2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
Stories in Progress – 4
Submissions This Week – 3
Submissions Currently Out – 9
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)
Goal
Last week I set myself a word count goal: 1,000 words per day. Sadly, I only managed about 50% of that. Most of those words were on my newest story, temp titled The Scout. So far, it’s one of those stories where I am really enjoying certain aspects, and other aspects are very obviously falling short. Stories like that just need time and effort to find the pieces that will click into place and make the whole thing work.
Even though I didn’t meet my goal, it was a useful motivator, so I’m setting the same goal this week (1k words/day).
Submissions and Responses
It continues to be quiet. I received no responses on my current submissions; maybe the editors are all enjoying the last few weeks of summer.
I have purposely stuck to publications that accept simultaneous submissions for my drabbles so that I could submit widely. I sent each of these three stories out again this week. Of course, Murphy’s Law of Short Story Submissions ensures that after weeks with no responses, I’ll eventually get them all back at once.
Goals for Next Week
Once again, I’m shooting for 1,000 words on my works in progress per day, and planning to send out one or two more simultaneous submissions.
2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
Stories in Progress – 4
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 6
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)
Another Story
Last week, feeling blocked on my stories in progress, I started working on a new story. This week, inspiration struck for yet another idea. Since I was excited about that, I let the momentum carry me and started on a fourth story.
I do believe that it’s important to work on finishing things, and that writers can fall into a bad habit of chasing ideas without ever putting in the work to revise and polish. Unfortunately, revision is never as thrilling as that first discovery of a new story, and sometimes working on exciting new ideas can be a good emotional reset. Working on the thing that excites you at the moment can be a good way to boost word count as well.
Simultaneous Subs
This was the second week in a row with no responses to my current submissions. Since I purposely picked publications that accept simultaneous submissions for my drabbles, I should probably send those to at least one or two more places.
Goals for Next Week
This upcoming week, I’m going to try to motivate myself with a word count goal. I plan to write 1,000 words on one of these stories in progress every day. That should get me close to finishing at least one of them—although my first drafts tend to run long.
2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
Stories in Progress – 3
Submissions This Week – 3
Submissions Currently Out – 7
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)
Release
I’m happy to report that my tongue-in-cheek horror drabble, “Renter’s Dilemma,” is in the anthology Dead Girls Walking (The Red Volume) which released this week. It is available in EPUB and paperback.
Submissions
Since I finally finished my big ‘ol list of publications that seem like they’d be interested in drabbles, I figured I had better send out the ones I’ve had sitting around.
I sent out Tom, Dick, and Larry; A Going Away Party; and No More Kings.
Goals for Next Week
Short update this week. I just didn’t get much done besides submissions.
It’s starting to feel like I haven’t finished a new story in a while, so this week I’m going to focus on really churning through my stories in progress.
2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
Stories in Progress – 3
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 3
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)
No Submissions, No Responses
My stories are currently submitted to publishers with longer turnaround times, so I had no responses this week. It was a nice break to get caught up on other writing tasks. I still haven’t submitted those drabbles that have been sitting around. More on that below.
The Writing Pipeline
Recently, I’ve been thinking about my writing pipeline. When I find myself doing the same type of work (like editing drafts) for too long, I lose focus and slow down. It is good to actually finish projects instead of endlessly jumping between half-finished things, but when I’m getting stuck on a project, it’s better to make some progress on another piece than grind ineffectively.
This week, I tried to diversify my writing more than I have been. I spent some dedicated brainstorming time generating new story ideas, which I haven’t done in quite a while. I also started outlining the new story I mentioned last week, The Vine. Finally, I wrote more of Portrait of the Artist in Wartime, a story where I suspect I will end up with a large word count and have to pare down.
What I didn’t do this week is any editing of Red Eyes, which is the story I was stuck on.
Next week, I’m going to try the same tactic and split my time among a few projects, and I might go back to Red Eyes to see if I can be more productive.
The List
The last thing I did this week is finish compiling my big list of potential publications for submitting drabbles.
One interesting discovery (which is obvious in retrospect) is that many publications will pay a fixed amount per story, and while $5-20 per story doesn’t seem like much, it ranges from a respectable semi-pro to top-tier professional pay rate when the story is exactly 100 words.
My next step will be to rearrange these publications into a rough ranking. I’d like to try more simultaneous submissions, but that will be limited by the amount of time I want to spend submitting.
