Katrina Johnston

Recipe cards are my nemesis and my friend. They’re strewn all over my desk–but none hold recipes.

I tote around two hefty decks; these cards are my real efforts to track my written submissions. I’m carrying them to the coffee houses where I normally work and then I use the shop’s WiFi to submit my short fiction. One deck of cards lists the title of each manuscript and a further list of when and where and to whom I’ve submitted.

Another bundle is slimmer than the first, and it provides information about where I may submit in future. These include a list of publications that have previously looked upon my efforts–or perhaps they’re new. God forbid that I mistakenly submit the same manuscript two times to the same journal, submit in error, or submit when one of my stories is still undergoing the editorial digestive process.

I remember once that I sent a sweet, home-style essay to a place that wanted only the darkest cutting-edge of hard science fiction. That story didn’t launch my writerly career. I try for more suitability these days.

A bulging box of recipe cards is filed at home and more cards are haphazardly laying idle on my desk, the remnants of all the places that I have ever submitted manuscripts. A bit of shuffling from time to time reorganizes what I take to coffee shops. I make new cards as new publications pop up like literary blades of grass.

Yet another mess of cards has been bunched together and put aside. That’s the cards that I deem ‘sketchy.’ These cards include the places that have not bothered to respond; apathy devastates me most of all. I will gracefully accept any rejection if an editor is straight-talking and knows the drill, or even if it’s boilerplate. ‘Least then I’ll know.

Occasionally a literary contact has been less than joyful. More than a few definitive ‘never agains’ reside within the sketchy cards. But there are a few listings I can also celebrate and these include the kindest and most encouraging rejections, the ones that make sense and offer sound writing critique, or are so well thought-out and meaningful that I cannot help but agree and go back for a re-write and more editing. I send effusive heartfelt gratitude. Thanks for the advice. Thanks to these kind and wise and experienced publishers and to other writers. Several have helped me to become a better storyteller.

I know it’s ridiculously old school, this card system, and I should teach myself how to adapt a spreadsheet program, or a database that would better track a zillion submissions and rejections and help me highlight the occasional acceptance.

I am able to embellish a scattering of my manuscript cards with a fat blue pencil– marking these with a heavy-handed and definitive “A” for Acceptance, and a joyful star and a then a smiley face when the piece finally appears as published. Not many, but the odds fare better now.

Wouldn’t it be more efficient to actually use these recipe cards for recipes? Then again, there are many other things I’d rather do than cook.

Katrina Johnston is the winner of the CBC-Canada Writes True Winter Tale. She lives in James Bay in Victoria BC, Canada. Works of short fiction may be found at several online venues. Occasionally, she breaks into print. The goal of her storytelling is to share.