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 – 1
- Submissions This Week – 0
- Submissions Currently Out – 5
- Acceptances This Year – 1
- Rejections This Year – 22 (8 personalized)
Doubling Up
I missed last week’s post, so I’m doing a twofer this week. The upside is that I have more news to talk about. After a long period of slow responses, I received updates on five submissions.
Responses
Two of the responses I received were form rejections for drabbles. This isn’t too surprising since I “shotgun” submitted these, and I feel like they’re long-shots outside a very few specialized flash fiction publications.
The other three responses were for The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk and Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug. I was a little disappointed by the Dr. Clipboard form rejection. This was for a contest run by a magazine that had given me a “close, but no cigar” rejection on another story. It’s also the first submission I’ve actually paid for, with significant cash prizes on the line.
Bluefinch received one rote form rejection, and one very nice personalized rejection that said it had made it to the final round of consideration. It’s not as nice as an acceptance, but that kind of positive feedback from a pro-payment market at least gives me confidence that the story is solid.
With those responses, Bluefinch and Dr. Clipboard are freed up for submission once again, and I will be sending them out in the next couple days.
Perspective
After the long silent period, these rejections felt worse than usual. An important part of the process of submitting short fiction this year has been building up a tolerance for rejection. It never feels good to have a story rejected, but you get used to it by repeated exposure.
I think one reason so many authors don’t submit their work or choose an indie/self-publishing route is to avoid rejection. If you don’t ask, you can’t be told “no.” If you throw that e-book on Amazon and nobody buys it, that doesn’t feel good, but it’s still different from someone explicitly and directly telling you they don’t want it.
Every route in publishing is hard, and it seems likely that anyone who perseveres in the industry is either masochistic or has a screw loose. I think I’m probably the latter.
I checked Duotrope’s statistics for the contest where I received the rejection. All 14 submissions by Duotrope members were rejected. Only one even got a personalized response.
So far this year, I have a <5% acceptance rate on my story submissions. That sounds pretty bad. And yet, when I go to that Duotrope dashboard, I see this little notice:
Being good isn’t enough. You need perseverance too.
Work in Progress
In my last update, I talked about focusing on one story in an effort to get something done on my works in progress. I’ve been focusing on the story Red Eyes, to try to get it fit for Critters critique.
I spent a good amount of time completely rewriting a scene that wasn’t working, and I’m happy with the result. I also fixed a few smaller issues. The main challenge, however, is that it’s still quite long. I trimmed about 400 words through tiny cuts throughout, but it’s still almost 6700 words.
I reverse-engineered an outline of the eleven (!!!) scenes and their word counts, so I can see where the bulk of the story is. This is an interesting exercise, because some scenes definitely felt longer or shorter than they actually are. I plan to take at least one more general pass through the entire story and then focus on several of the longer sections to find places to trim.
Goals for Next Week
- Submit Dr. Clipboard and Bluefinch again
- Continue Editing Red Eyes
Words Deferred 