Magazines are a quixotic group, but I believe that writers have made them such. Receiving daily queries and submissions to articles months out requires a ridiculous amount of patience, quick thinking, and the ability to survive head-desking on a regular basis. Meanwhile, us writers are sitting at home, checking for responses, wondering what's taking them so long – I just sent it to them yesterday, how can they be so unprofessional as to not respond to my brilliant article on the many jobs weasels can be trained for?

Okay, so both sides of the equation are a bit quixotic. Maybe it's infectious.

So, which side of the chess board are you on? (Yes, we've moved on to chess analogies now.) Are you in the process of submitting, hoping against hope that your knight can drunkenly swagger through the opposition to get to the king of publishers? Or are you the queryee, slogging through the cannon fodder of stale pawns hoping to find a few castles and perhaps a bishop?

I'm usually on the submitter side of the equation, trying to become a knight. I almost never use castles while playing chess; the bishops are usually the first to be sacrificed, at least once I've run out of cannon fodder pawns. The King is just a lazy bugger, and the Queen is a bit too feminine for me to aspire to. A knight works just fine for me. But, as I was saying, I tend to be the one crafting pieces to submit to various places.

Half the time lately, it's been stuff for – my day job. A blog concept here; an outline idea there. But it's a rigorous submission process nonetheless, involving several rounds of revisions and concessions on both sides before a final piece is ready for publication. The other half of the time is me prodding at short stories and poems to submit to various contests. Those tend to have less revision processes and more "thanks but no thanks" type responses. Although my favorite form letter response so far had a handwritten addendum of "Thanks for the unusual read." I may not be getting the publication success, but at least I'm entertaining people. That's gotta count for something.

I've also been on the submittee side of the equation, albeit on an on and off basis (now there's a tongue twister of a phrase). A majority of the submissions were pre-screened by the author. I know their work and their style, so their submissions made it through the first cut based on reputation and previous history. New authors or those I just didn't know as well as others needed to pass the first cut before making it to the revision process.

Regardless of the author, though, a query of some sort was required first. Mainly, what topic were they writing about and submitting to me? My guidelines are pretty loose. Informative, educational, or otherwise entertaining pieces no longer than 750 words about some aspect of the writing process and / or living as a writer. Simple enough, no? Sure, I had pre-set topic suggestions to give an idea of what I would really like. But if someone submitted a topic that wasn't on my list and sounded interesting, I'd at least take a look.

Conveniently, those same guidelines apply to Full Coverage Writers. Guest posts have not yet occurred, but they're a welcome offering to any brave enough to submit a topic to me. *Insert ominous thunder here* Unlike the larger blogs or publishing groups, my slush pile has been mercifully manageable, both in digital and hard copy forms. That may change somewhere down the line, which will probably result in somewhat stricter guidelines. But until then, it's more fun to let writers be writers and figure out their own way of submitting what they enjoyed writing. (Hopefully whatever you write was an enjoyable experience. At least for some portion of it. If the whole process was a horrific nightmare of unending pain...then maybe it wasn't worth writing it in the first place.)