The Ubiquity of JCO

I finished a story last month and decided to start sending it around in search of a publisher.  It's a private dick story, like most of my work, but I'd like to see it in one or another of the mainstream journals.  I often look in the back of Best American Mysteries of 20nn to see where they get their stuff.  

So, The Atlantic.  A long shot but fine, they have an Elmore Leonard story in their current issue.  The Missouri Review—an online note, "What people say about us:  'I’ve admired The Missouri Review for years. . . . It’s one of a half-dozen literary magazines I always read.' —Joyce Carol Oates.  Good.  Send a copy off to TMR.  After all, one or two issues before my first story appeared in the Black Mask section of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Joyce Carol Oates had the Black Mask slot. 

How about McSweeney's?  Edgy, picky, but my story's in S.F. and McSweeney's seems tied to the community.  Sure enough:  "McSweeney’s has attracted work from some of the finest writers in the country, including Denis Johnson, Jonathan Franzen, William T. Vollmann, Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, Heidi Julavits, Jonathan Lethem, Michael…"

Prairie Schooner:  "we have printed the work of Eudora Welty, Octavio Paz, Tennessee Williams, Weldon Kees, Joyce Carol Oates, and Rita Dove, Richard Russo, Reynolds Price, Julia Alvarez …"

Well, let's see, close to home, just up U.S. 15, there's the Gettysburg Review.  Yup, there she is again—"Since its debut in 1988, work by such luminaries as E. L. Doctorow, Rita Dove, James Tate, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Wilbur, and Donald…"

Fiction Magazine?  "In the past we have featured work by such prize-winning authors as John Ashbery, Joyce Carol Oates, Heinrich Böll, Yasunari Kawabata, Camilo José Cela, Günter Grass, and John …."

Joyce, sweetheart, I love you but take a break, please!  You're 74.  You deserve a little rest. 

Or maybe I should start using three names in my byline.  

P.S.  Today I pick up The New York Times Style Magazine--"Fall Fashion starring Amber Heard, Andrew McCarthy, Diane Kruger, Hannelore Knuts, Joyce Carol Oates,"