Goals for Next Week
Work on brainstorming, The Vine, Portrait, and Red Eyes – whatever feels most productive
Since I took a month away from blogging in June (and I was so busy that I only read one book), this will include my June reading as well.
Where possible, I’ve included Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these books pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of a fifth vacation house for a billionaire.
This is my favorite Discworld book, and Pratchett is at the top of his game. There are a couple of additional books that came after this, but sadly he was likely fighting dementia at that point, and I think later books like Unseen Academicals suffered for it.
Moist von Lipwig is a confidence man who starts the book by getting hanged. He’s given a reprieve by Vetinari, ruler of the city, and given the job of postmaster. The Ankh-Morpork post office is a dilapidated disaster, but he’s aided by Mr. Pump, a golem bodyguard/probation officer, the elderly “junior” postman Groat (who attributes his health to horrifying homemade herbal remedies), and the young postman apprentice Stanley, a boy who isn’t quite all there and has an abiding obsession with collecting pins.
Moist spends the first half of the story looking for ways out of his forced government service. However, he’s a showman at heart, and he soon discovers that his brand of hype and hyperbole is well-suited to getting people excited about sending mail. Unfortunately, the post has largely been replaced by Clacks—a network of semaphore towers that act as a fantasy telegraph system.
The Clacks were built by high-minded engineers, but the original owners have all been ousted or murdered by clever corporate raiders, who are doing their best to extract as much value as possible while running the whole company into the ground. By delivering the mail once again, Moist finds himself in their crosshairs, and it doesn’t help that he’s falling in love with Adora Bell Dearheart, the disaffected, chain-smoking daughter of the Clacks’ dead founder.
Pratchett is a fantastic comedy writer, but he doesn’t get praised enough for his intricate plots or his characters that make you care, even if they’re all rather silly. This book is filled to the brim with all of that. If you’re only going to read one Discworld book, it should be Going Postal.
Another re-read with my kids. This was a formative sci-fi book for me when I was young, and it holds up fairly well.
This is one of those books with some content that some adults probably wouldn’t want their kids reading, like children murdering other children. And yet, my children really enjoyed it, and didn’t seem especially traumatized. I guess we’ll see how they turn out.
I appreciate that Ender’s Game is populated by many characters who do terrible things, but the narrative is not judgmental. As a reader, you’re free to form your own opinions about whether each character’s actions are justified or reasonable, without feeling like the book is trying to steer you to a particular conclusion.
It’s a book about growing up, and war, and the terrible things people do to one another, often for reasons that seem justifiable or even absolutely necessary at the time. It is also about the way that history often judges those actions in its own context, ignoring those justifications.
As I was getting back into Go, I re-read this excellent beginner’s guide in the SmartGo app. Cho Chikun is one of the most famous professional players in modern times, and the Japanese player with the most titles.
This book deftly introduces all the important aspects of Go rules and basic strategy, while alternating chapters about the history and cultural significance of Go. It’s a perfect introduction to the game (or re-introduction, in my case).
In amateur Go, players start at a rank of 30 kyu. As they improve, their rank decreases down to 1 kyu, then to 1 dan, and up to 7 dan. As you might expect, players with double digit kyu ranks are beginners and casual players.
While most books about Go are written by pro players for obvious reasons, Moffatt wrote this as a moderately high (1 kyu-ish) amateur. He’s close enough to still remember and understand why the players of these games make the mistakes they do.
Moffatt also goes into more detail than usual in explaining the merits and disadvantages of each move, often exploring various alternatives. They result is a set of thorough game deconstructions that are very useful aids for an amateur player to recognize their own shortcomings.
I bought this on a whim while on vacation, mostly on the authority of a positive blurb by Kieran Gillian (of Die and other comics), and a brief skimming of the art. Unfortunately, this book was not for me.
I don’t read a lot of romance, but I’m not strictly opposed to the genre. This, however, was just too much irritating teenage angst and not enough mythology for my tastes. When the romance hinges on everybody being afraid to voice how they feel, and the conflict stems from people hating each other for basically no reason, I get bored.
As far as the art goes, the character work is nice, but these characters live in a world composed of colored smears. This lack of any background detail is something that seems to be more and more common in indie comics, and while I understand it, I do miss the crispness that you see more in high budget superhero comics.
