effort involved in reading and researching hundreds of literary magazines, writing queries and perfecting submissions, only to receive rejection after rejection after rejection.
Finding the right place for your stories can feel elusive, but there is hope. New online magazines are cropping up and you can find them if you search diligently.
I recently happened upon some interesting online magazines that are right up my alley. Why do I call them #LitMag+ ? Because they offer something extra.
As a musician as well as a writer, I am very excited about Fictional Pairings, an online magazine that pairs music from bandcamp.com with fiction and poetry.
My very short sci-fi story “Your New BAM-AG Home” is coming out tomorrow at Fictional Pairings. Please give it a read and enjoy the other stories and poetry with their musical pairings. I can’t wait to hear what they think my story sounds like.
This magazine of the dark and macabre, premiering this month, will be setting up its issues like a theatrical performance with an opening act, a comedic interlude, a headliner, etc. I really like the premise and can’t wait for the firs issue.
For those of us that find our writing leaning to the dark and twisted, it can be hard to find a fit for our stories. Twisted Sister proudly lists their contributors on their Freaks and Wierdos page. I hope to join the ranks soon.
This online magazine presents a fun challenge: to write a story in exactly 66 words. I feel inspired to give it a try. I enjoyed many of the stories in the current issue.
Have you been exploring new magazines to submit to and have some to add to my list? Please share in the comments. You can also add your finds on twitter #amsubmitting
Hope to see your work in the world of #LitMag+
Experience Writing 