Rededicating myself to submissions

I'm not talking about querying The Novel. I'm keeping that baby in the rotations pretty well, because I will go crazy otherwise.

I'm talking about submitting shorter pieces to magazines, or querying article ideas. I've done the fiction submission thing for a long time, but never queried an article, and I think that needs to be remedied. And soon. And this isn't even out of any sense of unwilling obligation, this is because I have been reminded lately how exciting the whole process is to me, and how much better I feel when I do it.

The other day I went through my submissions sheet of all my short stories and submitted all the ones that weren't currently doing the rounds, which was a lot of them because I've been a slacker on that one lately. I sent a lot of stories to a lot of places and I haven't felt that productive in a long time and I was in a spectacular mood for the rest of the day.

Also I read and completely loved this blog post from Urban Muse, which gives pretty much the best advice for how to do this querying/freelance thing, particularly how to start out. There are ways to make this work, and huge advantages. She even offers a free ebook all about crafting the best possible query letter.

So. I am 1) rededicating myself to keeping my short stories out and about, and 2) gonna get serious about this magazine article query thing. I've even got a couple ideas, now I just need to do some venue research and see what we can do here.

Do you guys get as excited as I do about sending things out? Anybody had success with short fiction or magazine articles?

Sarah Allen