Ages ago, I had a short story I was sure was a good fit for Paradox, a speculative fiction magazine with an interest in historical and alternate history fiction. Unfortunately, they had closed to submissions. I created a Google Alert that searched daily for references to paradox, magazine, and submissions. Sure enough, eventually they opened, I sent in my m.s. and guess what? Paradox didn't think it was such a good fit.
But I never bothered to turn off the Google Alert. It was interesting to see how often the results were something I might actually be interested in. For some reason, I quite often got notices of postings by Pyr editorial director Lou Anders on his blog Bowing to the Future, plus the occasional interesting-sounding aspiring author blogs like this one by a British guy named Gareth Jones. Sometimes the blog would belong to a published spec fic author, like this post from Dave Williams. It was a little like having a free subscription to the lottery. Sometimes the ticket was worthless and sometimes I won something interesting.
So, I still have my paradox alert running daily. I'm just sitting here, waiting to see what the vast ocean of data will wash up on my shores. Okay, I know I just mixed my metaphors. So sue me.
