I am about to graduate college after this semester and I am a bit scared. There are a lot of things I am afraid of, but the one which is most relevant to this post is my future as a writer. Ever since high school I made the decision that I wanted to be a writer, even if I spend more time than I like outlining or writing bad drafts. While I took one creative writing class at the start of my college career I have not done one since, mainly because the class I took mainly focused on poetry, which I do not enjoy writing. I also found it hard to really connect with my fellow creative writers, feeling like I didn't fit in, discouraging me from taking any more creative writing classes. Looking back it was a stupid thing to do because if I want to publish stories in the future, I am behind a lot of other people because I didn't spend as much time developing the same skills as they did.  

So this semester I am taking a class on publishing and my teacher is a published poet, and I decided to ask her for advice on how to go about this dilemma. My original plan was I would just get a regular office job, and then in my free time write short stories I would try to submit to literary journals. She thought it was a good idea, but agreed with me that the biggest issue in this plan was the lack of anybody to edit my work and give me feedback on how to improve, because journals very rarely give feedback on the work you submit. She said that there are writers workshops I could attend where people can give me feedback on my writing, so if anybody has any advice pertaining to that I would greatly appreciate it.  

We also discussed submitting short stories to journals, and we seemed to differ a bit in terms of how to approach it. My original plan was to use Submission Grinder, a website I found in another thread which lists Journals, the genre they specialize in, pay, etc. She was not impressed by it, and thought I should pay less attention to pay and more attention on prestige. I should focus on only submitting my stories to the best journals, but I am cautious to follow this advice because what if I suck so much that I never get accepted? Is is better to be denied than get my story published in maybe a less popular journal? 

She also said most professional journals only accept submissions through a website called Submittable, so if anybody can share there experiences with that website I would be interested to hear about it. 