Why you shouldn't be using opportunities you got from a random stranger on the internet

I like Craigslist.
I like the connections and the ideas and projects.
There's another place where artists and writers collaborate and gig and get employed, it's called everywhere.
So pick up what's on the news stands and floating around the coffee shops where you live, and see if they'll let you submit to that. Find a local artist/writer to emulate--look at their biography or resume. Where did they send their work?
Sending your work to my motley assemblage of publishers (and ..."publishers") is okay, as a supplement to participating in the creative community where you are.
Your personal experience or identity probably could propel you into a few creative communities, too. I like this blog and the idea behind it, but nobody needs this.

This is my disclaimer. This blog is not how you get published. I am not a lawyer and this does not constitute sound legal advice--I am not an editor and these do not constitute sound opportunities to get published.

Stephen King said that anyone who doesn't have time to read, doesn't have the time or the capacity to write. So be a patron of the arts and submit your stories to the rags that you read and your visual art to the galleries that you visit, put your bucket down where you are* because even if you're dying of thirst there's a good chance you're floating in fresh water.

That said, a lot of the old writer's block for me is the knowledge that I'm trying to make a story for my favorite rag, and I'm 2/3rds sure they should never accept it. I used to draw on used paper just to make sure that I was improving the paper instead of making it worse.
Blogs like this can feed an inferiority complex--I'm encouraging you to send to sketchy small press operations off of Craigslist instead of telling you all to submit to The New York Times.
But sometimes I need to trick my inferiority complex. Making work for small time people who don't pay at all is fine with my inferiority complex, but I can write and edit and do my best, and I can say, inferiority complex, I wrote this for that ad on Craigslist, but it really feels more like the Times to me.


*This references an allegorical story you can easily look up.