My first successful magazine submission was to Cotton Grower Magazine.
It was a piece titled: Speculation 101-A Primer In The Cotton Market.
The piece ran in the magazine’s print edition.
Sure, it helped that I have degrees in economics and that I was a cotton trader at a large gin at the time…
But I remember that I had a feeling of glee too.
A “real” company that prints “real” magazines thought enough of what I said to include it in their next edition. Maybe with enough effort and time, I could be a writer?
IN THE SUMMER of 1958 I opened an envelope one day and discovered that I had had two poems accepted by Southwest Review: my first actual acceptance by a real, grown-up magazine. For the very first time I began to feel that I might be a writer. I was so thrilled that I went out into the burning streets of Archer City—115 degrees that day—and took a long, triumphant walk. One of the poems was to the photographer Erwin E. Smith, whose photographs of the early days of cowboying on the Texas range leave a wonderful record of a vanished way of life; my poem about Erwin Smith was actually pretty good.
-Larry McMurtry, Literary Life (Amazon)