I have sent out two queries for pieces from my manuscript, one to OUTSIDE (which I think is a good market for the subject - flying the dead body contract - but a total shot in the dark as I'm unknown) and THE BELIEVER (which might be more receptive due to my Bookslut cred, but I'm not sure - I sent them the essay comparing AK flying to Saint Exupery's NIGHT FLIGHT South America novella). I'm getting ready to send off "The Good Pilot" to TIN HOUSE tomorrow - a fiction piece based on the experiences of a good friend who was an excellent pilot and still crashed and whose life has never been the same. (It's fiction because so much of it is conversation.) Now I need to look for more markets. I was trying to stay with established print publications because my online publication (Storyglossia and Fail Better) don't seem to have impressed publishers at all.

And this is all about impressing the big boys and proving I'm worthy of their attention. (Cut to a thousand junior high school memories of wishing the cool crowd would honor me with a second look.) (Those are not good memories by the way.)

I'm trying to stay with publications I am familiar with so I think I will also try MISSOURI REVIEW and NINTH LETTER. They don't seem impossible (like GRANTA) but realistic and will be recognizable to publishers. I also think RIVER TEETH because it seems to carry a lot of western/outdoors type essays. (Or at least I've read several in it.)

What's frustrating in all this is that I don't know if I'm on the right track or wrong - I don't have connections at any of these places and so in many ways it is all just a big crap shoot. But at this point the manuscript isn't really going anywhere. It's kind of like a house that has been for sale for more than a year; no one is looking at it until I give them a reason to. Part of me wonders if I should even care anymore about publishers - if maybe I should just yank it back from my agent and go the route of self publishing. I wouldn't even know how to begin to do that however and if it then just died a sad little death then it would really depress me.

So I'm trying to sell it in bits and pieces and see what happens. It seems like I'm continuously learning just what publishing means and how hard it is and how complicated it can become. You write a book and that is a great accomplishment. You get an agent at a solid, reputable agency and that is another great accomplishment. But neither is enough. So now you pivot and try something new to see if it will move the process along. My one regret is that I did not start all of this sooner - that I wasn't writing twenty years ago like I am today. I hate that I wasted so much time pursuing a "real job" to satisfy the expectations of others. I should have known what I was and accepted it and worked around that goal instead of making writing the least significant part of my life. For years I didn't even write at all.

That still bugs me.

If you have any lit journal suggestions then let me know - I want to have plenty of back up if any from the first round get kicked back.