Abyss & Apex, Shimmer ...

I've had a couple of rejections just recently - hey ho - but each of them has demonstrated how fine the respective magazine is. One was from Abyss & Apex for The One Thousand One Hundred and Eleven Gates to Faerie, and the other from Shimmer for Her Long Hair Shining. Each response was timely, polite and encouraging, in stark contrast to recent experiences with other magazines. I wholeheartedly recommend both as places to submit to.

It's just a shame they aren't all like this. I've heard nothing back from 42 Magazine in nearly three months, for example. Now I know things can move slowly in the publishing world. But at the risk of repeating myself I'll say it again : writers are too often treated disrespectfully. For some markets, it seems we're just a nuisance or a resource to be exploited or ignored. Very quickly as a writer you learn to just accept this, but I don't think we should. The more information about good and bad markets that is available to writers, the better.

One way in which writers cope with these occasional problems, I think, is to simsub - i.e to simultaneously submit a piece to multiple markets - even when magazine guidelines explicitly forbid it. This has the effect, I'm sure, of annoying editors and clogging up slush piles even more. It's wrong, but sometimes you can understand perfectly well why writers do it ...