Submitted - "Golden Opportunity" to Heliotrope Magazine

Thank you, Anonymous Commenter, for your advice - he/she suggested I try "Golden Opportunity" out at Heliotrope, a delightful magazine that not only can be read online (fave story so far: January Mortimer's "A Godmother's Gift"), but is currently accepting online submissions.

I've noticed a lot of magazines are now accepting online submissions - it didn't use to be so, did it? I wonder why...There are lots of reasons why, of course - the recent bump in U.S. postal rates might be one - but it seems like a sudden change to me. Maybe it's just that I didn't catch on to these magazines that now accept online submissions until recently. It does mean one has to be more careful, though. I don't know why it is, but I tend to read stuff on paper more carefully than words on a computer. E-mail is a fascinating messenger system, but it's still something of a casual system to me, if that makes any sense. There's something about sending a crisp, white manuscript in a manilla envelope with a white "postage paid" sticker on it that seems more formal than sending an attachment in an E-mail. I mean, my mother's friend sends attachments in E-mails, and more often than not they are videos of a man applying a Tazer to his reproductive organs for laughs. Not quite the same as a writer sending something out in the hopes of getting published.

There's also the Blackberry reason - people are reading on those now, but they still seem too small for me to read anything comfortable on. Still, I'm a dinosaur when it comes to handheld technology - I still use my parents' cell phone, and it doesn't take pictures or text or download or even fold in half like all the other ones do.

Still, it saves on both time and postage, so I have no complaints. I've recently sent E-mails to On Spec, since it's been four months since I submitted my story to them, and they're situated in the same city as me so it seems unlikely that the manuscript would have taken a horribly long time to get to them. I know they're very busy, but I did wait four months before E-mailing them. I just hope I don't have to wait another month for them to reply to the E-mail.

I also started another story, "The Middle Child." It's not a fairy-tale retelling, although it does have another misanthropic female teenage narrator. I seem to write a lot of them. I don't want to fall into a pattern, but a misanthropic female teenage narrator just seems the best fit for the particular story I have in mind (I got the idea from reading "A Godmother's Gift," although they're not alike at all). Maybe it's because I spent so much time being a misanthropic female teenage narrator myself.

Now I'm a misanthropic female twentysomething narrator.

Good gracious, I'm a twentysomething now, aren't I?

*cough* Moving on, I also finished the first draft of "Joyful Noise." It took a while, but I think it has a good foundation and could survive a couple of rewrites. It has some great actions scenes in it, I think.

Ah well, I'll just have to see how my writing turns out. I still have lots of ideas (I have one in mind about God's little brother and sister, which doesn't need a misanthropic female teenage narrator).

P.S.--> I apologize for posting the atrocious cover for Nicholas Nickelby - it was the best one that I could find on short notice.