literary journals – Robert Tomoguchi

I sent My First Scribble to three literary journals but have since stopped submitting. The reason is because I entered it into The Masters Review Anthology Contest and they don’t allow simultaneous submissions. It’s a contest for emerging writers. It’s a total longshot but it could potentially gain me a lot of visibility if my story was one of the ten selected.

Between wanting to keep submitting and since Fractured Lit just announced a flash fiction contest, I wrote another story on Friday called Forever Yours, Button. It’s a short story told from Mayuko’s perspective. At 213 words, it ended up being micro fiction instead of flash fiction, so I plan to submit it to other journals or enter a micro fiction contest.

I’d like to share both stories with you here, but I can’t publish them anywhere until I hear back from everywhere I’m submitting. Hopefully when you read them it’ll be on a journal website.

Again, please wish me luck.

An AI generated image for my short story My First Scribble — ChatGPT drew this for me.

This week I wrote a short story called My First Scribble. If you guessed that it’s a story about Orly, you are correct. But it does not use the word “vampire” once. This is because Orly is only six years old in the story and is not yet a vampire and has not yet met Yelena. The story is about the first time she learns of her ability to see the evil in others in her scribbling. Does that count as an origin story?

It’s short, approximately 1,400 words. It’s meant to work as a standalone story and will hopefully appeal even to those who have never read her trilogy or journals. I plan to send it out to literary journals and hope one will accept it for publication. Until that happens or until I’ve had my fill of rejection slips, I won’t be able to share the story. I hope you don’t mind me telling you about it anyway.

Please wish me luck.