Third Article Submitted

I finally figured out the appropriate blood sacrifices to make to convince the AlphaSmart to send my text file to my wife's PC (still no luck getting it to talk to my laptop, but at this point I'll take what I can get). I uploaded the article I wrote yesterday to the PC and spent most of today editing it and getting it ready to submit. The final article came in at just under 5,000 words, which is the limit for this particular magazine. It's a good article and works well as a follow on to the one they already bought. It also bridges well to the third and final article I'm planning to write on the subject, although I'm being careful to make sure that each article will stand on its own. The problem I foresee with this one is that it is not as close to the "usual" articles this magazine prints as are the first two I submitted. If they are interested in the topic, I think they'll buy it, but I'm not as confident as I was about the first two. Still, I figured it was a risk worth taking, and I know of a couple of other markets that I'm pretty sure would buy it if this one turns it down. It's a worthwhile experiment.

That was the "up" part of today. The down side of today was that as I was getting this article ready to submit, I realized that I didn't include my Social Security number and U.S. Mail address on the second article I submitted. While they have that info from the article I submitted before (the one they bought), they are pretty clear in the writers' guidelines that they need that info for each submission. Stupid, stupid thing to do. I thought I had included it at the end of the article, but apparently not, according to the backup copy I keep of all my submissions. Grrr. So, they are perfectly justified in rejecting it out of hand without even reading it -- which is too bad, since it's a really good article. I think I can resubmit it in this case, but I'll have to think about the ethics of that. The moral of the story is don't get in a hurry. I have a checklist for submissions to most of the markets I send things to, so I've now created one for this market as well. A professional doesn't take short cuts. I know that, and I'm kicking myself for violating that rule. Ah well, we don't learn from successes, only from mistakes, right?

Right. Just keep saying that. :)