Words Deferred

The Story Idea Vault — Totally Not Banksy

It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a weekly writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Idea of the Week – Totally Not Banksy

An anonymous artist is building the world’s largest unauthorized art installations. They appear on skyscrapers, in the middle of interstates, on military bases, and floating in busy harbors. She and her team secretly construct these elaborate pieces, then unleash them onto the world without anyone realizing what’s happening until it’s done.

Nobody knows who she really is or what her motivations are. Does she do it for the thrill, or is there a subtle, hidden meaning that connects all of her work? Does her inner circle really know her, or is she a mystery even to them? Who seeks to expose her, and why? What is the public reaction to her work?

Year of Short Stories — Week #42

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 – 1
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 5
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 26 (10 personalized)

Submissions and rejections

Once again, a fairly quiet week. I did have one bit of news: after three months of waiting, I got a rejection from Analog Science Fiction. Admittedly, I expected to receive a rejection, and I expected it to take a long time. Analog is a bit notorious for very slow submission responses. Duotrope says they average 112 days for a response, with their longest reported response time just barely squeaking in under a year!

What was surprising was that the rejection was actually encouraging. Now, this is traditional publishing, so the encouragement consists of a single sentence: “I like your style of writing and suggest that you try us again.” I think that’s what Aeryn Rudel calls The Improved Form Rejection.

Still, Analog is one of the “big three” SFF magazines, and they’ve published enough Hugo and Nebula award winners to fill a few trophy cases, so I’ll happily take whatever encouragement they give, and I will likely try them again when I have another sci-fi piece.

NaNoWriMo? No. PerShoStoWriMo!

If you missed my previous post, I’m doing something a little different for November, and I’ve given it a dumb name. My guess was that I will write 10-15 short stories this month.

I started off on the right foot by missing Day 1 completely. No words written. On days two and three, I wrote a complete story each day, and comfortably met my “par” word counts (which still leaves me a day behind).

Both of these stories were for a secret project, and I have one or two more that I’m expecting to be similarly-sized. It’s looking like 10-15 stories might be a low estimate, but I’ll have a better feel for how things are going in a week or so.

Critiques

I am still painfully aware that I’m below my ratio on Critters, and Red Eyes is languishing in the holding pen, waiting. Writing 15 other stories probably won’t help with that problem, but I have been making progress and catching up. So long as I can finish a couple per week, Red Eyes should be back in the queue before the end of November.

Goals for Next Week

Resend The Incident at Pleasant Hills
Continue critiques
Blast out stories for PerShoStoWriMo!

PerShoStoWriMo

It’s November, and you know what that means. It’s the month when a bunch of writers try to string 50,000 words together into something almost, but not entirely unlike a novel.

Over the years, NaNoWriMo has grown from a thing that more and more people do to a full-fledged nonprofit corporation with a website and forums and programs and email lists. Somewhere in that process, it has become apparent that this organization has a penchant for saying and doing some questionable things. The most recent controversies involved a moderator grooming minors on the forums, and a statement on AI that suggested that any stance against AI-generated writing was ableist and exclusionary.

NaNoWriMo, the Unnecessary Organization

Thankfully, we still live in a world where pretty much everyone agrees that child-predators are the scum of the earth, and the forum debacle resulted in the whole forum more or less being shut down and a major shakeup in the organization.

The statement on AI, unsurprisingly to everyone except the people making it, did not go over well with the core NaNoWriMo demographic of people who like to write things themselves. It resulted in little more than a bunch of grumpy articles across the web, a quiet backtracking of the original stance, and a response from the NaNoWriMo organization that amounted to “Oh, guys, we didn’t mean it like that.“

Rather than write my own screed about how dumb this is, I’ll just point to a pair of rants by Chuck Wendig: one about the NaNoWriMo thing in particular, and another about the problems of generative AI. I agree with about 90% of what he says on this topic, and he’s just really good at channeling angry outbursts into blog form.

I’ve done my best to ignore the NaNoWriMo organization’s antics in recent years, but I think I’m finally done with them. What will I miss out on? A not-entirely terrible online word count tracker and a Discord that I never use? It seems clear that NaNoWriMo works pretty well as a thing people do, and not so well as an organization. So let’s treat it that way from now on.

PerShoStoWriMo

This year, I’m not writing a novel, or even something vaguely similar. No, it’s my Year of Short Stories, and I’m going to spend the month attempting to write 50,000 words of short stories. To get in the proper spirit, I’ve christened the month with a new, even more insane pseudo-acronym. It’s my Personal Short Story Writing Month: PerShoStoWriMo.

The advantage of a novel-sized story idea is that I generally don’t run out of plot in 50,000 words. I write sci-fi and fantasy, where 100,000-word novels are considered to be a bit on the short side. But when it comes to short stories, I try to actually stay on the short end of the spectrum. This poses a big question.

How many stories am I going to have to write to hit 50,000 words?

I don’t know, but I can make some educated guesses. If we ignore microfiction, my stories range from around 1400 words to 6500 words. The halfway point in that range is about 4000 words, and while I probably write more stories on the shorter end of the spectrum, I also tend to write long drafts and pare them down in editing.

