I write in many different genres, and have been published many times in some great journals. I have written multiple books, including fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. I started using the online submission program, Submittable (which our Writers Alliance literary magazine, Bacopa, uses for their submissions). It was easy to use and provided me with a way to keep track of all the many stories, poems, and pieces of non-fiction I was sending. You can download your files, you can download lists of your submissions, and you can access them anytime you want.
I have to admit, I’m one of those chronically late people. My friends tell me about an upcoming event a half hour earlier than it actually starts so I’ll make it on time. My relatives send me texts – “Are you on your way?” “Where are you now?”
But what the heck, who doesn’t want to make sure their writing is perfect before they submit? Right? Keep editing, keep changing, keep going till that last minute.
Or at least, that’s what I thought until – until a very strange situation occurred. I received the weirdest rejection I have ever seen. “Dear Ms. Thornton, thank you for your incredible piece. We really loved it. Please consider submitting again.”
Okay, that was a rejection? Huh? What the heck? I couldn’t understand why, if they loved my work so much, they would reject it with such positive responses. If they liked it so much, why didn’t they accept it?
And then the journal came out. You know, a lot of times, when you submit to a particular journal, you get a copy of the final piece. (For Bacopa, WAG members get a free copy included with their membership). I opened my copy of the journal and read through all the fiction pieces to see what the editors accepted rather than my piece, which they said they loved. And I was shocked.
One of the pieces was so close to what I had written that we could have used the same description for each story. Yes, the other author wrote about a different environment, and the details of their characters’ lives were different from the storu I wrote. But basically, we had both written about a family conflict that finally gets resolved at the end of the story. In a very similar way.
I couldn’t believe it. Why would they accept this story instead of mine? I was convinced mine was better written, that my details were more specific, that my characters were more realistic. After all I’d spent every spare minute of the deadline time working to correct every little comma, every tiny error, every –
Wait a minute… Submitting at the very last minute? Right up to the deadline? Was it possible the editors of that journal had accepted the piece by that other writer before I even submitted my work?
Of course it was possible. So, I started submitting my pieces earlier and earlier. It was so hard to let my babies go, knowing that I could have had more time to make them more perfect. My ongoing joke when I open up a file I’m still working on is, “Who broke into my computer and wrote this crap?”
But let’s face it. Most writers are never, ever going to be satisfied with their work. I’m an editor, too. I always ask the people whose books I’m editing if they want me to send their work back chapter by chapter or send the whole thing all at once. I can’t tell you how many times my clients have sent basically sent the same response back to me: “I never want to see the darn thing again.”
Okay, so we joke. But it’s true we’re usually a little obsessive about our work, and once we submit it, we feel that we could have done better. We could have made it more perfect.
The thing is, someone else may be sending something similar, and they might get accepted before your work even gets out the door.
Now, I’m not saying be irresponsible. Let’s face it, if something you wrote gets published and it has a lot of mistakes in it, you’ll never hear the end of it. Your fellow writers will log in laughing. Or the editors will reject it anyway.
Do you want to be famous after you die? Well, go ahead and delay sending your work out. After all, a lot of writers got famous for their work after they died, such as Franz Kafka, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, John Keats, Herman Melville, and Zora Neale Hurston (https://blog.bookbaby.com/infographic/famous-authors-infographic). But if you’d like to see your work get published, enjoy the acclaim, show it off, then get it ready early. Clean it up as much as you can and let it go.
Our WAG literary magazine, Bacopa, is open for submissions now, with a deadline of April 30 (https://writersallianceofgainesville.submittable.com/submit) So, procrastinators, don’t wait. Knock it out of the ballpark! Send it now.
Bio
Wendy Thornton has been published in Riverteeth, Epiphany, MacGuffin and many other literary journals and books. She writes memoir, short stories, poetry, and a mystery series, Bear-Trapped. She just published her third book in the series, Bear-Trapped: Windsept, in Jan. 2026. She’s fiction editor of Bacopa literary magazine, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has won many literary awards, and started the Writers Alliance (www.writersalliance.org).
