Babysitting and Submissions

Today I'm home watching the kids while the wife is away with our oldest daughter at a speech competition. This is probably the first time I've had to watch the five youngest kids all by myself overnight. I've had to watch them before while she was in the hospital, but that was usually with the help of our teenager and before our youngest was born. I think I'll do okay, though. They'll be back tomorrow and things will be back to the normal level of chaos.

I submitted a story to Futurismic this week. I don't know if they'll like it, but I have a few more science fiction ideas that I'd like to pursue. Hopefully, I can knock out a couple quickly and get them in the mail (or electronically submitted) soon.

I have two or three mainstream fiction stories that are just about ready to submit, too. I've been doing a lot of market research lately to get familiar with the kind of publications that print this stuff. I'm debating where to submit first. There are so many markets out there to choose from. I want to start with those that pay the most and have a more reasonable response time.

What's reasonable for response times? For most short fiction markets it seems like around three months. Some can be much shorter than that, but most can take a while to get back to you. If you're interested in checking out some reports of response times from writers, go to Critter's Submitting to the Black Hole.