Week 31 — 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 Aug 2 – Aug 9.

Stats

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

Submissions and Responses

No new submissions or responses this week.

Goals

My goals from last week:

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

After last week’s reset, I’ve been blasting through critiques to get ahead of the game. Now I just need a story to put in the queue.

On that front, I worked on revisions for both T.I.M. and Estate Sale. This was the first time I’ve read through T.I.M. since the major rewrite, and since it has been a few weeks, I felt like I could give it an honest look. It was better than I thought it might be. The main problem is that it’s now 6000 words, and I’d like to really trim that down. It also has a weak ending that will need to be improved.

Estate Sale feels closer to done, but I’m going to try a new revision technique with it.

Externalizing The Inner Critic

The idea I’m going to try is pretty simple. Now that I have the story in a pretty good place, I’m looking at it, pretending I’m a critiquer, and trying to anticipate where the critiques might complain about the story.

The reason I’m doing this is because I have had a couple cases recently where I managed to convince myself that a niggling problem with a story is not a big deal, only to have critiques come back and call out exactly that problem.

Now, sometimes fellow writers will critique a story, and it’s clear that they want to make it the kind of story they like, rather than the best version of the story you want to tell. I try to avoid this when I’m critiquing. So it’s still important to not water down the story in hopes of making it “something lots of readers will like.”

I suppose I’m just trying a new tactic to try to separate my critical brain from my writing brain for editing.

Next Week

Goals:

1. Keep up with critiques
2. Finish Estate Sale revisions and submit for critique