Another Long Gone story getting published...

Just got word from an editor at a literary magazine out of South Carolina that they'd like publish another piece I wrote. They'd like to place it in their upcoming October edition.

This current offer is with an online magazine called Amarillo Bay, (so named to reflect the hometown locations the magazine's founders, one from the Texas Panhandle and the other from San Francisco, back in 1999). It's published the Department of English at the University of South Carolina, Aiken, S.C., and as best I can tell, it's another one of those exposure-only type publications, no monetary perks involved.

I've got the same piece in with a possible four other publishers, some of them actual paying contests and paid submission sites. This is where multiple submissions will give you an ulcer if you start thinking on it too hard. The piece that caught their eye is one of the more experimental pieces I wrote for my book I'm calling "Lubbock 1974," about what scant recollections still pop in mind time to time from back then.

Keep in mind, I’m now more than four decades removed from any memory I may have had at one point. I wouldn’t even call it memory per se, which I would typically attribute to a specific event. No, most of those are long gone. It’s more of a feeling these days, and not even that much, anymore. I sooner recall conversations I had, later in life, talking about those days than I am to truly remember anything specific on the actual days themselves.

As such, it will publish as a work of fiction, yet one based as close to the realities I came to know then as one can muster, given a bunch of sketchy memories and stories you’d rather not recall, and most of its actors folks I never really came to know in the first place, and most everyone else, long since dead now.

Considering, too, their interest in publishing it focuses primarily on securing my “first publication” rights (so their name can forever linked to the story as its first publisher), I won't be able to share much else on it until that story does in fact publish with them first.

That's part of the reason I’ve been relatively silent on these pages of late. These journals, anthologies and magazines don’t want anything previously published by anyone, not even our own websites. And with my Sept. 1 deadline for the book steadily approaching, I've got lots to get done still twixt now and then, I've discovered.

Still, this piece will be the second one published as a standalone story since I began submitting literary type works to publishers at the end of January. Both were written for the book I’m finishing , Long Gone & Lost: True Fictions and Other Lies, a story collection due Sept. 1. It’s the last step to my MFA program. I should be getting my degree there in a short four months.

Excerpts of the first piece, "Mr. Man Candy," a rather funny piece I thought, printed in Bluestem Magazine out of the Eastern Illinois University, remain some the most popular items on both this blog and my webpage.

Well, here's hoping I get a few more of these to share soon. It'll be my last big push on submissions before I get busy again with my final semester coursework and the classes I teach. Wish me luck, and I'll keep you posted...