Week 5 — Year of Short Stories 2026

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 five: Jan. 31 – Feb. 6.

Stats

• Stories Finished: 0
• Submissions Currently Out: 2
• Submissions Total: 1
• Rejections: 3
• Acceptances: 0

A New Kind of Rejection

I received one rejection this week. Sort of.

At first I thought it was going to be one of those rejections where the publication is so worried about offending anyone that they don’t even clearly say that the story is rejected. (For the record, these are my least favorite kind of rejection. Don’t treat writers as fragile little babies, even if we occasionally act that way.)

Around the fifth paragraph it became apparent what was actually going on. The publication was unable to keep up with the number of submissions, so they gave up, rejected everything, and changed their format to be flash fiction only.

My submission wasn’t flash, hence the non-rejection rejection.

Goals and Results

The goals I set out for this week were:

1. Finish or get close to finishing Red Eyes revisions.
2. Catch up on writing word count.

I have to admit I got distracted this week, but it was productive distraction. I ended up working on several blog posts, which should be a longer-term benefit when I have less work to do for the remainder of my February posting schedule.

I didn’t finish my revisions on Red Eyes, but I did make good progress. I’m now ahead on my self-imposed revision quota for the first time this year. I still have one more week to wrap up Red Eyes before critiques for another story, Taco Cat, start coming in from Critters.

I didn’t quite catch up to my word count quota this week, although I am within spitting distance. Those words were spent on finishing the first draft of the horror story I’ve been working on, currently titled Estate Sale. (I’ll be looking for a more interesting name when I come back to it for revisions.)

Next Week

For the upcoming week, my goals are:

1. Finish revising Red Eyes. Finally.
2. Start the first draft of a new story.