Year of Short Stories — Week #17 and 18

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

• Stories in Progress – 2
• Submissions This Past Two Weeks – 3
• Submissions Currently Out – 5
• Rejections This Year – 10 (4 personalized)

Moving

Well, I missed my usual Monday post last week, and as soon as I did, I lost all my blogging ambition. So this week will be a double-whammy and include the stats for last week too.

In exciting non-writing news, I’ll be moving house in about a month. We’re just getting all the paperwork sorted and starting on the packing, but I have no doubt it’ll be a big time suck. We’ve had more than a decade at the current house, and boy oh boy, stuff accumulates. At least it gives us an opportunity to go through everything and do some Spring cleaning. It’ll be a good thing, but it may eat into my writing time in the next few weeks.

Submissions

Luckily, the Year of Short Stories continues full-bore. With more than a quarter of a year under my belt, I’m up to five short stories currently out for submission, and feeling like a proper short story writer.

I finally finished The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk and sent it out. I also found a good themed anthology that accepts reprints, and submitted an old drabble, Haunted, under a new name: Renter’s Dilemma. I also got a rejection on Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug and sent it out again. I’ve just about exhausted the professional-paying options for this story, so I’m moving on to the semi-pro publications.

New Stories

I’ve noticed that I tend to slow down when I’m working on a single story, so I’ve decided that it makes sense to have a couple irons in the fire. Now that Bluefinch is done, I’m going back to Red Eyes, another story from the trunk that I’m in the process of revising. I’m also working on a fresh story, Portrait of the Artist in Wartime, in the hopes that if I don’t feel like working on one of these stories, I can make progress on the other.

Goals for Next Week

• Make some progress on Red Eyes and Portrait