Imagine you wake up one morning with a memory that isn’t yours. This is what happens to Farley Brent in my story Zhuang Zhu’s Dream. I’m thrilled that the story, after much revision, has been published by Gold Dust magazine. You can find the winter issue of Gold Dust containing the story here.

My plan was to make 2015 the year I got published in literary magazines. Magazines allow you to place yourself on a spectrum as a writer, because you can look up their acceptance rates. Gold Dust has an acceptance rate of 6.86%. So, I’m pretty happy with this. Zhuang Zhu’s Dream is the green blob at the left hand side of this chart of all my short story submissions in 2015. You can see what a fine collection of rejections I also have (the red blobs).

I hope those few green blobs among the sea of red may give some of you courage as well. If you research the market and decide where to place yourself, then read the magazines, and submit to the ones that are publishing stories that seem a bit like yours, it works out in the end.