Valentine's Day is over! That means it's time to write about back to school, Labor Day, and end of summer activities.
That's the type of temporal paradox writers live in. In the heat of summer, when the air is too hot to breathe and walking from one room to another leaves you soaked in sweat, it's time to submit work about winter, the deep cold, poinsettias, holiday crafts, gift-giving ideas, and Christmas activities. The best paying magazines, and the hardest to break into, want seasonal material six to nine months beforehand. The lesser paying publications still want seasonal material three to four months ahead of time. This is true whether you're talking about short fiction or magazine articles.
Given turn-around times for each publication, this also means that seasonal material can only be submitted to no more than four places before the window of opportunity expires and it must be laid aside until next year.
I have one piece of flash fiction based on Santa Claus that I have yet to place. It's a good little piece of fiction and it usually gets good comments on the rejections -- it's even helped me get invitations to submit additional work -- but I usually forget to start submitting it until September or October, which means I'm only able to submit it to two places -- three if I get lucky with a quick turnaround -- before the season ends and I have to lay it aside again until next year.
Then, when next year comes around, I have to start the market search again. Who have I already submitted it to? What new markets have emerged? Which markets that looked like they might be a good fit have closed?
Yet, I do understand the need to submit seasonal material so early; I know the reason the temporal paradox exists. Writers submitting material are only the beginning of the publication cycle. When I was working with Coyote Wild, I would be accepting and shepherding submissions received for the Fall issue (this was when it was still a quarterly publication), while MacAllister Stone was overseeing the copyediting of the Summer issue. At the same time, the Spring issue was being coded, given a final proofread, and being released. Each part of the process took time and those hours added up to days and the days to weeks and the weeks to months before an issue went live.
The time between accepting a submission and the issue it is slated for being published means writers must always be looking down the road, into the future, if the editorial staff is to have time to complete their tasks before something can be published. It is also why, when so many publications pay on publication, that there is a time delay between getting enough work accepted to make a living on and getting paid enough to make a living on.
As a result, we writers must live in between the then and the now. Living in the moment, seeking out things that are fresh and new, while planning for the future. It's a good habit to get into, regardless of what you are doing. Planning for possibilities and contingencies.
I do so even at The Commune, writing articles ahead of time and releasing them on a schedule. That way, if I get busy, I still have content for the blog and it still continues, rather than languishing in that sporadic-blogger purgatory that so many bloggers find themselves in. It's a good habit to get into regardless of what you're writing.
How do you plan for the future? How do you manage the temporal paradox that is writing?
5 comments:
I'm not qualified to comment, basically because I write only novels and not articles or any other time-sensitive product - but I must say I imagine it can't be easy !
I can't even fathom writing a Christmas article or short in spring, or summer. It's like shopping for a bathing suit when it's snowing outside. But obviously that's what you have to do. While the rest of the world is reading your article on Santa Claus, you're writing something about fun in the sun.
*boggles*
The only holiday I properly ever wrote about is Halloween. Or All Souls' Day. But even then, the stories aren't tied to the holidays themselves and I sell 'em any time of the year. I've never had anything in particular to say about Santa Clause, for example, which would lead me to this problem.
Does everyone else here only write fiction?
I'm with you on this, Lori. I mostly write fiction, but a lot of children's writing in themed.
But the whole temporal paradonx feels normal to me because I'm a singer. We start our Christmas Cantata music in August.
Nothing says Christmas like shorts and gatorade.
I heard that "Chestnuts Roasting Over An Open Fire" was written in the heat of summer, when the songwriter was trying to write something to make him feel cool.
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