Flash Fiction to be Published

As in - MINE! 

I've been digging around Duotrope's Digest, which lists magazines, journals, publishers, etc. of fiction and poetry.  It's a great resource for finding places to submit short stories and poems.  I figured I should try to break into some magazines with small pieces as a way to gain publishing credits I can use in my query letters.  Plus, I have a couple older pieces that I really love and felt were good enough to be published somewhere.  It can be difficult to find just the right outlet for your short stories/poetry because you have to read the actual journals/magazines to see what their tastes are, and not every one offers archives or samples on their websites.  And I don't know about anyone else, but I don't want to spend $10 per back issue, or $20 or more per yearly subscription just to find out if that publication would be a good fit for me.

So anyway, I started looking for outlets under the theme of religious/spiritual, because the two pieces I was looking to submit are spiritual in nature.  Unfortunately, they're not particularly Christian, or Jewish, or about the nature of Christ, or related to Scripture, or...... you get the idea.  Lots of the publications were overtly religious, and my pieces are not.  They're more skeptical and questioning of religion.  Finally, I came across Divine Dirt Quarterly, a brand new e-publication that describes themselves as "theology's tabloid, here to spread the dirt on the divine."  And I thought - perfect!

So at one o'clock this morning, I was sitting with my laptop, doing one last fine-toothed edit on my two pieces (one poem, and one long-poem-turned-flash-fiction-story) and emailing them off to their respective editors.  I was all prepared to sit back and wait for a few weeks for a response, because the website said the slots for the inaugural issue were full and they were currently reading for the second issue.  Imagine my surprise, when I checked my email and saw a response from the fiction editor - he wants to publish my flash fiction in Divine Dirt Quarterly's inagural issue - which will be out later this month!

I'm so freaking excited I can't even express it properly on screen!

Aside from my high school literary magazine, I've never had anything published!  While searching for potential publications, I found myself giving preference to print publications (I mean come on, who doesn't want the satisfaction of holding pages in their hands??) but Divine Dirt Quarterly is online only.  And that's okay, because I felt it was such a great fit for what I'd written that it didn't matter.  Not only that, but the subject matter is something I would enjoy reading, and that I could write more about and possibly submit to them again in the future.  How awesome is that?

So as soon as I have details - like a publication date - I'll post it here!