On Blue Stoop's "Submissions Tetris" Workshop

Plus, an essay and three poems.

[EDIT: As of October 2023, the recording and handouts described in this newsletter are no longer publicly available. Please feel free to email me at mary@mtgberman.com if you’d like access to them.]

Hello friends,

It is March! Happy belated St. Patrick’s Day!

Like a lot of people in the greater Philadelphia region, I have some Irish blood in me (and in fact I wrote an essay on the subject which will be out later this year – see the News section below). Some years ago, on a trip to Ireland, I picked up a stuffed leprechaun who still lives with me. For the holiday I parked him on top of the closest thing to a pot of gold that lives in my house, and believe it or not, it’s pretty close:

(The sculpture is by my partner Morgan Dummitt.)

Back in February, someone asked if I planned to write a newsletter on ChatGPT as a tool for creative writing. I sure don’t! Instead, I want to talk today about a resource to help you submit your short stories to markets. I assume you will have written these short stories yourself, but only you can look into your own soul.

News

My essay “Form as Laboratory,” as well as my poems “The Queen Converses with Her Jailer,” “Further Experiments in the Revival of Organisms,” and “Observations of a Shoggoth,” were published this month in Blood & Spades: Poets of the Dark Side. I was very pleased when Marge Simon invited me to guest this column, and I hope I’ve done it justice!

My horror-leaning Shakespearean sonnet, “Ophelia After Her Distress,” will be published in Shakespeare Unleashed in July 2023. I have now seen the proof for this and it looks REALLY cool.

My essay “Nostalgia, but Make It Stressful: Fantasy Game as Pressure Valve” will be published in the British Fantasy Society Journal’s Special Issue on Fantasy and Gaming in autumn 2023.

My essay “‘You Have to Cook It In Your Own House’: One Family’s Pork and Sauerkraut Ritual” – about my mixed Irish-German-etc. heritage, and also the southeastern Pennsylvania tradition of cooking pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s – will be published in Heritage Local in 2023.

Mary Berman’s “Submissions Tetris”

That’s right; this resource is one I put together my own self. Is it gauche to talk about it here? Who cares! However, I know that some of you subscribed to this newsletter after attending the workshop I’m about to discuss. If that’s you, and if you don’t want to see the same content twice, may I point you to a newsletter in the archives? Perhaps this one on Algis Budrys’s formula for guaranteed fiction-selling success, or this one on the Save the Cat novel-structuring method?

Otherwise:

In early February, I ran a workshop via Blue Stoop, a Philly-based literary nonprofit, on “submissions tetris,” or the process of matching a short story to the vast array of submissions calls that exist in the world.

This matching can be harder than it looks at first glance. Magazines – especially science fiction, fantasy, and horror magazines, which are the types with which I am most familiar – often have clashing deadlines and themes. Plus, everyone weighs different criteria – like pay rate, response time, and market prestige – differently. This can make it hard to know where to submit your pieces, or even where to look. So in this workshop, we built a spreadsheet for ranking and tracking short story submissions; we researched a variety of markets; and we discussed how best to prioritize submissions for our own fiction and career goals.

I happen to think this is a decent resource if you’ve written a couple of pieces of short fiction and you aren’t quite sure what to do with them next. You can watch the recording on Blue Stoop’s YouTube channel, which has a whole video library on everything from getting a job in publishing to writing hermit crab poems. The recording is time-stamped, so you can jump to whichever section interests you most, like “Where to Find Markets” or “Spreadsheets and Tracking”.

I also offered a couple of free resources to the workshop attendees:

Here’s a handout with a list of where to find different kinds of markets, plus further reading if you’re interested in how people who aren’t me approach this boggle. 

And here’s a template for building your own submissions tracker, in case you want a starting point.

The other great thing about the workshop, for me anyway, is that some students pointed me to resources that I didn’t even know about! Like Chill Subs, as if submitting one’s beloved work has ever been chill.

Do you have any resources that you’d like to see added to these handouts? Or: Do you have questions about submitting that weren’t treated in this workshop? Email me back and let me know.