My 1st 2017 publication is in Apex Magazine Issue 92

Apex Magazine Issue 92 is out–Happy New Year! It’s full of great fiction and poetry.

SF, Fantasy and Horror with an Edge is the Apex Magazine tagline, and Issue 92 delivers. I’m thrilled to be published in Apex Magazine. A great way to start the New Year!

You can follow along each week as the issue is unveiled piece by piece online, or you can purchase the ezine in its entirety from the Apex Magazine site for $2.99 or at online locations such as Amazon. Right now, my poem, Wormhole, is scheduled to appear on the Apex Magazine site on January 20.

SciFi Poem Submitted & Accepted…

There are some places that accept SciFi poems, but not a lot. And not many as well known as Apex. I had several SciFi poems I would have liked to send to them, but the poems I wanted to send were being considered elsewhere.

So I waited and waited, hoping the rejections would hurry up and come back, so I could turn the poems around and send them to Apex Magazine before their submission window closed.

Let’s face it, submitting to lit journals is basically an exercise in accumulating rejections on the way to occasional publication. Getting an acceptance is a tall order.

• Your work has to compete with many other great pieces.
• It has to fit into a journal’s specific theme or aesthetic for a given issue.
• It has to be not too close in theme, tone, or subject to other work that the journal recently published or has accepted but not yet published.
• Maybe it will have to survive multiple rounds of readers.
• Hopefully it doesn’t reach the decision makers on a bad day–a day when they dislike everything, but don’t realize themselves it’s not their best day to read and evaluate.
• Ideally, it won’t get lost along the way.

I really appreciate those places that get the rejection over with quickly rather than taking nine months to  decide they don’t want to use the poem. But did I get rejections? No…nor acceptances…just crickets….

Then came the last day before Apex Magazine’s submission window closed. So I took the one lonely SF poem that wasn’t out elsewhere, and submitted it to Apex Magazine.

…But Not Without Some Twists

Well, I tried to submit it.  I got an error message. The message wasn’t clear to me, but it looked like an error on my end, as if the message wasn’t transmitting at all.

I tried again. Received a second error message. Then tried a third time and received a third error message.

So, I decided this submission wasn’t meant to happen. But then, I went to my email, where I found electronic receipts for all three submission attempts.

Note to self: next time you receive an error message from an electronic service, check your email before trying the submission again.

Three times submitting the same poem, using three slightly different versions of the cover letter? OK, that’s embarrassing. But if that wasn’t embarrassing enough, there was a typo in my poem. In the version I submitted. Which I didn’t realize until I saw it in the galleys.

I know how the typo happened. It was one of those situations where you change something in a poem. Then change it back. Then change your mind again. By the time you settle on a final version, you’ve left a small error behind. A period or comma where it shouldn’t be. Quotes opened but not closed. Or, in this case, a word capitalized that should have been in lowercase.

‘Fessing up to that was embarrassing, too. Not my finest hour when it comes to typographic accuracy, I see.

Thankfully, the editors sent galleys to the issue contributors, and were able to correct my mistake for me. Or else the error would have made it to the final publication.

The best part? Now that one lonely little poem isn’t so lonely.  It has all this great company from Issue 92 — just look at the contents (not in web publication order):

Contents of Apex Magazine Issue 92

Editorial

Words from the Editor-in-Chief—Jason Sizemore

Fiction

• Soliloquy in a Cheap Diner Off Route 66—James Beamon
• The Dark Birds—Ursula Vernon
• The Invisible Box—J.J. Litke
• Next Station, Shibuya—Iori Kusano
• The Quiltmaker—Mike Allen
• Mag, the Habitat and We—Lia Swope Mitchell
• Masked—Rich Larson

Nonfiction

• Interview with Author James Beamon—Andrea Johnson
• The Once and Future Chief: Tecumseh in (Science) Fiction—Amy H. Sturgis, Ph.D.
• Interview with Cover Artist Aaron Nakahara—Russell Dickerson

Poetry

• Disobedient—Barton Paul Levenson
• On the Edge of the Stone-Meadow—Laura Madeline Wiseman
• Wormhole—Tracy May Adair
• The Galatea—Amanda Pekar

So Excited

Did I mention I was excited? To be published in Apex Magazine? I guess I might have mentioned it…

Comments on Apex Magazine Issue 92? I’d love to hear what you think, whether about my poem or any of the other work in the publication.