Category: Short Fiction

Year of Short Stories — Week #6

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 – 2
  • Rejections This Year – 2

It’s Quiet. Too Quiet…

I received no responses this week. Based on the average response times for the two places I’ve submitted, I expect to get at least one next week. Of course, as I get more stories into the rotation, this will pick up, and I’ll have fewer “quiet” weeks.

Revisions for Pleasant Hills

This was my big goal for the past few weeks: finish revisions on “The Incident at Pleasant Hills.” It only took about three times as long as I planned, but I’m happy with how the story turned out.

I finished with all of my revision notes, and it’s going to get one last read-through from my wife. Once she’s done and I’ve addressed her final feedback, it’ll be ready to send out.

Another One

One of the many nice things about writing short stories is that each one requires considerably less up-front thought than a novel. Now that I’m done with Pleasant Hills, I can jump right into the next.

I mentioned in previous weeks that I was thinking about “Portrait of the Artist in Wartime,” a story about a performance artist who uses time travel to make his point. I briefly thought about writing the story from the artist’s perspective, but I eventually decided that it would work better if it was told by his former assistant in the form of a magazine interview. Because the article is written with the expectation that the reader will already be familiar with some of the events of the story, I can leave out certain information at first, and create some twists and turns as it is revealed.

I reviewed my notes for this story, and discovered that I had actually written a few tentative pages at some point. I have a pretty clear idea of the ending, so I just need to plan out the rough beats that lead to that ending.

Other Bits and Bobs

Before I get too deep into “Portrait,” I’m going to think about some other projects as well.

I’d like to spend some time thinking about interactive fiction, to see if I can come up with an idea for Plotopolis. However, since interactive fiction is so niche, I don’t want to spend too much time on it. If I submit something and get rejected, there really isn’t anywhere else to send it, so it’s a dead story.

I’m also still occasionally stirring the stew of ideas for themed submissions. I might spend another few hours this week more actively working on that.

Goals for Next Week

  • Think about interactive fiction and themed submissions
  • Submit “Pleasant Hills”
  • Work on “Portrait”

Year of Short Stories —Week #5

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 – 2
  • Total Rejections – 2

(I doubt anyone is setting their watch to my blog posts, but I wanted to note that I’ll be shifting these updates to Mondays, which fits better with my writing schedule.)

Second Rejection

This week marked my second rejection of the year, a response for Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug, which had been out for about three weeks. I’ve now had one rejection for each story I’m submitting, which feels like a small milestone.

I’m learning to batch the effort of finding publications for a story by jotting down several options, so that when the story comes back to me, I can send it off again with less downtime.

Revisions for Pleasant Hills

After a couple weeks where I felt I wasn’t getting much done on this story, I tried to buckle down and get these revisions done. I even took a day off my day job to sneak in some extra writing time.

Revision is hard to quantify, especially with short stories. There are no word count quotas or chapters to measure progress against. I definitely get more done when I can set specific, measurable goals.

To that end, I made a checklist of problems to resolve and went through them one by one. Most of these items involved adding words, so the final step will be to trim, trim, trim.

So, as I suspected last week, I didn’t manage to finish. However, I’m close, and I should be done before the next update.

Goals For Next Week

  • Finish and submit Pleasant Hills
  • Start a new short story

Year of Short Stories —Week #4

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 – 2
  • Rejections – 1

The First Rejection of the Year

“Tom, Dick, and Derek” garnered my first rejection of the year. This was a turnaround of only a few days, but it’s not too surprising since it’s a drabble and the magazine was only accepting flash fiction. I’m still not entirely sure of the viability of 100-word stories, but I’ll continue submitting to flash fiction publications and see how it goes.

Revisions for Pleasant Hills

This week, I re-read all the feedback I had received for “The Incident at Pleasant Hills” and condensed it into a page of bullet points of things to address, and several more pages of small line edits and suggestions for wording improvements. Most of these are straightforward fixes. A few are things that the story needs, and I just need to figure out where to put them. But there are a couple problems that I don’t have a solution for yet.

