LOSING MY PUBLISHING VIRGINITY

I’ve been thinking hard about what to write as my first legitimate post for this, as I wanted to make it something memorable. In the end I figured I would talk about my first legitimate publication. So far I’ve had two short stories published and while the first was validated before the second, the second was published first – so I’ll talk about that. The shortest short story I've written so far is called, 'The One Who Held the Strings' and is available to read online here and was published in print in the 2013 edition of Vortex magazine.

The process behind writing the piece was – at the time – fairly experimental for me. I am fortunate enough to be studying on one of the country’s best BA Creative Writing courses, and on my course have a yearly module known as Creative Voice. In my first year this module was taught to me by the fantastic writer Calum Kerr (who happens to run a Flash Fiction blog here if you’re interested). Kerr introduced me to the notion of Ekphrasis – creating art from art – and over two seminars we all experimented with two methods of this, visual and musical.

The musical experimentation really struck with me as every student was required to play a song of their choice consecutively and we would all glean our own creative themes and interpretations from them all. In doing this – and after casually watching the Kings of Leon documentary – I wrote The One Who Held the Strings.

I entered this into my university’s annual creative writing magazine – not thinking it’d be published as the Editorial Board are well known for being strict in their selection process. On the introduction page of the magazine it even ominously reads, ‘Each year we publish only around 15% of the work that is submitted...’

Skip forward a good six months to no word on the matter. I had a seen a few peers on Facebook discussing their sadness at not being published and thought that I too was among them. A day or two later however, and a fellow good friend (and blogger extraordinaire) messaged me saying that I had been published alongside her. At a loss for words, I ventured down to the university to see for myself. After all, I hadn’t even been contacted by officials. I went into the faculty office and asked, and lo and behold there I was on the adjacent page to her. A man gave me five free copies for winning and told me, in a very apologetic manor, that while this never usually happened they had misspelled my last name as Garett instead of Garrett.

But did I care? No freaking way! I was published, like actually published! Though in all honesty, it was odd to know that my work had been printed for public consumption without my knowledge. Despite this though it was a good thing, and I guess the moral of my story is to embark on something – even if you don’t expect good results.