Category: Short Fiction

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.

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.

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

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

Year of Short Stories — Week #34

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 – 9
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 18 (7 personalized)

Submissions

I think I may have been spoiled by publications that respond to submissions quickly. I suppose I shouldn’t complain, since it gives me the opportunity to work on my stories in progress. I received a single form rejection this week—for one of my many recent drabble submissions—and that’s more exciting than the past couple weeks. Hopefully the long quiet means several of my stories are being ushered reverently into the shortlist piles for multiple magazines.

Or maybe summer is coming to a close, and all of the editors are very, very busy.

Writing

If it hasn’t been obvious, the last few weeks have felt as though I’m spinning my wheels on my stories in progress. This week, in the moments when I had time to work on my writing, I felt myself shying away from it. In the past, this sort of thing would precipitate a lot of negative self-talk, where my brain would happily provide a dialogue with some cruel and negligent parent I never had, telling me that I’m lazy and will never amount to anything.

Approaching middle age, I’ve gotten a little better at introspection and recognizing my own mental patterns, so I try to cut off these patterns of thought before they get going. When I’m “lazy,” it’s usually some form of demotivation, and the key to getting over that is to recognize the specific problem and plan to overcome it. To that end, I decided to evaluate these stories and write a little about how each one is going.

  • Red Eyes – This story has a complete draft. It has moments that I love, and the overall arc feels good. It has one scene that doesn’t really make sense and needs to be rewritten. It is 7000 words, and I would really like to cut that by…two thousand?…which would require some kind of restructuring. I’m also concerned that the core sci-fi concept is not clearly described and will be confusing.
  • Portrait of the Artist in Wartime – Incomplete. I suppose I’m still not totally confident in the structure that I’m using, which is a mix of interview and flashback. I’m also worried that the ending will feel too much like a twilight zone “gotcha” moment. This story is threatening to be longer than I intended.
  • The Vine – Very incomplete. I have a strong general idea of the beginning, middle, and end, but I haven’t nailed down all the scenes yet. When I try to bullet-point them, I have yet another story that looks like it’s going to be awfully long.
  • The Scout (temp title) – Incomplete. I have some strong “visual” ideas of the aesthetic I would like to get across in this story, but they aren’t well-defined enough. I need to develop this into more than a simple Venn diagram of cultural influences. I’m not entirely sure how I want the story to end. With only the first third drafted, it’s 1700 words, pointing to another fairly long story to round things out.

The clear through-line I hadn’t noticed before this exercise is that I’m working on a whole slew of long (maybe overly long) stories. Estimating the eventual lengths, I have something like 25,000 words of stories in progress. Assuming a 6000-word story is roughly three times more effort than a 2000-word story, it probably shouldn’t be surprising when I feel overwhelmed.

My original thought was that when I’m stuck on one thing I can work on something else. Instead, I now feel stuck on several things. My multitasking experiment has not been a success so far.

I think I have been staring at Red Eyes for too long, and I need to just make some rough cuts and submit it to Critters to get external feedback on what’s actually working and what’s not. Then I can revise again. This story is furthest along and should be prioritized.

Out of the three more incomplete drafts, The Vine is the one that I am most excited about at the moment. However, I’ve been going back and forth between outlining and writing, and for me, this is not a good workflow. I need to fix the problems with the outline and then try to write it straight through.

The other two stories will return to the back burner as I try to focus on one thing at a time again.

Goals for Next Week

  • Rewrite the difficult scene in Red Eyes and do some basic cleanup.
  • Submit Red Eyes to Critters.
  • Finish outlining scenes for The Vine.

Year of Short Stories — Week #33

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 – 1
  • Submissions Currently Out – 10
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)

Quick Update This Week

I’m going to be brief this week, because there’s not a lot to report. I continued to make progress on my unfinished stories, although I’ve been switching back and forth. This week I worked on The Vine again. My biggest worry was that it would end up being too long, but I had some ideas this week that I think will tighten it up quite a bit.

Once again, I received no responses to my submissions this week, but I did send out The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk to another publication that recently opened for submissions and seemed like a good fit.

Keeping tabs on Duotrope’s “What’s New in Fiction Publishing?” page also continues to pay off, as I noticed a couple of new or recently opened venues for my drabbles. I’ll be reviewing those this week to see if they’re worth a submission.

Goals for Next Week

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, my main goal is to continue making headway on my (too many) stories in progress. I may also submit a drabble or two if these new publications look promising.

Year of Short Stories — Week #32

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.

Year of Short Stories — Week #31

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.

Year of Short Stories — Week #30

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.