You don’t want to be published. And, yes, I know you disagree. You’re an aspiring writer. You’ve worked hard at your craft. You’ve been getting rejection letter after rejection letter since you started sending your work out. All you want, more than anything in the world, is to get published. It’s the focus of everything you’re doing. But the truth is, you’re wrong. You don’t want to be published; you’re just using those words as a short-hand for a goal that you aren’t willing or able to articulate yet. I work in a writer’s centre four days out of every five. My job is literally answering the questions new writers ask about how to get published. I’ve done it on the phone, in seminars, in person, and via magazine articles. Now I’m doing it here, and I’m sharing the one truth I’ve learned after three years at the centre and nearly a decade of teaching creative writing classes before that. You don’t want to be published. No-one does. HERE’S HOW I KNOW Realistically speaking, getting published is easier now than it’s ever been. You want to get published? Go to wordpress.com. Fire up a new, free blog. Post your work to

Yesterday I posted about tracking your unfinished work and the major advantage that comes from taking a story all the way through to the end. Today I handle the other half of Elizabeth @ Earl Grey Editing’s query: TRACKING YOUR SUBMISSION (AND YOUR RIGHTS) Tracking your unfinished works is a personal decision. No-one is going to care if you just shove all your work into a folder and forget about it, and it’s not going to affect anyone but you. You do it because it makes life easier. Tracking your submissions, on the other hand, is a core requirement of the writers business, particularly at the earliest stages of your career when you’re doing things on spec. Basically, this one is non-optional if you’re writing to have a career. When you submit a story or a novel, you record where it’s gone (ie the magazine and publisher) and when you sent it. When they send you a response – positive or negative – you record when it arrived. You do this for every story, every submission. You keep this shit up-to-date. The logic behind it is simple: editors will generally only look at something once. Unless they say the words

I just put a full slate of 2018 deadlines up on a whiteboard. With the first semester of my PhD over I’ve had a little time to start thinking about writing work again, and the presence of a significant other in my life has generated a lot more focus on my long-term strategies and short-term tactics than I’ve managed in a long while. There is something about having to tell someone else about your day that makes it easier to navigate the garden of forking paths that make up a writing career. Also, rule one, when you’re a writer in any kind of relationship: do not be a wanna-be heavy metal bassist sponging off a series of significant others. Which seems unfair to a number of heavy metal bassists who work incredibly hard at their art, but it’s John Scalzi’s metaphor, not mine. July is also a useful month for taking stock – looking at what’s worked for the past six months, figuring out what goals I set for myself that need to be shed. And planning a year ahead tells me what I need to be doing now, in terms of processes and research and getting shit done to clear the