Many magazines will tell you that they don't look more favourably on your submissions if you subscribe. I do know that when Ailsa Cox, John Ashbrook and I published the short story mag Metropolitan we used to join in the magazine-publishers' collective sigh that if only everyone who submitted subscribed we'd be well away, but we made a point of never converting that into a prejudice against submissions from non-subscribers. You do wonder, though, if people are sometimes tempted, but then maybe I'm just an old cynic. Anyway, before it was more generally known that Elizabeth Baines is a writing name, at least I could be sure that that wasn't happening when my stories were accepted by mags, since it's a different name which appears on my cheques and thus usually on mag subscriber lists.
One magazine which reassures us that they are never thus swayed (which reassurance only serves to suggest that they do indeed suspect that some mags are!) is Mslexia, the magazine for women who write. One excellent service they do provide for their subscribers, however, is that they list their latest publications. I've subscribed to Mslexia since its beginning, but since I did so under my non-writing name, and it seemed too fussy to explain, I wasn't able to take advantage of that when Balancing on the the Edge of the World came out. This time, though, I decided to write and explain, and the latest issue has just popped through the door, with Too Many Magpies listed - and they've even included a picture of the cover! Thank you, MsLexia! This issue carries an interview with novelist Kamila Shamsie and the winning stories of the latest Mslexia short story competition.
The problems of having more than one name, though...!
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