22 Literary Magazines with 3% Acceptance Rates
Plus an essay "A Writer on the Crisis of Time" by The Racket founder, Noah Sanders
This week’s guest essay is by The Racket Reading Series and journal founder, Noah Sanders. Noah, like so many of us, is in the midst of a relentless time crunch. He writes of how the challenge to maintain a writing routine has only intensified by parenthood as he grapples with his need to adjust priorities and expectations to find solace in any moment he can find to write. Who else can relate?
I am in the midst of a time crisis.
I have always been a person who precariously balances a daily writing practice with a heavy, self-inflicted to-do list. Each hour of the day stuffed full to the brink of collapse, hoping I might clear my plate just enough to find space to write. Time has become a commodity I obsess over. A rare, valuable, taffy-like substance I try to stretch further and further to encompass all the things I need to do.
It is, at best, occasionally successful. There are enough days where I find the time needed to write. Enough days where I fill the white space of a page and I can comfortably call myself a writer without self doubt and existential dread coloring the edges.
Or there were.
Seven months ago, my wife gave birth to our first kid, and with him, my current time crisis. If I thought I was busy before, I now know I was ignorant of the word’s awful potential. Where previously there was fleeting space to write, now there is only a dense thicket of unavoidable responsibility. A wall of must-do tasks I can only just start to chip away at each day, the excess bleeding over into the next. Finding time to use the bathroom has become a struggle, finding time to write a near impossibility.
A writer without time to write is, as the kids say, not a good scene. I am anxious, aloof and edgy. I stare wistfully out the window and then curse myself for time wasted. The scarce moments I can write become overburdened with expectation. If I am not writing a transcendent novella in the fifteen minutes between cleaning spit-up from the cracks of the car seat and trying to figure out how a sippy cup works, I slip into self-defeat bordering on self-loathing.
It is a crisis on all fronts. If there isn’t enough time in the day to do everything I need to do, how can I find even more time to write?
At first, sleep seemed to be the enemy. If the time allotted in a day isn’t enough, I’ll simply stay awake longer to write. I’ll fulfill my adult and familial responsibilities in socially acceptable hours. When my wife and child have drifted off to sleep, I will throw off the shackles of exhaustion, and I will write. Unfortunately, the basic task of keeping a life, career, and family plodding forward is fucking exhausting. Staying up later is not just losing sleep but rather trading hours feverishly writing by moonlight for functional daytime ones. I add “zombie-like” to my list of negative traits. I stretch out next to the baby when we are playing, only to wake up, panicked, fifteen minutes later to the sound of his contented coos and burbles. Time is not an asset easily abandoned.
I consider waking up earlier. This seems plausible. There are 24 hours in a day and I am frittering away six to eight each night. I just woke up earlier, how much could I get done? I am giddy at what possibilities will open if I sacrifice minor conveniences like circadian rhythms and REM cycles. Wake up at 6:30? Easy. 5:00? The accomplishments seem endless. 4:45? 3:00? – I imagine myself waking earlier and earlier, marveling at everything I’m getting done. The time between sleep and wake up begins to bleed together. I am no longer rising from a restful night of slumber, but simply disco napping in the middle of the night. This, as it turns out, does not seem plausible at all.
I write, “multi-task, but like exponentially,” on a sticky note and put it on my computer. I will attempt to do everything, but all at once. I will write while listening to music, watching a movie, holding the baby, holding my wife, cooking dinner, cleaning up after dinner, exercising more, eating better, drinking less, growing as a human being – I will redefine the idea of multi-tasking so each moment is a well of infinite possibility. From a distance, I can feel the layers of accomplishment piling up on my back, and I can hear the sharp crack as my body collapses beneath them.
Impossible, wishful, solutions bubble to the surface. Maybe I have a specific aura gifted to me as a child by a chance encounter with radioactive chronal energy, and now, forty years later, I am able to slow each hour to a thick, pliable syrup in which everything can be accomplished, all tasks completed. I do not have superpowers. Time rushes forward. My writing does not.
What if I just give in to my basest desires? What if I prioritize writing over cleaning, over working, over friends, over family, over eating, over breathing, over everything until I am nothing but detached hands gliding across a keyboard?
No. No. No.
None of this works—none of it will solve this crisis. Time is a concept that will not change.
I need to change. My priorities, my perception, my metrics for success. My life is different now, and I am better for it. As much as I want writing to be my priority, and for everything I do to be in service to it, I can’t. The life I now joyfully live – full of mashed pea puree and dirty diapers - isn’t conducive to this.
I’m not; I can’t stop writing, and neither will I stop working to free up time to do so. Instead, I will write when I can, but with the understanding, there will be days when time does not allow this. When the joyful undertaking of balancing childcare with everything else is too much, and I am too tired to bring myself to write.
When I can though, when I am able to stretch the clock just enough to put down a paragraph, a sentence, a single word, I will not think for a moment, “I could’ve done more.”
I will be ecstatic I could write at all.
Noah Sanders is the founder of the San Francisco-based The Racket Reading Series, Journal, Website and Newsletter. He lives in Northern California with his wife, 8-month old kid, 12-year old dog and a nagging feeling he believes is his memory of what "free time" is.
And now! 22 Lit Mags with 3% acceptance rates.
When you’re short on time, its always good to have some markers for what lit mags you like to target. For me, I sometimes aim for 3%. It’s just a nice number. Very competitive but not absurd. So I’ve pulled a list of those to share here with you.
These acceptance rates are based on tracked submissions and editor reports.
If you’re looking for more accessible mags from 5-10%, I recently made a list like that here:
And if you’re feeling real confident, I dug around for the most competitive lit mags I could find on Chill Subs:
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