One of the things I need to improve about my writing process is handling revisions. I was hoping to be done or close to done with this story last week, but now that I’m in the middle of it, I’ll be happy if I can get it all done in the next week. I’m quickly realizing that writing short stories is a juggling act between keeping finished stories out on submission, and writing and editing new stories.

Themed Submissions

I mentioned last time that I was thinking about trying some themed submissions.

This week, I trolled the Duotrope listings, looking for themed submissions in speculative fiction genres that pay pro and semi-pro rates. I started with the basic search, and was annoyed to find no good search options to filter down to these. So I searched the listings and read the submissions pages. It was only after I had gone through twenty or thirty publications that I discovered Duotrope’s entirely separate page, the Theme and Deadline Calendar, which is designed for exactly this.

Having gone on my own search before discovering these listings, I know it’s not showing everything that’s out there. For example, Apex Magazine’s monthly flash fiction contest doesn’t show up. This probably comes down to how the listings are categorized.

If you’ve got the time and the inclination to write for these themed submissions, it might be worth doing your own research to track them down. However, the Duotrope listing is pretty good, and won’t suck up a whole afternoon.

With a few options in hand, I spent time brainstorming for the Parsec short story contest’s “AI Mythology” theme. I filled a couple pages with Story Engine ideas, but nothing that particularly excited me. I find Story Engine useful because it creates interesting constraints, but in this case, where the theme is already a significant constraint, I think it might be too much.

I plan to come back to these themed submissions every week or two and try other methods of brainstorming. It’s a good exercise to stay productive when I don’t feel like working on the stories in progress.

Fun Find – Plotopolis

Plotopolis is a new site for interactive fiction. It’s launching this winter, but open for submissions and proposals now. If you’re not familiar with interactive fiction, I wrote a post about it. It can be as simple as Choose Your Own Adventure-style branching narrative, or as complex and gamified as Fallen London, with character attributes and an inventory of items.

Interactive fiction has gained some acceptance as gaming in general has entered the cultural mainstream, but it remains a fairly small niche, so it’s nice to see something like this popping up. Hopefully they find their feet and are able to stick around.

Goals for Next Week

Only one goal this week: revise Pleasant Hills! I want to get this one done and out for submission.

Year of Short Stories —Week #3

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 – 2

Submitting a Drabble

I reviewed quite a few options this week, and ended up submitting my drabble, “Tom, Dick, and Derek,” to a magazine taking flash fiction submissions. I’ve never sent out a drabble before, and I have no idea whether the incredibly short format will be a disadvantage or not.

As a general rule, it’s a little easier to sell short stories than long ones. In the old days, when everything was on paper, this was a simple matter of limited pages. Magazines cost money to print, and there’s a limit to the number of words that will fit. In a world where many publications are entirely online or have a web component, the limiting factor might be attention, rather than space.

However, I suspect the general rule breaks down when a story gets below about 500 words. While there are plenty of places to sell flash fiction, when the story gets short enough, the format becomes a distinguishing feature. There are a handful of publications that specialize in drabbles, but they’re few and far between.

Critique Revisions

My short story, “The Incident at Pleasant Hills,” is a more traditional short story at roughly 2000 words. I ran it through Critters a while ago, and got a lot of useful feedback. This week, I reacquainted myself with the story and began to re-read all that feedback, distilling it into broader issues and line edits. Hopefully I can finish those revisions this week.

Themed Submissions

While I was scanning publications in Duotrope this week, a few calls for themed submissions caught my eye. These are usually for one-off themed issues of magazines, but they can also pop up for anthologies or writing contests.

This is one of those things that I was aware of, but never really took seriously. Maybe it’s the difficulty of coming up with an interesting story for a specific prompt. Maybe it’s the concern that a story crafted to fit a theme will be harder to sell somewhere else if it’s rejected. However, if I’m going to be spending a year on short stories, it seems like a great time to get my feet wet.

