Do they dig your wyrd?

    “A man needs a little madness, or else... he never dares cut the rope and be free.”

― Nikos Kazantzakis

    I wanted…

    No…

    I needed to share my writing.  My ideas, worlds, universes.  Whatever.

    I had ‘Dragonson’, ‘Gaslight’ (aka “SuperhorrorMax”), ‘Liberty’s Run’, ‘Knight Shift’, ‘Leaking Banana’, ‘Monster Alley’ and more.  But, no one was going to just call me if they didn't know that these worlds existed.  

    No, I was going to have to do something that I really hated to do.  

Send out my stories to magazines.  

It wasn’t the inevitable rejections that stopped me, because everyone gets those.  

It was that I love to write, to create...and sending out stories is...well, kinda boring.

    To misquote Zorba the Greek, Sometimes you gotta hitch up your pants and go looking for trouble.

    In and about August of 2015, I started sending out stories.  In September, two magazines published two separate stories, ‘Dark Dossier’ with “Red Rain” and ‘Aphelion’ with a Dragonson story, “Overcooked”.  [I guess that might seem fast to get published, but I had been writing since 1991.  So, I had honed my craft by that time.  And, I sent out only the best.  The lame ducks are still hidden away.  Poor lil ducks.]

    A major part of those first couple years was trying finding magazines that dug what I was writing.

That dug my wyrd.

Then, a few years ago, I started contributing regularly to “World of Myth” because my friend there, Dave Montoya, would write to me about mid-month, and ask if I had anything.  

Did I have anything?

Heck yeah!

I had a ton.  

Eventually, I started sending a story at the beginning of every month.  

Since then, I have been published, with one or two exceptions, in every issue since July of 2018.  

    But the list you see in Writer’s Resume does not include any rejections.

Why?  

Because they don’t matter.  The people there did not dig what I was writing.  And that’s cool.  I don’t dig everything that other people create.  Moby Dick is kinda dull. 

What mattered was to keep going.  To send that same story to another publisher, until I found some magazines that dug what I was writing.

    That was the hard part in starting out.  Where one person might not like the way a story is written, or my style, another person might love it.  

So, look for the people who like your stories as they are.  And if someone doesn’t dig your weird, or even your wyrd, then that’s cool.  Give them a sincere, professional ‘thank you’. and keep looking.  

Or, start your own magazine!  There might be others who are looking for an outlet for the type of writing.