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
Rejections This Year – 14 (7 personalized)
A Month Of Responses
As I mentioned in my previous post, I took a writing break in June, so my works in progress are still in progress. I haven’t sent anything new out, but I did receive several responses.
For “The Incident at Pleasant Hills,” I received a very positive personalized rejection, indicating I had gotten past several rounds of evaluation. This confirms to me that the story is solid, and this is a publication I should keep in mind for future submissions.
“Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug,” received a rather strange rejection that was generally positive about the story, but concluded that it didn’t fit the editors’ definition of the fantasy genre. To my sensibilities, it’s more of a modern fantasy or new weird story, but this response makes me think it might be worth trying some “softer” sci-fi magazines as well.
“The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk” received a form rejection.
My drabble, “Tom, Dick, and Larry,” has the distinction of being the first submission of the year that didn’t get a response at all. A few magazines state in their submission guidelines that they won’t respond for rejections, but this was not one of them. It’s possible that the story got lost in the shuffle, or the response was eaten by internet goblins or spam filters. I’ll be sending a query to see if I can get a clear response.
Goals for Next Week
Send a query to get the status of “Tom, Dick, and Larry”
Re-send all the stories that came back to me
Get back into the writing groove and work on at least one short story
I’ve always loved this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and not just for the image of a monster wriggling out of a tiny brain.
Modern life is rigid in many ways. School and work train us to believe that consistency should be valued and striven after. For many modern creators, the internet and its algorithms reward consistency. But we’re not robots, and consistency is often the enemy of creativity. The human brain is a creativity machine, but it needs constant stimulus and surprise as grist for the mill.
One of the things I’ve been consistent about over the last few years is this blog. Granted, I don’t always stick to a tight schedule, but over more than four hundred posts, I’ve rarely gone more than a week or two between posting. I’m happy about that, but I do wonder if it’s a bit of “foolish consistency”.
Life has been busy lately, and one of the results of that has been a sparseness and lack of variety here on the blog. So, I decided to take a little writing break. In that time, I moved to a new house and sorted out some of those dull real-life things that need doing.
Now I’m back, refreshed, with some new ideas. I’m currently on a much-needed vacation at the lake—the perfect time to write. I’ll be catching up on my short story submissions, and I may have some table-top content coming up in the not too distant future.
For now, here’s the peaceful panorama from the shore.
Summer is here, and I’m currently in the process of packing to move. It turns out you can acquire a shocking amount of junk when you spend almost 15 years in a house, so I’m going through it and getting rid of everything I can.
This past month was light on reading, but I did manage to get through a couple of books.
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 Armageddon bunkers for billionaires.
I’m still reading Discworld with the kids at bedtime. This title features some of my favorite recurring characters: Death (and the miniature rat version, the Death of Rats); Susan, his grand-daughter; the wizards of Unseen University; and the mysterious and villainous Auditors, who are not permitted to meddle in the affairs of mortals, but keep coming up with clever schemes to wipe them out so the universe can be neat and orderly.
The Discworld version of Death is, in some ways, the classic trope of the robot who wants to become human. He may be an anthropomorphic personification, but he has spent centuries around people, and he can’t help that they’ve rubbed off on him.
Thanks to the Auditors, the Hogfather (Discworld’s version of Santa Claus) is missing in action, and it’s up to Death to take his place and keep the world believing in him. It’s a Nightmare Before Christmas with ancient gods and extra-dimensional monsters.
Susan is pulled into Death’s schemes against her will, determined (but mostly failing) to live a “normal” life instead of the inevitably strange life of the woman whose grandfather is the personification of Death.
Hogfather is a meditation on the way people create the gods they need, while also being a completely silly story about bumbling wizards, a skeleton posing as a mall Santa with a strap-on beard, and a governess who actually finds the monsters under the children’s beds, and resolves the issue with the sharp end of the fire poker.
Novelty is a book of four stories, two longer, and two shorter. Its themes and some elements of its plots are very science-fictiony, but the style is literary. It feels like a 1980s precursor to the “new weird” of Jeff Vandermeer or China Miéville.
“The Nightingale Sings at Night” begins in classic myth-story fashion with an explanation of the nightingale’s unusual song. It’s a retelling of the fall of man from Genesis, but the structure feels like something straight out of Aesop’s Fables. It’s a great example of using a classic story structure as a jumping-off point.
“Great work of time” is the longest story of the bunch, and a fantastic time travel story. Like all time travel stories, it’s linear from one perspective and non-linear from another.
