Monday, July 29, 2013

Happy (belated) Anniversary!!

I meant to write a post on July 15th to celebrate a year from the date of my first submission to Total-E-Bound, marking my return to a 'professional' writing career.  About 10+ years ago, I used to write short stories for Sterling MacFadden publications, i.e. the True Confessions magazines.  I had a lot of fun and even made a little bit of money, but I eventually grew bored and stopped, focusing more on my day job.  However, I never totally gave up on my dream of turning my writing into a career.  I just decided to postpone it for a while until I could develop more focus and skill to write longer length and more complex stories.

In all that time, I'd never stopped writing, but spent more time reading different types of novels, trying to decide which genre I enjoyed the most.  Most writing books state you should write what you enjoy reading, but that's not easy advice to take when you read anything and everything like I do.  However I'm a sucker for romance, so I knew that's where I wanted to concentrate my efforts.  Around this time, I also read my first M/M story.  I'd picked the book, Supplicant by Gem Frost, up on a free ebook site thinking it was a typical M/F story with a hot guy on the cover.  But from the first page, I realized it not only wasn't a M/F story, it was a M/M story with some BDSM elements.  The super sexy erotic scenes hooked me and it wasn't long before I was reading every M/M story I could get my hands on.  From there, I made the leap from reading M/M stories to writing them.

After deciding that I was ready to get back on the submissions treadmill, I tried to find information for Sterling MacFadden but came up with nothing.  Apparently, they have been bought, sold, and bought again.  Even if I could have found submissions information for them, I don't think I would have pursued it because I came across many other publishers and submissions calls in the course of my research.  I hadn't realized how many opportunities existed now for all lengths of work, and how easy it was to get a foot in the door through submissions calls.

Total-E-Bound's Emergency Servicing anthology intrigued me because I love medical romances and I was eager to submit a M/M story to see if I really had what it took to write in that genre.  I submitted my story on the last day of the deadline, July 15th, and I received an email informing me the story had been accepted into the anthology on August 15th.  Since then, I've been a lot busier and had a lot more success than I could have anticipated.  There is still much more I want to accomplish, but I'm thrilled with how far I've come so far.

4 comments:

  1. Glad you hopped back on the submissions treadmill and Happy Anniversary!

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    1. Thank you my friend! So great to hear from you, thanks for dropping by!

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  2. Wow! You started reading m/m because of my book? Really? That's just awesome, and makes me feel like I've really accomplished something. I've never influenced the path of anyone's writing career before, even a little. That's very cool and has given me a really big happy smile tonight:-).

    Best of luck with all your writing endeavors!

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    1. Hi Meg,
      Thanks for stopping by! I really enjoyed the Dominance series, it introduced me to M/M and now it's one of my fav genres to read AND write.
      Noelle

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