Early August: 10 Goals Accomplished

Another one of my 2025 writing goals accomplished, and this one is amazing for a couple reasons. The first being that I got a story published in a publication, something I am always striving for. This is my 10th story to get into a publication, the 6th different publication I’ve gotten into. 10 stories feels like an amazing milestone. Sure, largely 10 is an arbitrary number. But it’s double digits. That feels incredible.

“But you’re burying the lead! What’s the publication?!”

Ah, but I have withheld that information intentionally, for the purpose of dramatic effect.

First... back story... I had written this piece recently about an endeavor that I would be undertaking…

The brief overview of it is this: I not only want to get published in publications… it’s great… and it’s excellent to have on my bio, on my resume when sending queries to agents and managers and for other similar things… but I also want to get published in notable publications, publications that carry cache. No one can know all the publications, there’s too many. Getting into the biggest ones is tough. But getting into ones that carry cache and sound like they carry a lot of cache, also tough, but a smidge more manageable. My hypothesis: Any publications with a state name, city name, region name, similar-sounding name, college name, or affiliation with a college carry big cache. So, I wanted to try to get into one of those.

I made a huge list of over 100 of these. I have around 20 stories that could potentially work for these publications. I made a whole big sheet, determining what worked where, and plucked out a schedule of what to send and where. This year, round one. Send a ton out. Good chance none of them work. If they don’t, no worry, round two, mark the stories that didn’t work and try different stories for each publication. Keep going. Keep trying until something sticks. It will probably take a while.

I assumed round one would see me get turned down by each and every publication that I submitted to. Not because I’m negative, but because I know that’s the most likely outcome. It took me 284 tries just to get published 9 times. But it was alright, I was already planning on trying, getting turned down a bunch, and trying again. However, I sent to some publications in May, June, and July… but most of these publications opened for submissions August, September, October, November… and because most of them take a number of months to respond, sometimes close to 6 or more months, I also thought this: Even if I do get a story accepted to one of these publications, I likely won’t even hear about it until 2026 sometime.

So, hearing about an accepted publication felt like a LONG way away. I was just fixated on sending my stories out to all these places over the next few months, it wasn’t even a thought in my mind about getting accepted.

August was when most of the submissions opened so I had a huge schedule written out for that month of all the places to submit to. I had barely scratched the surface of the August submissions when I got an email from one of the May-June-July submissions. I searched for the “unfortunately” in the email as I usually do so I can confirm it’s a rejection and move on.

But it wasn’t there. The word that was there… “accepting.”

We are accepting your story for this upcoming issue of Adelaide Literary Magazine.

I was ecstatic! And because they’re a monthly magazine, they turn things around quickly, and within a week of the email notification, it was up!

The full publication is available in print and digital and if you want to dive right into my story “Nuggets of Joy” it’s available on their homepage and in the short stories section for free.

This was all so thrilling, obviously. But another funny thing came from this that I wasn’t ready for. Every other time I had had a story accepted somewhere, that was the only place I had sent it at that particular time. This whole endeavor of mine, this was the first time I was doing simultaneous submissions, sending my stories out to more than one place at a time. So, now that a simultaneous submission had been accepted… I had to WITHDRAW!

I’d never withdrawn stories before. It was a new experience. Relatively easy, but made me feel important having to say, “Sorry, I am withdrawing this as it has been accepted elsewhere.” Did I sound important? I felt important. Luckily, I kept detailed information on all my submissions so I knew right where to withdraw them from immediately. That added an extra interesting wrinkle as I thought, I should remember which publications I withdrew from. Maybe withdrawing from them made me sound important. Or maybe there would be a slight, I don’t know, irritation about it? Maybe it would be best not have to withdraw from them the next time I submit. Maybe I should mark down which ones were withdrawn from, keep that information, and make it so that the next time I submit to them, I can hopefully avoid that. I wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of any publications.

But in the end, what a good problem to have. Figuring out what exactly to do about withdrawing from publications because I got accepted by another one!

All in all, this was an excellent accomplishment for me. Yes, it was my 10th writing goal that I accomplished for the year of 2025. Yes, it was also my 10th story to be published in my writing career. It was the 1st one in my new endeavor of “official sounding” publications that “carry cache” and would hopefully “impress” when placed in my bio. And aside from all of that, to boil it down to its simplest form, I was published in Adelaide Literary Magazine. So thrilled about that.

And so thrilled to share it with anyone who wants to read it.