Writerly Tip: Organizing Story Submissions

Her first submission log was a bag she'd sewn from a jeans pants-leg and then affixed with an iron-on image of an old-fashioned girl.  Here is where she collected all her rejection letters.  Likely the bag is still being stored by her mother, in her old bedroom, in a box full of other rejection letters and notebooks.  No doubt, for a keepsake, this is a lovely way to keep no-track-whatsoever of the writing you have submitted for publication.

Typically, she uses a spreadsheet to track the submissions.  She finds it best to keep everything as simple as possible so that she's more likely to use the log/calendar. 

Story	Magazine	Submission Type	Notes to Self	Date Replied
11/12/11
Every Road	New Fangled Review	submishmash - pdf from August 2010 folder	query after four months	11-13-11, form letter, don't send again, response too quick
Every Road	Next Journal	email to editor, Jane Doe	pays penny/word
The Snow-Cone Stand	Lulu Story Contest	Contest requires e-book creation, uploaded on site	mid dec results announced

She places the date submitted in the story column and highlights it.  This is also helpful for tracking the last time she did a large batch, and it's easier to compare response times of journals.  

Until a magazine rejects a story, she keeps the row in bold.
When a magazine accepts the story, she highlights the row in purple.



Why keep a submission log for writing?

• To know when it's time to query about a submission that's been held longer than the magazine's stated response time.
• To have the information necessary to write a professional query, e.g. I'm checking on the status of my story, "The X to the Y", which I submitted on such-and-such date.
• If you're a gambler, to keep track of how much money drained in contest entry-fees.
• To keep track of postage, envelopes, paper for tax purposes (or in hopes that one day these can be claimed on taxes)
• To keep track of writing; for example, sometimes she'll subconsciously give up on a story, forget about it, then find its title in the submission calendar
• To rally one's spirits or realize that the number of a rejections a piece of writing has had may mean you need to open it up for revision.
• To keep track of editors - a cordial or personal note from an editor means that, even if rejected, this is a person you would want to work with in the future and, thus, to submit to again.

For an article regarding rejections, 

how to interpret them, and 

the current situation 

with online rejections, 

 see "Editor in Oz: May be human, 

only behind curtain"

Happy Human Day!

One must try not to imagine what will be served at the dinner these turkeys are going to (or what they've already eaten).


Happy Thanksgiving!

"The Skydivers" Forthcoming in Emrys Journal, Spring 2012

Emrys Journal has accepted her story "The Skydivers" for publication in their Spring 2012 issue. This will be her first publication with Emrys.

"The Rabbit" Forthcoming in Big Pulp, March 2013

Her mini-story "The Rabbit" (not to be easily mistaken with her story "Rabbits" from The Floating Order) will be published in Big Pulp in March 2013. This will be her third publication with Big Pulp, which is lovely because it's one of her favorite venues.

Pringle-Toungate's previous publications with Big Pulp are "Every Good Girl Does Fine" and "Palestine, IL".

Update 3/30/13: The Rabbit is now available to read. Click here or copy/paste this link into your browser: http://bigpulp.com/issues/2013_03/pringle_therabbit.html#.UVeb9hemiAi 

E-story Experiment: The Snow-Cone Stand

With the rising popularity of e-readers, she has now and then considered self-publishing a single story. She has romantic ideas of photocopying thousands of copies of a story and dropping them on a city or handing them door to door. It's ridiculous, of course--that much paper.

Certainly, the music industry has been changed by the user's ability to download single songs, and she has wondered how that might bleed into the publishing industry--or how that might provide her a little more control, now and then, of getting her work to her readers by self-publishing a single story. She found her valid excuse with Lulu.com's 600-word short-story contest.

Basically, writers submit a story of 600 words or less, convert the story into an e-book, and upload it on Lulu. Later, Lulu judges will declare whatever story the winner.

The contest is not dependent on how many times the story is viewed, and she also couldn't find anything about not charging people for a contest story (so Lulu will be making money off contestants who do sell their contest entry). Regardless, she's giving her story away for free.

After taking several hours to format a tiny story, she thinks she'll go back to her old-fashioned route of letting editors do their jobs and she hers. But that doesn't mean that she wouldn't like you to have it, dear reader.

Download and read "The Snow-Cone Stand" at Lulu.com, iTunes, or Barnes & Noble.--Especially since she might have disqualified the story by putting an image on the cover. Ah, well.

