2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week four: Jan. 24 – Jan. 30
Stats
- Stories Finished: 0
- Submissions Currently Out: 2
- Submissions Total: 1
- Rejections: 2
- Acceptances: 0
Goals and Results
The goals I set for this week were:
- Clean up another story (F-TIB) for Critters
- Revise a story (Red Eyes)
- Do just enough new writing to meet my self-imposed quota
My first goal went very smoothly. I usually don’t do a lot of heavy editing on a story initially, unless I get seriously negative feedback from my first readers or I feel like it has big structural problems. This particular story is fairly short—about 2300 words—and feels pretty good after some light cleanup.
My biggest concern isn’t a story structure thing, it’s the fact that one of the two main characters is trans, and their transition is an important plot point. I’m not trans, and I want to do right by the character and by that community. I haven’t worked with a sensitivity reader (formal or informal), but that’s something I might explore for this piece.
Goal number two is a work in progress. I won’t talk too much more about it. I’ve already mentioned that Red Eyes is a fairly long story (6600 words) that does need some structural adjustments, and that’s ongoing. I think this is an interesting example of the editorial process, so I may publish a longer post-mortem when I’m done.
Goal three was an abject failure. I barely wrote anything new this week. That doesn’t bother me, since I’m making progress on my revisions and that’s what I need to do to get more stories ready for submission. My word count goals are very reasonable, and I can still easily make up those words in a few hours of solid work.
Looking Back on the First Month
It’s hard to believe that January is over. One month down, eleven to go. I’m happy to report that I feel like I’ve struck a good equilibrium with my goals. I don’t feel overwhelmed, but I am getting things done.
So far, that isn’t reflected much in the stats at the top of these posts. I’ve been working on several stories, but haven’t yet pushed one over the line to be ready for submission. If we go by my goals for the year, I should be finishing one story per month. So I will necessarily have to ramp that up.
The number of submissions is also slightly low, if we go by the raw math of splitting 50 submissions over 12 months. This flows from completing stories, so it makes sense. Naturally, as I finish more stories I will be able to submit more, so I expect this to ramp up throughout the year.
My final goal for the year was orthogonal to writing short fiction: essentially keeping the blog active by posting 100 times. Conveniently, this works out to roughly two posts per week. So far I’ve remained comfortably on track.
I was struck by multiple ideas for the blog this week, which was a small distraction from writing fiction, but a welcome one. I was able to build up a small backlog of posts over my holiday vacation, and I’m happy to be able to maintain a healthy buffer for those inevitable times when the well of ideas runs dry. It’s a nice way to keep the writing muscles in shape while taking a break from fiction, and a good excuse to think about and discuss process.
Next Week
For the upcoming week, my goals are:
- Finish or get close to finishing Red Eyes revisions.
- Catch up on writing word count.
Taco Cat Employee Manual still has roughly two weeks in the Critters queue before I start to get feedback, and I now have F-TIB ready to submit for critique immediately after that. Red Eyes progress has been slow, so I’m mostly clearing my week to work on that. I’d really like to have it done by the time the critiques start rolling in so I can move on to addressing those.
Catching up on word count is a secondary goal, and one that will be fairly easy to achieve if I get in the right mood for it, but I’ll be happy to let it slide if I can make significant progress on revisions instead.
Words Deferred 