Hellblazer: The Red Right Hand
By Denise Mina and Mike Carey
Illustrated by Leonardo Manco, Cristiano Cucina, John Paul Leon
I do love me some John Constantine, but this collection wasn’t my favorite. There are two story arcs here: one where Constantine enters into a trap, and one where he gets out of it.
The typical Constantine story usually has a mystery twist, and this is no exception. Unfortunately, the twist didn’t shock me, it just made me shrug. Maybe if I were reading the series in sequence I would be better prepped as a reader.
It’s also not uncommon for Constantine to have some plan that only gets revealed when everything seems hopeless. Here, he doesn’t have much of a plan at all.
A collection of Constantine’s friends show up midway through, and it feels like deus ex machina, but even they don’t actually do very much. They muddle through, and the eventual resolution to the situation hardly feels like any of the characters had agency.
The last issue in this volume is a stand-alone one-off story, and it’s a classic, solid Hellblazer story. It made me a little sad that the rest of the book didn’t hold up as well.
2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
Stories in Progress – 3
Submissions This Week – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 3
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)
The Vine
I have the excuse of a busy schedule over the past month or two, but I haven’t been getting as much done on my stories as I would like. Perhaps counterintuitively, I decided to unblock myself by starting work on yet another story.
The new story is tentatively titled “The Vine,” and is one that I’ve been kicking around for a while. (It inspired a piece of microfiction way back in the summer of 2021.) It’s about a plant that gets inside you and makes you feel empathy for others.
When I find myself getting stuck like this, it’s usually because there is some issue that I’m not recognizing and addressing, and it can be helpful to step away and work on something else. When I return, I’ll have a little more distance to evaluate the problems in my other stories and address them.
The Drabble Publishing List
I mentioned in previous weeks that I have a couple of drabbles that I’m interested in submitting, but some would qualify as reprints (since they already appeared on this site), and I think a good percentage of publications aren’t interested in stories that short.
So I dug deep on Duotrope and sifted through nearly two hundred publications that say they accept SFF flash fiction. I poured over submission requirements, editorial interviews and mastheads, and created a list of about thirty paying and thirty non-paying markets that might be good places to submit.
My next step will be to read some stories from as many of these as possible, especially the ones that specialize in shorter formats.
The Grind
It was a quiet week for submissions, with no new responses. I resubmitted The Incident at Pleasant Hills (which came back to me last week).
2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
Stories in Progress – 2
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 2
Acceptances This Year: 1
Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)
Acceptance
It was a busy week for submissions, but the exciting news is that I received my first acceptance of the year. My drabble, Renter’s Dilemma, will be published in an upcoming horror anthology.
Part of being a writer is the “skill” of being simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, so my inner critic immediately looked for some reasons to get less excited: it’s just a drabble, it’s a big anthology series with lots of authors, and there’s no payment. But hey, the truth is that there are fewer and fewer publications that pay, and a writing credit is a writing credit. I’ll take a win, and keep on submitting. And I’ll post links when it’s released.
A Little Clarity?
I also received an odd email this week that made me realize even those who work in publishing sometimes have trouble communicating clearly.
This email was in response to a submission I had sent, and it said that the story had been “accepted for further consideration.” Since this publication accepts submissions via email, I am assuming this is nothing more than an acknowledgement that they received my story. (Duotrope’s guidelines for their normal response times also backs this up.) However, many publications do require submissions to pass through multiple readers or editors before acceptance, so this could conceivably be a note that the story made it through a first round.
The word “accepted” is a very loaded word in a response to a submission, so this phrasing that starts with the story “accepted” and ends with “further consideration” ends up being a linguistic rug pull for expectant writers.
Rejections
I received two speedy rejections this week: one for my recently renamed drabble, Tom, Dick and Larry, and one for Incident at Pleasant Hills.
I don’t normally talk about where I’m submitting, but I did want to mention how much I appreciate Clarkesworld Magazine. They are an excellent sci-fi mag with a very nice homemade online submission system, and they are remarkably fast at responding to submissions, despite being one of the biggest English language sci-fi markets.
Goals for Next Week
Quick turnarounds on submissions are a mixed blessing. It means I’m getting stories in front of more editors, sooner, but it also means I’m spending more time prepping and sending stories. It’s a lot easier to get to some of my other writing goals when stories aren’t coming back to me in 3-4 days.