Caspar Last is an imminently reasonable man who invents a time machine and decides to use it only once, in order to make enough money to live out the rest of his days in moderate comfort. However, he is tricked into giving up his invention to a secretive group calling themselves the Otherhood. They use the time machine, first and foremost, to sow peace around the world and build up the British Empire. They also use it to ensure their group’s own creation.
However, all this meddling in time has strange effects. The peace they create has its costs, twisting the world beyond all recognition. One member discovers that the Otherhood’s twisted timeline will eventually result in a sort of quiet cataclysm, a world so at peace that there is nothing but endless forest growing out of a quiet sea. The only way to prevent this terrible future is to undo everything the Otherhood has done.
“In Blue” is a story set some time in the future, in an unnamed city. Refugees crowd an ancient city that is being systematically rebuilt. There has been pseudo-communist Revolution, and lives are governed by a social calculus and act-field theory, mathematics that govern society and all interactions between people. The protagonist, Hare, is a member of the cadre that organizes society without overtly ruling it, but he becomes overwhelmed by his duties and has a mental break.
The final story, “Novelty” is the most literary (or, at least, the lightest on plot): a story about an author in a bar, realizing what his next book will be about. He decides he must write a book on the “pull men feel between Novelty and Security,” the drive to discover something new versus the safety of the known. The implication is that the story is at least a little autobiographical, and the book we’re reading is the book he will write.
What I’m Reading In June
I’m not sure how much reading I’ll actually be able to do, but I’m still working on the Witcher series and Discworld. I’m also continuing my goal of reading at least one anthology of short stories each month, and recently picked up a volume of stories from Apex which seems perfect for summer reading.
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 Past Two Weeks – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 5
Rejections This Year – 11 (4 personalized)
This week is the last week of school, so my kids are keeping me busy with concerts and events. I’m also packing and getting everything set up to move house next week. Once again I’ve been slacking on my short story reports, so we’re doubling up this week and last.
Submissions
My first submission for The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk came back with a rejection, so I sent it back out. This was my only submission for the week, although a few other stories should be coming back soon, if the duotrope estimates are anything to go by.
Writing
I finally completed a draft of Red Eyes, a story that I revived from the trunk, although it’s still a pretty big mess. This pass was mostly to find the core of the story and assess what the big, structural problems are. Now I need to take some time to decide how those things should be fixed. I also need to make it shorter, because this story is awfully long.
I’ve been doing a lot of revision lately. This is a good thing, because it’s one of my weaker points and I want to get better. However, too much revision makes me feel like I’m churning on the same stories, so I’m planning to shift focus to fresh stories for a week or two. The first of these will be Portrait of the Artist in Wartime, which I’ve been talking about for a while, but not really working on.
I intend to knock out a half-assed draft just to get a feel for where I want to go with it. Hopefully that will leave me feeling refreshed and ready to tackle more revisions.
Today’s reblog comes courtesy of the Lit Mag News Substack. Lev Raphael spins us a classic yarn of years of rejection finally turning into success. The secret: understanding why you write, and knowing who you’re writing for.
What eventually turned the tide? Distance and introspection. Away from New York and its toxic ideas of success, I asked myself a simple question: who might be my audience, given that I was writing so much about children of Holocaust survivors? The answer was obvious and should have hit me sooner: Jewish readers. As if by magic, once I started sending these Jewish-themed stories to Jewish magazines and newspapers, I was back on the publishing track and making money at it too.
Most writers are excited about writing, but many are deeply unexcited about marketing themselves or figuring out the commercial niches that their work fits into. Unfortunately for most of us, it’s a necessary skill to learn to sell our work, whether that be sending out short stories to the right publications, or seeking agents and publishers (or self-publishing) for books.
As Raphael says,
The main thing I learned from being accepted by publishers is that a book and its author are commodities that need to be sold, and the author has to work hard to sell both. You need to push aside any embarrassment and pull up your cyber sleeves.
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 Past Two Weeks – 3
Submissions Currently Out – 5
Rejections This Year – 10 (4 personalized)
Moving
Well, I missed my usual Monday post last week, and as soon as I did, I lost all my blogging ambition. So this week will be a double-whammy and include the stats for last week too.
In exciting non-writing news, I’ll be moving house in about a month. We’re just getting all the paperwork sorted and starting on the packing, but I have no doubt it’ll be a big time suck. We’ve had more than a decade at the current house, and boy oh boy, stuff accumulates. At least it gives us an opportunity to go through everything and do some Spring cleaning. It’ll be a good thing, but it may eat into my writing time in the next few weeks.
