Just in time for the big build-up to spring, I have declared Re-Orientation Time. To the writing life, that is. Join me?
Re-orienting to the writing life means getting submissions out. This is the perennially painful duty that I and all my writing friends complain about. Through the years I’ve experimented with various ways of making submissions less painful, and one that works well for nerdy me is to think of the whole complex of tasks we call “submitting” as a kind of game–a role-playing, problem-solving game with its own rewards entirely apart from the outcome of each submission.
Character: 21st Century Writer.
Outfit: Your favorite sweater, comfy jeans, lucky socks.
Tools: A laptop / Notebook / iPad. A scruffy, spiral-bound, PAPER notebook with a blot-ey pen shoved into the spiral. A favorite book. Lumbar support. Snacks, both salty and sweet.
Primary Task: Find one good (and currently open) market for your finished story and submit to that market. Depending on the kind of submitter you are, you might need to create a chart in Word before you can choose that market, or make an inky list in your spiral notebook. If your eyes go blurry, rest them on that favorite book, the one that reminds you why you’re called, today, to ask an editor to consider your 2400-word story about the people passing through a flower garden, or 7500-word essay on the apron your grandmother passed to you, skipping your resentful mother. Remember that you don’t offer work to the world because PEOPLE NEED IT. You offer it because you are more whole when you write, and even more whole again when you share what you have written. That is ALWAYS enough reason to submit. ALWAYS. Plus: SOMEBODY NEEDS IT.
Secondary Task: School your brain to ignore the fact that you have always known the word “submission” to mean the act of bowing to someone else’s will. Your brain fixates on this meaning and makes you feel nervous and small, even pitiful, when you’re offering up that story or essay or poem. But the absurdly bold act of submitting your work makes you a pirate, a warrior, or maybe just a really nice person who wants to make meaning and then share it. In this context, “submission” means “gift.” Now give the brain a snack.
Rewards for Completing Tasks: Snacks, obviously, both salty and sweet. Also 3 points for Participation, 2 points for Confidence. Bonus reward: An entertaining and commiserating e-mail exchange (or Facebook status update parade) about your submission session with a writer friend or friends, initiated by newly participating and more confident you.
50 points gets you a meal at your favorite restaurant OR a new book OR an ice cream cone OR a new pair of socks OR [fill in the treat of your choice].
Good luck! Oh, and if you’re the kind of submitter who considers a magazine’s prestige as a factor when choosing a market–I am sometimes that kind of submitter, sometimes not–then you might want to use this list of ranked magazines, put together by writer Clifford Garstang, as one of your guides. (Hat tip to my friend Cheryl Wilder.)
*Picture (cropped) from Wikimedia Commons, here.
Daily Shorty 
My favorite parts of this post: 1) the requirement of salty AND sweet snacks because of course it’s their alternation that keeps you going. 2) the reason we submit: because we are more whole when we write–we are and I never thought about it that way before–and even more whole again when we share what we have written–I am learning this. 3) in the context of writing, in all these years, I never once associated the submission process with the act of bowing to someone else’s will–now that seems impossible, and also, now I will never be able to get it out of my mind. Good luck to the newly participating and more confident you.
Oh, dear, it never occurred to me that I might be poisoning someone with my thoughts on how the primary meaning of “submission” tricks us into thinking we’re giving up power when we put our work out for review and potential publication. I know you won’t be deterred, and I guess I just have to trust that the 4 other people who read this post won’t be, either.
Thanks for the kind comment, Cyn. Knowing I’ve said even one tolerably thoughtful or pleasing thing in a post is like getting a piece of birthday cake. Well, without the great mouthfeel. But still.