Cover photo by Keoni Cabral,

used under a Creative Commons License

***

Post Update 4/20/12:


Project Retired

"Winter's Wooden Sparrows" in Lake Effect

The first time he felt a need to walk, he was a boy of six or seven. He had awoken one winter morning with the urge to be outside, alone. And so decided to go, and felt the good feeling that decisions often have. He zipped on his snowsuit, wrapped his face in his scarf, and left the house while his parents slept.

The early sun was somewhere behind the bright gray sky, and the snow was so bright he couldn't look at it without forcing himself, but he forced himself and felt the strange, pleasing feeling of snow-dazzled eyes. The snow in front of the house was not new, mussed with boot-tracks filled with gray water; but the snow in the back still followed its own created planes, on and on, untouched—and it was this that guided him to take his walk in the back. He walked and listened to the crunch of his boots and felt the cold air. A few black birds crossed the sky like a meaningless thought. Beside him trotted the ghost of the old dog that had died recently enough to still follow him.

Read the rest of "Winter's Wooden Sparrows" by Erin Pringle-Toungate in Lake Effect, due out in January 2012  Now available

Photo used from Getty Images, with permission/

Dirk Wustenhagen Imagery

Writers Run, Too

Her friend and a fellow writer, Stephanie, will be running as part of the Komen Race for the Cure in Austin, TX. To donate to the cause, via Stephanie's running shoes, follow this sentence to her donation page.

She thinks this is worthwhile. The number of graves due to breast cancer, among other cancers, is more than wearisome.

New Interview Up: Fear, Halloween, and an Enchanting Talk

Erin recently sat down with her sister-in-law, Misty, via computer and across 2,000 miles, and chatted about Halloween, making stories, making childhood, making memories.

Here's an excerpt:

Misty: Did you visit graveyards as a child? Since reading The Floating Order the first time, I have wondered if we had this in common. I'm sure my brother has told you about our adventures in graveyards prompted by our grandmother.

Erin: We lived down the road from one, and so we drove past a graveyard every day. The schoolbus took the same route. I remember my mother getting into genealogy and so that took us to graveyards, making rubbings and such. Graveyards captured my imagination. Everyone who had lived in the town had ended up in one. Then, part of the town's teenage folklore included visiting either graveyards or places where hauntings might occur in the country. I was part of the drive-out-into-the country crowd, though mostly I just heard about what would happen if you went to the bridge and did such and such. I was never very brave or popular enough to find myself very often at such "haunted' sites but would imagine what I would do were I.

But graveyards have never ceased to interest me, maybe more now since I know more people who now exist in them. So I do visit more now, though not so much the ones where I know the people whose names are on the stones. For example, the graveyard in Fredericksburg, TX is a really intersting one because of the amount of children's graves-- and that the children's graves are in their own section and many of them have metal bassinets made around them. Graveyards understand grief. I find them to be empathetic places to go.

Read the rest of the article and interview, "fear and an enchanting talk", at the blog senseMaking.

"This Bomb My Heart" in War, Literature & the Arts

Out in the vast field, she kneels under the wings her brother made when she lost her arm. He sawed them from a storm-fallen tree then picked a wheelbarrow of Queen Anne’s Lace from the field and ditches, spreading the stems across newspapers on the porch as their mother once had. When the flowers dried, he glued them over the boards then spray-painted the wings white. He screwed the wings to the front of his drum harness from marching band. She wore the harness backward, as she does now over her winter coat, though the wings are patchy and he’s dead.

Read the rest of "This Bomb My Heart" by Erin Pringle-Toungate in the new issue of War, Literature & the Arts (volume 23, 2011)

"The Lightning Tree" in Box of Delights, anthology from Aeon Press

The house has the empty feeling cleanliness or new death brings.

She touches her neck. Her heart like a leaf scared by the wind.

The wind presses against the window panes

She turns to the other side of the pillow, imagining her pupils like two broken, erratic lenses, like two puddles on a country road to nowhere with a sky, like skull sockets dark as death—death always. Death that makes and diminishes all our gods.

She reaches to her husband's side of the bed.

He isn't there.

Finish reading "The Lightning Tree" by Erin Pringle-Toungate in the anthology Box of Delights, published by Dublin's Aeon Press.