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 Week – 0
- Submissions Currently Out – 2
- Acceptances This Year: 1
- Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)
Acceptance
It was a busy week for submissions, but the exciting news is that I received my first acceptance of the year. My drabble, Renter’s Dilemma, will be published in an upcoming horror anthology.
Part of being a writer is the “skill” of being simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, so my inner critic immediately looked for some reasons to get less excited: it’s just a drabble, it’s a big anthology series with lots of authors, and there’s no payment. But hey, the truth is that there are fewer and fewer publications that pay, and a writing credit is a writing credit. I’ll take a win, and keep on submitting. And I’ll post links when it’s released.
A Little Clarity?
I also received an odd email this week that made me realize even those who work in publishing sometimes have trouble communicating clearly.
This email was in response to a submission I had sent, and it said that the story had been “accepted for further consideration.” Since this publication accepts submissions via email, I am assuming this is nothing more than an acknowledgement that they received my story. (Duotrope’s guidelines for their normal response times also backs this up.) However, many publications do require submissions to pass through multiple readers or editors before acceptance, so this could conceivably be a note that the story made it through a first round.
The word “accepted” is a very loaded word in a response to a submission, so this phrasing that starts with the story “accepted” and ends with “further consideration” ends up being a linguistic rug pull for expectant writers.
Rejections
I received two speedy rejections this week: one for my recently renamed drabble, Tom, Dick and Larry, and one for Incident at Pleasant Hills.
I don’t normally talk about where I’m submitting, but I did want to mention how much I appreciate Clarkesworld Magazine. They are an excellent sci-fi mag with a very nice homemade online submission system, and they are remarkably fast at responding to submissions, despite being one of the biggest English language sci-fi markets.
Goals for Next Week
Quick turnarounds on submissions are a mixed blessing. It means I’m getting stories in front of more editors, sooner, but it also means I’m spending more time prepping and sending stories. It’s a lot easier to get to some of my other writing goals when stories aren’t coming back to me in 3-4 days.
As usual, I find myself with a lot of things I’d like to do, and not enough time to get them all done. I need to re-send those rejected stories, and I need to continue working on my stories in progress. That’s the bread-and-butter work.
I do still have a couple of completed drabbles that I have not been sending out, and this is mostly because it’s a pain to find places that are interested in a 100-word story. I also haven’t really done any simultaneous submissions, even when I’m sending stories to publications that allow it. That’s another way to get more stories in front of more editors.
Finally, there are always Critters critiques to catch up on. Those tend to be the first thing I let slide when I have too much to do. Luckily, I’ve built up a lot of credit, but it will eventually run out, and I don’t want to end up with a story blocked, waiting in the queue while I try to catch up on my quota.
So, I’ll throw down all of these as goals, with the understanding that I’m only going to get some of them done in the next week:
- Resubmit rejected stories
- Look for simultaneous submission options for The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk
- Submit more drabbles
- Work on incomplete stories
- Catch up on critiques
Words Deferred 