A Little Help From My Friends, and My Undying Love for Ratings Systems

Finding places to submit to is a challenge. As a young neophyte, I bought the Writer's Digest Bible of all magazines possible to submit to (what I thought at the time), and then spent the year I should have been writing getting analysis paralysis instead, never coming to a decision, and ultimately wasting my $50 I spent on a very large pile of paper to recycle.

This time, I'm not doing that. Starting now with free resources scrounged on the Internet, and working my way up.

My fellow forum members pointed out a couple of new sources to check out in future: www.ralan.com and Submissions Grinder and also DuoTrope, should I ever make enough money to spend some back.

Thanks, guys.

The SFF Chronicles website has been terrific in helping me find my way back to writing again, and feel much less lonely in my chosen obsessions.

Anyway, now that the housekeeping's done, I'm reviewing Escape Pod, and figuring out which story to send. If it's read, it'll have to sound good out loud. Hmmmm...

The staff bios are cool...always a good sign.

The stories have ratings on them...also a good sign in my book. Call it a quirk, but I hate being shocked by something I wasn't prepared to stumble across. I get enough of that in life; don't need it from my entertainment.

The first story on their Best of page, "Imperial", their very first podcast, has an R-rating for "profanity, sexual content, politics, and sarcasm".

Not sarcasm! Oh nooooooo! And I did appreciate them screening for 'politics' - bleah!

Episode 105, called "Impossible Dreams", actually appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction before getting pod-casted here, and is rated G, for 'excessive movie trivia, some of it true'.

Love!

If you'll excuse me, I have a little more research to do...now where's my headphones? :-)