Month: August 2026

Week 30 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is the week of Jul 27 – Aug 2.

Stats

  • Stories Finished: 3
  • Submissions Currently Out: 10
  • Submissions Total: 29
  • Rejections: 21
  • Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

The only response I received this week was a single form rejection—the very first for my new story, Beneath the House at Caen. I’m never looking for a rejection, but I do appreciate a publication with a quick turnaround on submissions. Now Caen feels “broken-in.”

I scoured the listings and sent out three more submissions this week, bringing my total in flight up to a healthy ten. Trying to find publications for Red Eye and Taco Cat once again drove home the challenge of selling a 6700-word story vs. selling a 1000-word story. Even though 1000 words is too short for a few publications, there are still far more listings than for the long story. Not only that, but the places that do take longer stories trend toward the bigger, older publications, and they often reply very slowly and don’t like simultaneous submissions, making the process even more arduous.

Remember kids, you have to write what feels right to you, but size does matter when it comes time to actually sell that story.

Goals

My goals carried over from the previous week:

  1. Submit stories
  2. Catch up on critiques
  3. Clean up and trim T.I.M.
  4. Other revisions: Estate Sale?

With the additional story submission this week, I’m in pretty good shape. Now I’m just keeping my eyes open for opportunities to submit Red Eye and waiting for responses.

I also reviewed my Critters admin panel and found that I was far enough behind to warrant a ratio reset. I’ll be working on a couple critiques this week to get myself back in the critique gods’ good graces.

I’m still not quite ready to come back to T.I.M., so I worked on revising Estate Sale this week. Having let it sit for a while and come back, I found it fairly readable. I don’t think this one will need too much more work, at least until I get some reader feedback.

Next week, the goals get a little shuffle.

Next Week

Goals:

  1. Keep up with critiques
  2. Revise Estate Sale
  3. If time and energy allow – review T.I.M.