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 for the week of Oct 12 – Oct 18.
Stats for the Year
- Stories Finished: 3
- Submissions Currently Out: 7
- Submissions Total: 38
- Rejections: 33
- Acceptances: 0
Submissions and Responses
It was a quiet week. No new submissions or responses.
Goals
My goals from last week:
- Revise The Magpie
- Write Mother Night
My kids had some school holidays this week, which seemed as good an excuse as any to take two days off myself. That gave me more writing time than usual, and as a result it was a fairly productive week.
Mother Night was one of the stories that I started from my brainstorms doc without having a full outline. I’ve started on several of these, just to see where they take me. I tend to abandon them after a few hundred words if they don’t inspire me. This one turned out to be one I enjoyed, and the plot was straightforward, so nothing really had to change in the writing. I banged out several thousand words and finished the first draft.
I also made some progress working through the critiques on The Magpie, so I could feel productive on the revision side as well.
Thinking About Zines
I try to keep Words Deferred focused on writing, and but I do occasionally talk about the ol’ vidja games, especially in the context of interactive stories. I’ve mentioned the video game documentary crew noclip previously, and for their 10th anniversary they’re reinventing themselves a little bit.
One of the things they’re doing is introducing little eight-page monthly zines, delivered by snail mail. If you’re not familiar, zines are homemade or DIY magazines, often small and designed for a small, specific audience. This announcement reminded me that I recently saw a few tiny “lit mag” zines in a local indie bookstore. Are zines making a comeback? Or were they always around and I just haven’t been seeing them?
Eight pages is more than I would have guessed could be crammed in a standard single-stamp letter in US mail. That got me thinking a little bit about the kind of short-story-length work that could be put into the zine form factor and distributed for pennies. While I’m not going to stop submitting stories to traditional publishers, I have been wondering what I might do after this year of short stories is over, and a zine (or series) might be a fun thing to try.
Next Week
Goals:
- Revise The Magpie
- Write more from the idea doc.
- Think about zines?
