Submission

Submission. You display your discipline. You submit. You are submitted, too. You are the audition, and the audition is you, there splayed on the page, laid bare. Submitted. You are the words that eeked out. You are the action, the pout, the clout or no clout, the one who did the work. The one who submitted. The one who topped when asked to. You switched and will switch on demand. Regardless of name, you will submit. You will do as you are bade, as you are told to. You will submit, and you’ll like it.

AIS 0018

So I submitted two stories in the past two days—the first to Fix’s Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors contest; the second to Flash Fiction Online. Both use a service called Submittable, which was nice. One of them was definitely more welcoming and less pissy than the other. Both use blind submission, which I think is cool. Both stories were written to the prompt. I don’t love it, writing to prompts. I’m not a super linear thinker, and so trying to deliver within specific parameters messes up my creative process a bit. But I got through it, and am relatively happy with both stories.

How about you? How’s your writing and submitting going?

Xoxo,

T