My Short Story Got Published!
Why all the publishing advice in the world is a total toss-up.
I’m so, so happy to announce that I recently got my short story, “I Am The Keeper” published in The Gateway Review: A Journal of Magical Realism!
While it isn’t available to read yet, my hard copy came, and though this is my second published short fiction, I never get used to the feeling of holding my own writing in my hands.
But the road to publishing this short story is a weird one, and not what I normally see in those “how to publish” articles I read all the time.
How I Got Published
This is the fast version of the publishing story — which was also pretty fast!
I wrote “I Am The Keeper” based on a Reedsy prompt which required an inclusion of the phrase: my lips are sealed.
In about two hours I had a 1,500-word rough draft. I polished it up over the course of a couple days before posting it to the prompt contest on Reedsy’s site. I didn’t win the contest, nor the $250 prize money offered at the time.
Instead, I got a single reader review saying that it was a good story, which made me feel pretty proud. So, I let it sit in my Google Docs folder for a few months before I thought: “Hm, is it good…
