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Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

Sometimes I feel caught between my best interests as a writer and my needs as a person, especially during this shifting scene of our pandemic and the resultant isolation and lack of community. For example, I find it helps me to share what I have written on my blog. It helps me feel less isolated. Sometimes I may even be fortunate enough to get a comment or two. As a writer, I really need this to keep going. It helps me to produce and move forward. After getting some encouragement, I will often, but not always, take a piece down and try to publish it in a journal.

Not all journals will accept a work that has previously been “published” on a blog, however brief its appearance. I understand and respect that. As a former journal editor, I used to have that same policy. However, I have loosened my views about this. That being said, I recently missed out on the chance to have a story appear in a journal because it briefly appeared on my blog. When it came to signing on the bottom line, I checked with the editor regarding their policy, and sure enough, the piece was ineligible for publication with this particular journal.

Writers have to sometimes do what they need to do to keep the synapses firing. At times, this is the larger concern. Pay for publication is rarely beyond token for short fiction, for example, and in the tradeoff for the psychological gains of an audience, however tenuous that support, I often err on the side of doing what feels best in the moment. I pray for venues that might like what I’ve written and not mind its archived history on some obscure patch of the interweb, a history that will be close to obsolete in a few months’ time after I have deleted my blogpost.

It is a tradeoff, but I do understand editors’ perspectives on this.

Still, the larger value for me at present is happiness.