Week 11 — 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 eleven: Mar. 16-22.

Stats

• Stories Finished: 2
• Submissions Currently Out: 8
• Submissions Total: 15
• Rejections: 11
• Acceptances: 0

Goals and Results

My goals for last week were:

1. Prep a story to queue up for Critters.
2. Start the post-Critters revisions for F-TIB.
3. Get ahead on critiques.

This was a quiet week on the writing front. IN the end, I received over twenty critiques and responses to my story, F-TIB. I suspect this is partly because it’s right in the sweet spot for Critters—long enough to count for full credit, but not much longer.

The feedback was mostly very good, but there is so much that it took a good chunk of my weekend to begin to catalog it and think about what I want to do in revisions.

I did not get ahead on critiques, and while I know which story I will submit next, it needs more work before I throw it to the wolves.

Submissions and Responses

I received two rejections this week: one for The Incident at Pleasant Hills and one for Taco Cat. I spent some time searching new publications to send them to, and found two for each story. So out they go again.

Next Week

Since I didn’t get through my goals last week, they will carry over to next week. I am going to let F-TIB sit for at least a week to give the feedback a chance to

Goals for next week:

1. Get ahead on critiques.
2. Prep a story to queue up for Critters.