Submissions
Luckily, the Year of Short Stories continues full-bore. With more than a quarter of a year under my belt, I’m up to five short stories currently out for submission, and feeling like a proper short story writer.
I finally finished The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk and sent it out. I also found a good themed anthology that accepts reprints, and submitted an old drabble, Haunted, under a new name: Renter’s Dilemma. I also got a rejection on Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug and sent it out again. I’ve just about exhausted the professional-paying options for this story, so I’m moving on to the semi-pro publications.
New Stories
I’ve noticed that I tend to slow down when I’m working on a single story, so I’ve decided that it makes sense to have a couple irons in the fire. Now that Bluefinch is done, I’m going back to Red Eyes, another story from the trunk that I’m in the process of revising. I’m also working on a fresh story, Portrait of the Artist in Wartime, in the hopes that if I don’t feel like working on one of these stories, I can make progress on the other.
Here in Minnesota, April showers have brought May…showers. It’s been rainy, drizzly, or just generally damp. Everything is slowly greening up, and Spring is going to sproing the moment the sun comes out.
This past month, I finished my read-through of the main series League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics, I got back into Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books with my kids, and I finally received my Kickstarter-backed edition of The Secret World TTRPG.
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 mega-yachts for billionaires.
Written by Alan Moore, Illustrated by Kevin O’Neill
After the first two volumes of League, I was a little disappointed in The Black Dossier, which was more backstory than story. I was curious to see where Volume 3 would take us. As it turns out, it’s both forward and backward in time.
As the subtitle suggests, the book covers a full one hundred years of the League. The main storyline of Black Dossier took place in the 1950s, but the story of Volume 3 begins just before the coronation of King George V, which is mid-1911, assuming the date in the alternate timeline of League lines up with real world history. This version of the League sees Mina Harker and Allan Quatermain joined by the immortal Orlando; occultist Thomas Carnacki; and gentleman thief A. J. Raffles.
The mystery that these characters seek to unravel throughout the book is the work of a cult founded by Oliver Haddo, who turns out to be a body-hopping mystic intent on creating the antichrist. The more immortal members of the League, Mina, Quatermain, and Orlando, investigate the cult over the course of the century. Their failure to stop the cult is matched by the cult’s own failure to create a proper apocalyptic monster.
This century sees the League eventually crumble, Mina falling into a drug-and-mysticism-induced fugue, Quatermain reviving his abusive relationship with Heroin, and Orlando getting lost in the violence of war.
It isn’t until 2009 that the League’s long-time mystical benefactor, Duke Prospero, contacts a reformed Orlando, who springs Mina from a mental institution. They join up with Allan just in time to confront the Harry Potter-esque magical antichrist, who is put down by an entirely appropriate modern myth who I’ll refrain from naming, lest I spoil the fun.
This third (technically fourth) volume once again shows the League as mostly ineffective. They are still involved in the big movements of the world, but none of their meddling does much good.
With the move away from steampunk Victorian England, some more recent pop-culture references inject fresh fun into the series, although I couldn’t help noting that twisted versions of Harry Potter have already been done elsewhere, and in my opinion, more effectively.
Written by Alan Moore, Illustrated by Kevin O’Neill
In this final volume of the main-line League books, Mina Harker, Orlando, and the freshly recruited Emma Night (a.k.a. M) are all that remains of the League in alt-history 2010.
In some ways, Volume 4 has learned lessons from the weak points of the previous books. The authors are playing with formats again, bringing back the 3D glasses sections and including parts reminiscent of classic superhero comics. These format-shifts add variety without being as gimmicky as Black Dossier.
The story alternates between three time periods. The 1970s sections follow superhero squad The Seven Stars, organized by Mina while disguised as Vull the Invisible. In 2010, the time travelers seek Vull and any remaining superheroes. In the 30th century, an apocalypse has occurred and a desperate few freedom fighters engineer a trip back in time to prevent the catastrophe.
The true history behind the League and the reason for its existence are finally revealed to be part of a vast conspiracy that also encompasses British Military Intelligence (with a host of oblique James Bond references) and Shakespearean-era faery politics.
