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Year of Short Stories — Week #27

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
  • Submit more drabbles
  • Work on incomplete stories
  • Catch up on critiques

Year of Short Stories — Week #26

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
  • Finish a few Critters critiques

Returning to Go

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.

Reblog: “800 Submissions: An Analysis” — Aeryn Rudel

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.

Read the whole post at Aeryn’s blog, Rejectomancy…

Year of Short Stories — Week #25

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

A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds

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.

The Read Report — May 2024

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.

Hogfather

By Terry Pratchett

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

By John Crowley

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.

See you at the end of June!

Year of Short Stories — Week #19 and #20

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.

Goals for Next Week

  • Rough draft of Portrait.

Reblog: Rejection Doesn’t Have to Hurt — Lev Raphael

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.

Read the full article over at Lit Mag News…

Year of Short Stories — Week #17 and 18

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.

Goals for Next Week

  • Make some progress on Red Eyes and Portrait