So, to meet my goal, I’ll most likely have to write 10-15 stories.

Hmm. It sounds a little insane when I say it like that. I’ve written fewer stories over the past year. Still, those other stories were properly edited, then critiqued, then edited again. There will be no editing this month. That goes against the ethos of PerShoStoWriMo.

I do have a few short story ideas lined up or in progress. I’ve talked about The Vine, Portrait of the Artist in Wartime, and The Scout, and I’ve got one or two others rattling around in the back of my head. I also have a secret project in the works, and this will result in another couple of stories, at least.

An Exciting November

All in all, this PerShoStoWriMo thing feels right. It’s got a ridiculous name, it will force me to get a bunch of writing done, and it’s right on the edge of what feels possible.

I’ll keep you posted throughout the month, and we’ll see how it goes.

Are you doing any writing challenges in November? Let me know in the comments.

The Story Idea Vault — Virtual Afterlife

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a weekly writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Idea of the Week – Virtual Afterlife

Earth is becoming uninhabitable, and humankind faces extinction. Luckily, there’s a new invention that allows us to upload the human consciousness into a computer. A system is built in a stable orbit, designed to survive as long as possible without intervention, fed by solar power so long as the sun still shines. Ten thousand people are uploaded into the machine.

This artificial physical space can be made to look like anything. Who are the architects, and how do they design it? What can people do in this virtual existence that they couldn’t do in the real world? What do the power structures and politics look like in this virtual afterlife?

Are the remnants of humanity happy to have survived the end, or are they haunted by the loss of their species? Is a virtual world freeing, or does it feel like a prison?

Year of Short Stories — Week #40 and #41

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 – 1
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 6
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 24 (9 personalized)

Mini-Update

Despite the two weeks since my last update, I don’t have a lot to report on. Stories are still out on submission. Red Eyes is queued for critique. I’m working on getting my Critters ratio back up to 75%, but it’s slow going.

I suppose the cynical and expedient thing to do would be to bang out some smaller, quick critiques just to get it done. However, I really do enjoy critiquing. When I first started with Critters, I used to struggle to write a few hundred words of (hopefully!) helpful feedback. Now I find that my critiques can easily hit a thousand words or more.

November Plans

Last year I posted daily updates for my NaNoWriMo experience. I considered doing the same thing this year and working on the second half of that same novel, but I don’t really want to put the year of short stories on hold for a month, especially in the home stretch.

Instead, I’ve decided that I’ll be sticking to the conventional NaNoWriMo goal of writing 40,000 words in a month, but attempting to hit that goal by writing short stories.

How many? As many as it takes.

Do I have enough ideas and half-finished stories for that? I guess we’ll find out together!

Goals for Next Week

Keep on critiquing!
Plan out the stories I’ll be writing in November.

The Story Idea Vault — The Big One

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Feel free to use these ideas as a weekly writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Idea of the Week – The Big One

Wizards are often depicted constantly slinging fireballs and lightning bolts, but real magic isn’t like that at all. Real magic requires a huge amount of energy—energy that takes months, years, or even decades for a person to accumulate. Casting a spell burns all of that energy. Some wizards spend a lifetime accumulating energy for a single spell.

What spells do wizards spend all that time preparing? Do the rich and powerful pay fortunes for a single spell to be cast; or threaten, blackmail, and coerce wizards into doing what they want? Do the wizards keep their accumulated power a secret?

Year of Short Stories — Week #38 and #39

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 – 1
Submissions This Week – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 6
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 24 (9 personalized)

I missed last week’s update, so this will cover the past two weeks.

Submissions

As expected, Clarkesworld provided their usual speedy form rejection for The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk. I have to appreciate them as the fastest responders in professionally-paying sci-fi and fantasy, even if they are a very tough publication to get a foot in the door. I’ll keep trying.

I sent Bluefinch out again, and received no responses on other stories, despite having five other submissions out.

Red Eyes

It feels like I’ve been picking at my current story, Red Eyes, for ages, but I have made some progress. I finished this round of revisions at 6500 words. It’s still longer than I’d like, but I’ve submitted the story to Critters for critique. I’ll also be getting feedback from my local, non-internet readers.

I haven’t yet caught up on my Critters quota, but submitting this story will put me on the clock, as it won’t go out until I’m caught up. I’ll be spending my writing time doing that this week, instead of jumping into another story.

Present and Future

It’s hard to believe, but it’s week 39 of my year of short stories, and that means I’m 3/4 of the way done! In some ways I feel like I made less progress than I had originally hoped—I had plans to write a story per month—but I also feel like I’ve accomplished quite a bit. I’ve been able to submit a lot, I got a story accepted, and accumulated a pretty decent number of “near-miss” rejections.

Writing and submitting short stories is a strange mix of the craft and business sides of writing. This year has allowed me to cycle a number of pieces through draft, critique, revision and polish, and given me useful experience finding places to submit, crafting cover letters, writing brief bios, and tweaking each manuscript to different publications’ slight variations on standard manuscript format.

