I have been focusing on creative writing lately versus craft how-to writing or blogging. It’s very different than the idea of writing something that I might get paid for. Instead, I write because I simply want to and then, hopefully, find a place that will accept it for publication with little to no intention of payment. Yes, writing for free, a very weird concept for anyone who has spent so many years freelance writing. However, the publishing world has really changed. Many craft companies prefer to have in-house (as in not freelance) content writers and designers. Craft book publishers have gotten lean and mean in order to survive. There is also a ton of free content on the Web, so the need to pay someone to write it is not really there like it was back in the day when I freelanced for a number Web networks and wrote books about how to make jewelry.

With this in mind and the fact that I’m not getting any younger, I realized how much I missed the creative writing I used to do when I was in my teens and twenties, so for the past few years I’ve been writing fiction for (gasp) pleasure and no real thought about making money from my efforts. However, I still want validation, which requires sending out my work and dealing with rejection (and more rejection). I was just about to the point of thinking I would never get anything published when within days of each other two short stories of mine were accepted for publication. Yippy!

My first story is called “Potluck Party” and is published in issue 7 of Constellations. This is a print journal that is published out of the Boston area. My story is a little PG-rated, but it fit in well with this issue’s theme of “transgression.”

Soon after this first story was accepted,  a second story of mine called “In Search of the Yoga Master” was accepted by a literary magazine called Typehouse (volume 5, no. 1, issue 13). This story was one that I really hadn’t sent to too many publishers, so I was surprised that it was accepted relatively quickly.

In a few more days, Typehouse will be out and in my hands. I look forward to reading the other works in it as well as the issue of Constellation I recently received. And, of course, I’m still writing away. I have a few more stories in the works, one of which has been rejected by dozens of journals, but I did a major rewrite on it, so I’m feeling pretty good about it. There is also the doll doctor novel I’ve written (which I’ve mentioned in videos on Youtube as well as here on my blog before). I plan to take a carving knife to it this summer and get the word count down to something that might be more appealing to publishers. Plus, tightening up a work of writing is always a good thing to do.