Know Thine Audience

The first dillemma I'm facing between me and getting rejected from magazines is finding magazines that would potentially publish the sort of work that I produce. There's sort of a complex rubric involved in finding the "right" magazine to make a debut, and among other things, what I look for in a publisher is:

• The genre and "culture" of the publisher. Somehow, I have this silly idea that a magazine named "Glimmer Train" would be terribly interested in a crime fiction story. Likewise,
  the Strand Magazine won't be quite interested in more the thoughtful outdoorsy works that made Faulkner famous.
• Respect. In the end, being able to say "I've been published in the New Yorker once", is way more impressive than being able to say "I've been published in a crapload of magazine's you've never heard of. One thing that I have to look at as a freelancer, even at this time, is how I'm going to build a resume that advertises the fact that my writing is a hot commodity.
• Compensation. A lot of these magazines demand exclusive printing rights in exchange for about 25 bucks, which sucks royally. (See? There's a pun there, if you look hard enough.) Personally, I'd like to be able to recieve adequate compensation for my work, so aside from standard submissions, I'm also looking into contests that could not only prove that I'm way better than everyone else, but also hand me fabulous cash prizes that go a long way to helping motivate me to write more.

Really, trying to find a publisher is like looking for foster parents for your child. My stories are my babies, as creepy as that sounds, and I'm not giving it to just anyone for anything.

Then again, this might be the same reason I'm single at the moment. I have issues with standards.

Stuff I'm working on

Like any self-loathing would-be author, I have a couple different projects floating around my head at the same time right now. For my own sake, and maybe for your enjoyment, I'll go ahead and list them and about how far I've gotten.

1. A spy-thriller type novel, currently under the buzzword "Shadow". I've been working on this sucker since November, and have about twenty-something pages of actual legible printed matter that I'll let people read. I haven't touched it in a while because I've been too busy slacking off at...
2. School. I've got a couple research papers, not to mention my old film history midterm, and I'm currently studying up for a whole new slew of research projects coming up: next up, the effects of U.S. political, economic, and military policy on the perenially misunderstood island of Taiwan.
3. A fantasy/pirate adventure that I've been kicking around in my head for years. Really, it's more like roleplaying fodder. Fun stuff, though. I might pick it up again if spy fiction gets old.
4. Room 42. Who knows? If I can see if the artist is still interested, you might very well see me writing up new scripts for a webcomic that I stopped working on about a year or two ago.

Hmm... that's about all I got for now. Then you've got all that bullshit that I have to deal with in... what's it called? Real life. Who knows? Maybe I'll find time to actually write sometime this year.

Required reading for devout sociopaths

Hi! Name's Felipe, and I write. I've been promising myself to start a blog for a while, now... and starting it hasn't been a problem... I just have issues with actually making sure the blog lasts more than about a month... so we'll see where this leads.
Basically, I wanted to make a blog that'd track my first forays into publishing my growing portfolio of short fiction and other assorted crap that I've slapped together over time for school, personal pleasure, or some sort of perverse fascination with pain and frustration.
Over the course of this blog, I'll be posting some of my work here, before, during, and after the creative process, up to the point where they hand me a letter saying something to the effect of "Fuck you, Felipe, your writing is mediocre, you have no references, and I don't like you. We don't have space in our magazine for chickenshit authors like you."


Of course, this just shores up my indie following, hence creating my new place in society as a renegade cult superstar. You know, like Kevin Smith, but cooler.