When you submit short stories or non-fiction to a journal it can be very straightforward, you just choose one well edited story that you wrote and submit it. With poetry things are a little tougher because you have to choose 3-5 poems to submit. There are several things you have to do before you submit them.

The first is that you have to choose 3-5 poems that go together. Some journals accept 6 and some only accept 3, but I usually make the packets include between 3-5 poems because 6 is rare and it’s easy to shave a packet of 5 poems down to 3 for one journal.

I call each grouping of 3-5 poems a “submission packet.” I usually have between 5-7 submission packets at a time, each packet contains 3-5 poems. Each of these packets I submit to more than one place at a time, but usually no more than four. That way if the poems get accepted anywhere I can easily withdraw them from consideration at the other publications.

When choosing what poems to place in what packet, I think a little about tone. Say I have a number of darkly comic poems, I may group these together in a packet.

However there should be variation in a packet. Don’t make the mistake of having poems that all have the same tone, theme, and subject matter. The editor who reads these poems only gets one impression of your work, and if it doesn’t match with what they are looking for, too bad.

Variation in your packet significantly increases the likelihood of the editor connecting with one of your poems. Think about order and sense of narration though. One poem should not contradict or clash with the next.

After you have chosen this group of poems, go over them one last time, reviewing for any obvious mistakes or changes in spacing during the rearranging process.

Some poets often have an urge to over explain the context of their poems in the cover letter when they submit their work to a journal. Restrain yourself from doing that. Most editors won’t publish work unless the context is made clear within the poems themselves.

Once you have your submission packets ready, your poems should be ready to submit to any journal! Restrain yourself from editing the packets for every journal, just make sure that the way your poems are formatted fit the journal’s guidelines.

A-Minor Magazine publishes quarterly and is associated with A-Minor Press which publishes full length work. It is good to create a positive relationship with a journal that is part of a publishing house, because if they like publishing your short fiction or poetry now, they may seriously consider publishing longer work in the future.

When considering fiction they are partial to surrealist dreamscapes. Although realist fiction is welcome if it is quirky and dark. They also like fiction that is mixed genre or experimental. For poetry, they favor the lyrical work that is imaginative.

Prose should be between 1000 and 4000 words for short fiction and between 100 and 1000 words for flash fiction. You can submit up to three flash fiction pieces at a time. They expect to receive between 3-5 poems at a time, there are no specific word limits in terms of poem length. They are also open to people collaborating with artists or creating artwork themselves and submitting it at the same time.

If you submit to A-Minor Magazine expect a response within a week. This is a great response time, because instead of waiting to hear back from them for months you will know right away.

They accept less then 3% of the work that is submitted to them, so it is rare for work to be chosen. But that means that if your work is accepted it will be a considerable accomplishment.

Even though their website is just a very basic WordPress site, the art work they put up is impressive, and helps make the magazine feel more substantial than the average online literary journal.

In conclusion A-Minor Magazine is a great journal to be published by because they have a good reputation and a fast response time, so your curiosity won’t get the best of you.  You can visit their website and use their easy submission manager here: http://aminormagazine.com/

They publish flash fiction up to 1,000 words in length, and narrative fiction, short stories, novel excerpts, and essays that are up to 6,500 words. The interviews and reviews they publish are up to 4,000 words in length. There are no stated limits on the length of poems, but they want to see no more then 6 poems at a time in a single document.

Word Riot uses Submittable as their submission manager, and it is very easy to use. They generally respond to work within a week. They have a very low acceptance rate of well under 5%.

The work the editors at Word Riot favor is edgy, and stretches forms. They are interested in experimentation but they want the language to ultimately make sense.

Word Riot has other opportunities for writers beyond the online journal. They have begun to publish short story collections and chapbooks. They put a lot of energy into promoting these publications on their website but also by attracting famous reviewers like Johnathon Franzen to praise the books they are publishing.

Word Riot may be hard to get into, but it is worth the effort once they accept one of your pieces, as you will be published in one of the best known online journals out there. You can visit their website at: http://www.wordriot.org/wrp/baby.

In this exercise the point is to tell a story you know well. It does not have to be your story though, it can be the story of how your parents met, or a story a friend told you repeatedly. It can be something that happened to you, a car accident, or a purse snatching, how you met your significant other, or how you left them.

You take this story and write about it. But instead of writing it down exactly as you believed it happened, change one key element of the story.

This key element should vary depending on the story, but it should affect the way the story is told. If you are writing about how your parents met, you could write from the point of view of an omnipresent narrator. If you are writing about the time your purse was stolen you can write from the point of view of the thief, or the cop who arrived late to the scene.

If you find it hard to switch narrative perspectives, you can always change another element of the story. If you were uninjured in the car accident, you can alter that fact in the story, but make sure whatever ‘truth’ you alter affects the story as a whole.

This is a great exercise for defeating writers block because it involves mining your life and friends life for material that already exists, but retelling it from a fresh perspective.