If I got accepted, I didn’t have to panic (“Is this magazine good enough?”) or feel that I’d settled, or anything like that. I’d built that into the system, by compiling that list of magazines. One good thing about the list: it meant that I’d never be published in a place that didn’t excite me.

I was also mindful not to send something I knew to be “less than” whatever they’d just rejected, in a spirit of protecting that new connection.) (If, in the rejection, an actual human being had replied, I’d make a point of sending that place the best story I had ready at the moment, with a note thanking them for the note, and so on. Then I moved to the next magazine down the list. When a story came back (in those days, some places actually sent the hardcopy back to you, even), I entered a code into the table: “A” for accepted (rare), “R” for rejected, “R*” if I’d gotten an actual letter back with the rejection. Friday afternoon was the only time, theoretically, that I needed to worry about publishing. (I worried about it all the time, of course, but, when I did, I could just think, “That’s a Friday worry.”) It helped me restrict my worrying somewhat.

(Maybe this time someone would take actually the story!)Īnd sometimes they did, but not often enough, it felt like. Then I’d consider reaching my arm down the mail-slot, decide against it, and trudge back to work with, oddly, a hopeful heart. At which time I would instantly see everything that was wrong with the story. I was still at the engineering company and “sending out” meant printing the story nicely and putting it into an envelope and putting some postage on it from the corporate machine, then paying that postage back to the receptionist, then marching my story down to a mailbox over near the neighboring TGIF restaurant, and (drum-roll, please) dropping it in. I’d set aside Friday afternoons for sending out. There wasn’t a magazine on that list that I wouldn’t have been thrilled to have my work in. Along the horizontal axis was a list of the four or five stories I considered finished. On the vertical axis was a list of ten or so magazines that I dearly wanted to be in. Well, actually, a table, in Word (or maybe, in those ancient days of yore, WordPerfect).

What I did, all those years ago, when I was first trying to break in, was make a spreadsheet.

Wordperfect office