Week 32 — 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 10 – Aug 16.

Stats

• Stories Finished: 3
• Submissions Currently Out: 9
• Submissions Total: 29
• Rejections: 22
• Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

One form rejection this week, for Taco Cat. I still have one other submission out for this story, but I may look for more places to send it.

Goals

My goals from last week:

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

I am back in the swing of doing a critique per week, so that’s an easy box to check.

I worked on Estate Sale, but it’s still not ready yet. I’m thinking about better titles, with Magpie being the current frontrunner. Ideally, I’d prefer something with a little more malice for a horror story.

Learn, Learn Again

I often find that many of my difficulties in life are self-inflicted. Few things are more irritating than thinking I’ve learned a lesson, only to realize some time later that I failed to internalize it and slid back into old behaviors.

I started this year with daily quotas for words written and revision per day, and my intent was to try to actually hit those numbers each day instead of cramming all of my writing time into the weekends. The quotas are small: 100 words and ten minutes, so they’re not hard to meet and it’s possible to catch up from missed days.

Now it’s August, and I find that I’ve slipped into old habits. I only write on the weekends, I have been revising with little new work, and my word count is weeks behind. I instinctively reach for the usual excuses: end of summer busyness and the imminent return of school, work, and my indie game project. Plus, it’s so hard to come home from work, cook dinner, do chores, and then find energy for writing, right? Never mind the folks in significantly harder circumstances who somehow find the time to bang out fine literature.

So, with that ritual self-flagellation out of the way, I’m going to try to relearn my lesson this week, and meet my quotas every day.

The Times, They Are A-Changin’

I’ll also mention that I think it’s a very interesting time to be a writer, and I mean that both literally and as the faux Chinese curse.

I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about the direct and indirect effects of AI on writing and publishing. Fiction, like everything involving written words, is in the midst of major disruptions, and these come on the heels of the e-book and self-publishing revolutions that have already caused major upheavals and consolidation of power in the industry. There are  more ways to publish work than there ever have been, though it’s still not easy (and maybe getting harder) to be paid to do so.

Scandals around allegedly AI-written books are making it into the general news cycle, but I suspect short fiction is feeling the impact far more, if only because of sheer accessibility of submissions and comparatively lower effort. I’ll have a post or two on these topics in the near future.

Next Week

Goals:

1. Keep up with critiques
2. Hit writing/editing quotas every day.