Reacting Quickly

This post was first uploaded on Saturday 27^th August, 2016. Archived posts have been recovered following irretrievable login problems.

You need to stay on your toes or entropy will erode your assault on the marketplace. Sometimes it’s just rejections racking up quicker than you can deal with, or that marketplace you felt was ideal having closed for submissions before you could connect the right piece with it. Or working late at night and not having the brain cells left to fathom what’s happening, so things get left for later…

For the first time, however, I’ve had a magazine die when I had a submission with them. Plasma Frequency was one of the promising, active markets able to look at dynamic shorts, and when Dailypassed on a new piece, I redirected it to PF. I received an email receipt and settled into wait – sixty days, they said, maybe as much as ninety. Well, at a hundred I thought it was time to query, and lo and behold, the magazine has closed. No wonder there were no emails generated through Submittable informing me of the status of my story – the market was gone.

It may have been good manners to directly inform those writers offering them material, but if the magazine folded under any but the best of circumstances such niceties may have gone by the wayside.

The website is still there, the link above still works, if you fancy a look, but this one has joined the honour roll of departed titles, and, as always, the fiction market is the poorer for the loss.

I redirected my story immediately, and that’s the focus here – whatever happens, there is always an alternative, and work should not be resting fallow, but out there under consideration with someone, somewhere. You never know, this particular submission might be the one to bear fruit!

Cheers, Mike Adamson