I believe my writing has improved considerably over the year so far, and I’m excited to continue adding to my stable of stories, and submitting them.

I’m not certain at this point if I’m going to do something NaNoWriMo-related in November, as is my semi-regular tradition. If I do, I’ll count that as a break in my year of short stories. Alternately, I might try to stay on theme and do some sort of month-long short story challenge instead.

Goals for Next Week

Get caught up on critiques!
Figure out what I’m doing in November

Year of Short Stories — Week #37

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 – 1
Submissions This Week – 2
Submissions Currently Out – 6
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 18 (9 personalized)

The Subs and the Pubs

Last week, Dr. Clipboard and Bluefinch came back to me, so this week I sent them out again–one to a publisher that usually responds in a few days, and one that typically takes more than a month. Luckily, I snuck this submission in right at the end of their quarterly deadline. I’m hoping that will make the response slightly faster.

Tom, Dick, and Larry also came back, with one of those odd rejections that mostly sounds like a form letter, but has just enough specificity that I suspect it’s not. The end result is the same, but these editors don’t seem to understand that I have to categorize the response for my stats!

The Edits

I continued to trim Red Eyes, shaving another hundred words off, and making a few other adjustments. I’m hoping I can trim around 400 more in this round of edits, to get it down to about 6,000 words.

I logged back into Critters.org after taking several months off. I’m several critiques behind, so I’m planning to do a couple per week to get caught up. I’ll need to get my ratio to 75% again by the time Red Eyes goes out for critique. Since it takes several weeks to get a story through the queue, and I haven’t submitted it yet, I should have plenty of time.

Goals for Next Week

Trim Red Eyes to 6,000 words
Finish 2 critiques

The Story Idea Vault — Across the Multiverse

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free. Use these ideas as a weekly writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Idea of the Week – Across the Multiverse

A man undergoes a traumatic event and discovers that he can jump between versions of himself in different universes. At first, he thinks he’s the only one who can do this. Then, he meets a woman who can do the same thing. They become friends, then lovers—but he slowly realizes that she is a dangerous megalomaniac. They have a violent falling-out.

Soon, they target other selves in other worlds. They build organizations across the multiverse. One aims to gain power: political, military, religious. The other organizes opposition groups.

How can either of them win? Do they continue fighting forever across infinite worlds?

Year of Short Stories — Week #35 and 36

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 – 1
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 5
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 22 (8 personalized)

Doubling Up

I missed last week’s post, so I’m doing a twofer this week. The upside is that I have more news to talk about. After a long period of slow responses, I received updates on five submissions.

Responses

Two of the responses I received were form rejections for drabbles. This isn’t too surprising since I “shotgun” submitted these, and I feel like they’re long-shots outside a very few specialized flash fiction publications.

The other three responses were for The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk and Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug. I was a little disappointed by the Dr. Clipboard form rejection. This was for a contest run by a magazine that had given me a “close, but no cigar” rejection on another story. It’s also the first submission I’ve actually paid for, with significant cash prizes on the line.

Bluefinch received one rote form rejection, and one very nice personalized rejection that said it had made it to the final round of consideration. It’s not as nice as an acceptance, but that kind of positive feedback from a pro-payment market at least gives me confidence that the story is solid.

With those responses, Bluefinch and Dr. Clipboard are freed up for submission once again, and I will be sending them out in the next couple days.

Perspective

After the long silent period, these rejections felt worse than usual. An important part of the process of submitting short fiction this year has been building up a tolerance for rejection. It never feels good to have a story rejected, but you get used to it by repeated exposure.

I think one reason so many authors don’t submit their work or choose an indie/self-publishing route is to avoid rejection. If you don’t ask, you can’t be told “no.” If you throw that e-book on Amazon and nobody buys it, that doesn’t feel good, but it’s still different from someone explicitly and directly telling you they don’t want it.

Every route in publishing is hard, and it seems likely that anyone who perseveres in the industry is either masochistic or has a screw loose. I think I’m probably the latter.

I checked Duotrope’s statistics for the contest where I received the rejection. All 14 submissions by Duotrope members were rejected. Only one even got a personalized response.

So far this year, I have a <5% acceptance rate on my story submissions. That sounds pretty bad. And yet, when I go to that Duotrope dashboard, I see this little notice:

Being good isn’t enough. You need perseverance too.

Work in Progress

In my last update, I talked about focusing on one story in an effort to get something done on my works in progress. I’ve been focusing on the story Red Eyes, to try to get it fit for Critters critique.

I spent a good amount of time completely rewriting a scene that wasn’t working, and I’m happy with the result. I also fixed a few smaller issues. The main challenge, however, is that it’s still quite long. I trimmed about 400 words through tiny cuts throughout, but it’s still almost 6700 words.

I reverse-engineered an outline of the eleven (!!!) scenes and their word counts, so I can see where the bulk of the story is. This is an interesting exercise, because some scenes definitely felt longer or shorter than they actually are. I plan to take at least one more general pass through the entire story and then focus on several of the longer sections to find places to trim.

Goals for Next Week

Submit Dr. Clipboard and Bluefinch again
Continue Editing Red Eyes