While League has never shied away from killing off major characters, Volume 4 is perfectly happy to burn all the bridges. While a few characters manage to escape disaster and even find some semblance of happiness, the entire setting burns down around them, with time travelers making it clear that the cataclysm won’t be cleaned up for hundreds of years.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a series built on literary references, and it has finally run the full gamut of time periods. This feels like a suitable ending. (At least until the thirtieth century, when I fully expect Alan Moore’s frozen head to be revived for Volume 5.)
I finally finished reading the Harry Potter series with my children last month. After that, I decided we ought to jump into some lighter fantasy, returning to the nearly inexhaustible Discworld series.
Pratchett has crafted a fantastic setting and populated it with a gigantic cast of interesting characters, but each book tends to follow particular groups. Feet of Clay follows Sam Vimes and his city watch in Ankh Morpork. The city’s patrician, Lord Vetinari, is being slowly poisoned, and it’s up to the Watch to figure out whodunnit.
The mystery provides the structure of the story, but the joy of any Discworld book is in the wonderful craft and comedy that Pratchett puts into almost every sentence, and the interactions between the characters. I think the craft of comedy writers tends to be underappreciated, but Pratchett at his best is as good as anyone out there.
The Secret World began life as a 2012 MMORPG. Sadly, 2012 was one of the last few years when game developers still believed that the market for MMOs was infinite, and that it might somehow be possible for someone…anyone…to dethrone the longtime king of the genre, World of Warcraft.
While Secret World did a bunch of interesting, innovative things, it was really the modern, urban, “every conspiracy theory is true” setting, slow-burn mysteries, and brilliant writing that set it apart. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to overcome its clunky gameplay. The game stumbled along for several years, eventually spawning an updated, free to play re-launch and a few smaller games in the same universe.
I won’t lie. When I heard about a table-top RPG based on the IP, I was excited. The setting and story were always the best part of the Secret World, so a TTRPG made perfect sense to me.
The rules are based on 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, lightly adapted to a more modern, more urban setting and the Secret World character system. At this point, 5e D&D is probably both the most popular and most disliked TTRPG system out there. Because it’s so ubiquitous, and many people directly equate role playing games with D&D, it’s the obvious choice when adapting an IP that most people have never heard of. No point in limiting your audience.
Unfortunately, 5e has its downsides, and I suspect that the Secret World has once again paired its fun settings and stories with clunky gameplay systems. The book’s creators, Star Anvil Studios, might realize this, because as soon as they finished this edition, they announced a new Kickstarter to bring the Secret World setting to the Savage Worlds rule set. Or maybe it’s just a way to cash in in the IP by writing a new book that is 70% the same as the old book.
The 5e core book defines nine classes that will be familiar to anyone who has played Secret World Legends. Everyone is a spellcaster to some degree, but two of the classes are all about the spells. There is no true multi-classing, but there are Secret Architypes, which are like mini-classes that characters can collect as they level. Only one can be active at a time, but they can be swapped with a short rest. It feels like a fun way to scale characters horizontally, but I wonder if high-level characters will feel too much like a jumble of abilities.
The biggest draw, to me, is the setting, and the book wisely dedicates about 60% of its pages to the world, with descriptions of a large number of NPCs, the factions, and a good amount of the history and lore from the games. Sadly, there are limits to how much can fit in a single core book like this. The game will still likely be much more fun in the hands of a game master who knows their way around the Secret World setting.
There was a single premade adventure released as a part of the Kickstarter materials. I would love it if Star Anvil was able to craft a couple more, although I won’t be holding my breath.
What I’m Reading in May
I’m still reading The Witcher. For my short story fix, I’m thinking I’ll tackle a sci-fi novella collection from the 80s. And I’ve got a book of writing advice that has been calling my name for a while. See you in May!
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 – 3
Rejections This Year – 9 (4 personalized)
Finishing “The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk”
This week was less stressful than the past few, and I found myself with more time and energy. None of my submissions came back, which meant I could focus entirely on getting The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk done.
I did some more cleanup based on critiques, trimmed it down, and tightened up the new ending. This story has felt close to done for a few weeks, so I was very excited to finally get it finished and ready to send out.
The Joys of Multi-Tasking
Until recently, my plan was to work on Red Eyes after I finished with Bluefinch, since I already have a draft. Then I had a flash of inspiration about a story idea I’ve been calling Portrait of the Artist in Wartime.
I had been struggling with the structure of that story because I wanted to write it as an interview with the main character, but I needed to reveal past events that the character wouldn’t want to talk about.
Now I’m thinking that I’ll alternate between the interview and flashbacks. That will give me a way to access those scenes outside the interview, and allow for some interesting juxtaposition between what the character is saying and what the reader sees actually happening.
