Anyone been professionally published?

However, I think some of us are in both camps. Our writing is pretty good, but we still need a lot of work. I learn daily more about the craft and each story I write is better than the last, so I look forward to where I will be in 6 months, or a year, or a decade, or a lifetime.

www.anotherealm.com

From Candlewick: The Telaphab from Z-A
From Tor: Elemental: New Stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Co-edited with Steven Savile)

Alethea

This one's archived at Quantum Muse:

http://www.quantummuse.com/mar05_grandfather.html

And the last is current at FLash Me!:

http://www.angelfire.com/biz5/authors/mag/narcolepsy.html

But though I am perfectly willing to promote my work at any given time, I will say this much: publication is no judge of how good a writer is. You've read, haven't you? HOw much pure s*** is out there? Meanwhile, there are great writers among us too scared to submit their works or who get discouraged after one rejection and stop sending their stories out. (That's a hint...submit, submit, submit!)

Myself: I'm good. I strive to be great.

This is one of the reasons that you should always read a copy of a magazine before you submit to it. If you don't like the stories in there, you don't want your work appearing in it. If it's badly edited, don't submit.

One of the ways I pick small markets is to look at the places that turn up in "Best of" anthologies. I also look at the writing credits of writers in the top markets. Then I order a copy and make sure that a) my story will be a good fit and b) that I won't be embarrassed to have my story there.

Just because a story is good, doesn't mean that it will fit in a top market. Sometimes stories have smaller audiences and that's when you should send them to small markets. But try the big ones first. It only costs a stamp.

And of course, that doesn't mean ANY of them are good.

Let me go see if I can find some links...

Here's the online links, although the poem lost it's whole form in this version. WNC Woman is the only one that seems to keep online archives.

Article: Eye of the Storm
http://www.wnc-woman.com/0604eye.html

Poem: The girl in the picture
http://www.wnc-woman.com/0204girl.html

quote:

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Also, though I applaud the sentiment, it probably costs two stamps. There's the SASE, after all.

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http://www.fantasyworldgeographic.com/index2.htm

A couple of creative nons you can link to through my website.

www.joshleone.com

Couple near misses on book publishing. Couple awards here and there.

For non-fiction - too many to name off the top of my head, but several dozen at least on everything from telemarketing to travel to celeb interviews. Pay ranged from around $35 to $500 or so.

Most rejection letters are put in the SASEs with the manuscript by someone other than the editor--why should the editor spend time stuffing envelopes when someone who is paid less can do it?

In order for editors to write something like "liked this," they have to make time. And editors are only going to make time in hopes that you will keep sending your work.

And why do editors hope you will keep sending your work? Because they actually do like what you've written and they are hoping to be able to buy something from you soon.

I have been told, time after time, that when editors find writers who are "almost there," they begin to watch for manuscripts from those writers.

When you receive a rejection letter with a hand-written note of encouragement on it from an editor, you can be pretty sure that your envelopes are not going into the regular "slush" pile, but they're going into the "hopeful" pile.

You do know that editors sort incoming manuscripts into three (or four) piles, don't you? One pile is for writers they've worked with and are likely to buy almost anything from. A second pile is for manuscripts from writers they have had to reject in the past, but whom they hope to purchase from in the future. And the third pile is the regular "slush" pile for manuscripts from people they aren't in any particular hurry to read. (Another pile may be for writers they have heard of but haven't worked with yet, but those may just go into the first or second pile.)

About a dozen non-fiction articles (as Spaceman said, not hard to sell non-fiction, come to think of it all but three were solicited by the editors, so I don't know if it counts).
1 children's book --collaboration-- won a literature design award in Australia in 1996.
1 upcoming book -- rollicking good yarn -- non-fiction.

The more I write, the clearer I see my deficiencies as a writer.

A good non-ficiton track record helps pay the bills if you are making a living by writing. Keep that in mind during a recession when people aren't buying much fiction. Even OSC had to turn down book contracts because the advance was too low. Plus, non-fiction is good for you. It breaks up the monotony and it gives you the chance to challenge yourself and learn something new. My first major non-fiction article was a 5000 word piece on the history of the Lick Observatory. I just looked at the mountain out the window of my apartment and knew there was a good story behind a hundred-year-old observatory on a mountaintop. I was paid in only copies for that article, but almost ten years later, I wrote a 500-word article almost completely from memory on my PDA waiting for meetings to start and waiting at the dentist office, and I sold it for $300. Not too bad for found time and 500 words. You'll probably never see that rate per word in fiction.

I wasn't trying to demean non-fiction writing.
It's like eating your vegetables.

But writing fiction is different, it is like trying to create a dainty dessert for a roomful of fickle gastronauts, when you are used to slinging good, honest hash for the breakfast rush.

'Tell the chef his tartlet is a little dry and formulaic...'
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Edit: Writing non-fiction for magazines also makes you stick to deadlines. If you can adapt to it, and still produce good copy, it often leads to follow-on work.
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The Lick Observatory article I recenly sold was to an astronomy magazine you probably never heard of, but I'm sure the editor at Sky and telescope knows about it.

By the way, I keep a binder with a photocopy (or print-out for web pubs) of everything I've ever published, along with an updated bibliography.

My first was a story "To Touch a Comyn," which appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley's anthology, Renunciates of Darkover.

My last "big" one was "Who Lived in a Shoe" (written with my wife Deborah Moses) which is in the Phobos anthology Hitting the Skids in Pixeltown.

I've also had several pieces in our local computer magazine, ComputorEdge, and one in a short-lived 'zine edited by Catherine Asaro.

Still doesn't mean I know how to write, though.

If you're really not sure, you can certainly query the publication on their definition of "clips."