A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-And-Fifty-Seven

I am thinking of enlisting some help to get my short stories in shape, and maybe find some places that might be a good fit for them.  The truth is, I am not as confident in my fiction as I am in my poetry.  I've not spent nearly as much time working on fiction, have not attended many fiction workshops.  I did take classes on fiction craft, and have read a great deal of fiction, but I haven't had as much opportunity to get feedback, and have written far fewer stories than poems.  In some ways, I think the fact that most of my thinking on fiction is not prescribed by writing classes has been a benefit to me, since my interests tend towards the experimental, but I also know that having not had as many opportunities to have my work critiqued limits my awareness around the work.  I don't trust my own perceptions of my work in general, but that is even more true in fiction, where I don't have enough experience to anticipate what might not be working.  As well, I am less certain about where to send my fiction.  There is, I think, a great deal more variety in what is expected of poems, fewer formal limitations, but a story has to work in specific ways, and most often is expected to fit into a certain type of structure.  I also think that many venues and markets are more specific about fiction, though I know there are genre outlets that include appropriate poetry.  It feels like targeting fiction submissions is more important than with poetry.  I mean, I can pick up most poetry journals and find a wide variety of work, but when I look at fiction in literary journals, it seems to me that it is often far more unified.  That may be my own perception, or might be true of the journals I've looked at, not so much for many others.  In any case, I think getting a bit of outside input on all of this will help, if only in terms of my own confidence around submitting the work.