So, now I’m planning to work on a rough draft of Portrait. When I’ve had enough, I’ll switch to Red Eyes revisions again. It can be nice to have a few different stories at different stages of completion, to switch back and forth when one feels blocked.
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 – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 3
Rejections This Year – 9 (4 personalized)
Quick Update
I don’t have much in short story news this week. It turned out to be busy, so I got little writing done. Bluefinch remains just shy of fully revised.
I was excited to discover a brand new, pro-rate-paying magazine that specializes in speculative fiction drabbles: 100-Foot Crow. In fact, it’s so new that it hasn’t actually published yet. The timing is perfect, since I got a quick, personalized rejection for Tom, Dick, and Derek a few days ago.
That’s all for now. I hope to have more news next week.
Anyone who has been keeping up with the blog lately will know that 2024 is my year of short stories. I’ve been writing short fiction and submitting it to publications. As a result, I’ve been using Duotrope quite a bit.
Duotrope includes a database of publisher information and a submission tracker for authors. (It’s not the only one: Submission Grinder and Chill Subs are out there too. Duotrope is just the tracker I’ve been using.) So, I thought I’d write about a few tips and tricks that I’ve discovered that make the submission process a little easier.
1. Search by Title
The Duotrope publisher search has a lot of options, so you might be surprised (as I was), that there is no option for the actual title of a publication.
For some reason, Duotrope decided that this belonged in its own section. The “Find by Title/Name” option in the Search menu gives you the option of inputting a partial or exact name. If you don’t quite remember the name of a publication, you can also try searching by alphabetical index.
2. Find Publishers for a Piece
Once you’ve added a story to your Duotrope submission tracker, it will show up on your “List of Pieces” page under Account -> Pieces.
When the piece is ready to be sent out, you can always search for publishers by manually entering the length, genre, and other parameters. But you don’t have to.
Instead, just click the “Publishers” link next to your story on the “List of Pieces” page. This will automatically populate a search with the information you’ve entered in the piece’s description.
3. Publishing News
The Publishing News section of the site shows publishers that have been recently added. Since brand-new publications are inherently less well-known, they may represent a good opportunity to get a story in front of editors that are hungry for content, with relatively small slush piles.
Publishing News also has a section for publishers that have recently opened to submissions, which can be another good way to find fresh options, especially when those publications are only briefly open to submissions.
4. Track Themes and Deadlines
Some publications are only open for submissions during specific windows. This is especially true for themed issues or anthologies. Duotrope can track these submission windows and deadlines.
On a publisher’s detail page, general submission windows will be listed under the Dates heading, and specific themes will be listed under Theme(s). In each of these sections, there will be a Track link and a colored bubble listing the number of Duotrope users who are already tracking.
In the Account menu, you can visit “Themes and Dates” to see a convenient list of everything you’ve chosen to track.
5. Deadline Calendar
Whether or not you’re tracking any Themes or Deadlines, you can access the Theme and Deadline Calendar under the News section of the menu, or from the link at the top of the Theme tracking page.
By default, the calendar shows a list of all the themed submissions and deadlines in Duotrope, but you can filter by genre, payment, or your personal favorite publishers.
6. Overdue Responses at a Glance
Duotrope’s Submissions view shows information for all your tracked stories that are out on submission. It includes a trove of information, including some that makes it easier to decide if you need to follow up.
This view shows how many days each submission has been out, as well as the average response time reported by Duotrope users and the estimated response time provided by the publisher. But the status icon also has four different color options for pending responses.
Normally, the status is gray, but it will turn yellow if the submission has been out longer than the normal response time, and red if it exceeds the publisher’s stated response time. In some cases the publisher may state that they don’t always respond to submissions or don’t respond to status queries. In these cases, the icon will turn purple.
Of course, as with all things, you should confirm the publisher’s information on their website before blindly trusting Duotrope. It’s usually right, but occasionally there are discrepancies.
7. The Reports
Reports may sound dry and boring, but there are a few useful lists available there.
Authors who are sick of waiting for long response times can check the 100 fastest publishers to respond. Looking for feedback? Check the list of publishers most likely to send a personal response. Just trying to get a story accepted somewhere? Consider the list of publications with the highest reported acceptance rates.
What Else?
Do you use Duotrope? Are there any interesting features I missed? If you use a different tracker, I’d love to hear what they offer that Duotrope does not. Let me know in the comments.
Words Deferred 