As usual, I find myself with a lot of things I’d like to do, and not enough time to get them all done. I need to re-send those rejected stories, and I need to continue working on my stories in progress. That’s the bread-and-butter work.
I do still have a couple of completed drabbles that I have not been sending out, and this is mostly because it’s a pain to find places that are interested in a 100-word story. I also haven’t really done any simultaneous submissions, even when I’m sending stories to publications that allow it. That’s another way to get more stories in front of more editors.
Finally, there are always Critters critiques to catch up on. Those tend to be the first thing I let slide when I have too much to do. Luckily, I’ve built up a lot of credit, but it will eventually run out, and I don’t want to end up with a story blocked, waiting in the queue while I try to catch up on my quota.
So, I’ll throw down all of these as goals, with the understanding that I’m only going to get some of them done in the next week:
Resubmit rejected stories
Look for simultaneous submission options for The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk
2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
Stories in Progress – 2
Submissions This Week – 4
Submissions Currently Out – 5
Rejections This Year – 15 (7 personalized)
Playing Catch-Up
First thing this week, I queried the final submission that was still outstanding after my one-month writing break. The magazine responded promptly, and it was a rejection that was likely eaten by my spam filter. I’ll need to be a little more vigilant checking for responses in the future.
I re-submitted the four stories that came back to me over the past month. The process still takes a while, but I’m getting better at having publications lined up for each story, so it’s mostly a matter of checking the particulars and making sure my cover letter and formatting match their expectations.
I submitted Dr. Clipboard to a contest with a small submission fee. This is the first time I’ve spent money on a submission. I received positive feedback on a different story from the magazine running the contest, so I’m hoping that their tastes align with my style.
The Halfway Point
We’re over halfway through the year, but I got a late start on my “year of short stories” project, so this is week 26 by my count—the official halfway point.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping I’d have an acceptance at this point, but the process is slow, and I have received positive feedback. I’m also feeling more and more comfortable with the short story grind, from writing and editing to submission. It’s quite a bit of work, but I’m having a lot of fun.
Goals for Next Week
With my finished stories back in submission, I really need to get back to writing. I’ve also been neglecting my Critters critiques, and I need to get back into that habit as well.
Get back to writing stories and get my word count up
I have been a fan of the game of Go for more than a decade. It’s a game of strategy comparable to chess, played in China, Japan and Korea for thousands of years, but only recently more popular in the rest of the world.
While chess is all about the tactics of threatening and capturing pieces with different capabilities, Go is both simpler and more complex. The board is much larger, but the stones stay where they’re placed. Capturing stones is an important part of the game, but happens only occasionally; the main goal is to surround more territory than your opponent.
Unfortunately, my past attempts to get my family interested in playing have failed, and I never got very deep into online play. I was just good enough to frustrate my family, and mostly much worse than the dedicated online players.
When we moved to our new house, our board game collection moved out of the basement and into a place of honor on bookshelves in the living room. The big wooden board and the bowls of stones caught my kids’ attention, and at least for a little while they’re interested in learning. Just like that, I was sucked back into the game.
Now I haven’t played in a while and I can tell my skills are rusty, so I fired up the Go app on my phone. I can’t speak to the options for Android, but on iOS, SmartGo One is the best app I’ve found. It offers quite a few features for free, and while it’s pricey to upgrade (as far as phone apps go), it offers a massive archive of pro games and practice problems for all skill levels.
The SmartGo people have also incorporated their extensive library of interactive Go e-books from their Go Books app. This is a really nice resource, because good books on Go in English are still quite hard to find in physical bookstores, and these e-books are honestly more useful, because the problems and examples can be “played” directly in the book.
I don’t know if my kids’ interest in the game will last, but I’ll enjoy it while I can. My oldest has been studying chess and now outclasses all of us, so maybe I can foster his interest in another game where he’ll quickly exceed my skill level.
Today’s reblog comes from Aeryn Rudel, who breaks down the numbers on his remarkable 800 tracked story submissions over twelve years. This includes a few novel submissions, but the vast majority are short stories and flash fiction.
With over 100 acceptances, Aeryn has a very good batting average. Even so, it’s interesting to hear that there are still publications where he’s submitted often and escaped the slush pile, but never gotten an acceptance.
These statistics also show the power of writing a lot of flash fiction: there are simply more publishing slots available for flash fiction than any other kind of story.
Words Deferred 