I may spend some time brainstorming ideas for themed submissions this week, but if I don’t get around to it now, I’ll definitely try to dedicate some time later.

Goals for Next Week

  • Finish revising “Pleasant Hills”
  • Begin writing “Portrait of the Artist in Wartime”
  • Brainstorm ideas for themed submissions

Year of Short Stories —Week #2

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 (1 currently out)

An Unproductive Week, A Cool New Tool

Short post this week, as I ended up being busy and didn’t get much done in the short story department.

I did discover an exciting new tool, Chill Subs. It already provides a publication database and submission tracking tool for writers, similar to the Submission Grinder and Duotrope. Even better, it’s looking to unseat Submittable as the de facto tool for editors to receive and track submissions.

In recent years, Submittable has become almost ubiquitous among literary fiction magazines, pushing the transition from snail mail to electronic submissions for short fiction. But its pricing scheme is predatory. It charges not only a monthly fee, but a fee per submission processed. Since so many literary magazines live on the budgetary knife’s edge, this has helped to drive the now-common submission fees for literary writers hoping to get their fiction published.

I feel lucky to work in genre fiction. The fantasy and science fiction space has more than its fair share of technical people. We’re lucky to have developed tools like Moksha and the Clarkesworld submission system.

Chill Subs aims to bring its own submission manager to market some time in Fall 2024. Their delightful website even allows you to choose how optimistic you are about their chances, updating the language and graphics accordingly. It’s a small team operating with a surprising amount of transparency, and their love of the craft (and the authors and editors) shines through. I don’t know if I’m “confident AF,” but I really hope they succeed.

Goals for Next Week

Same as last time!

  • Revise “Pleasant Hills”
  • Research more publications and submit at least one drabble
  • Begin writing “Portrait of the Artist in Wartime”

Year of Short Stories —Week #1

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 (1 currently out)

Reviewing the Backlog

This first week, I spent some time reviewing short stories that I already have finished and edited.

“Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder-Drug” is a 1400-word modern fantasy story about a man in a drug trial who experiences an unexpected transformation. It has already been through critique and polishing, and is ready to send out.

In general, there tend to be more venues for shorter stories than longer ones. This is a nice length because most publications will accept it. It’s right on the edge of flash fiction territory (depending on your exact definition).

I recently gave a Critters critique that got me thinking about story titles and the ways they can add to the story itself. I spent some time rethinking this title, and while I didn’t end up finding one I liked better, it was still time well-spent. One of the most valuable things I get out of critiquing others’ work is new insights that I can apply to my own work.

I also have four finished drabbles that I’m fairly satisfied with. One is new, but the other three are already posted here on Words Deferred, so they could only be submitted to publications that accept reprints.

I don’t really know how easy it is to sell drabbles, since they’re so short. I’ve only seen them in a couple of publications that specialize in them, so my guess is that they are harder to place than flash fiction in the 500-1000 word range.

Submitting Stories

Duotrope is a great tool for narrowing down possible places to submit stories. I start by narrowing my search to the appropriate genre(s) and length. I also limit my search to professional pay rates. Well-paying publications are going to be more competitive, but you might as well try. If the story gets rejected, you can always submit to the semi-pros markets next.

However, that filtered list of publications is just the start of the process. The bulk of the effort is in reviewing those publications to find a good fit. After all, it’s a waste of time to submit a story to a place that doesn’t publish what you’re writing.

Duotrope has interviews with the editors of some publications, and these (usually) provide some insight into what they’re looking for. Ultimately, though, the best way to get to know a publication is to read it.

So, I read a few of their stories, if possible, and try to get a feel for what the editors like. Conveniently, a lot of publications these days are online, and it’s common for at least some stories to be available for free.

This all has the added benefits of immersing my brain in good short fiction and giving me a better understanding of what the current market is like in my chosen genres. It feels like a lot of effort now, especially if I decide that a publication isn’t a good fit for the story I’m sending out, but I hope that over time I’ll develop a good feeling for many of these markets, and I won’t have to do quite so much research.

This week, I only submitted one story, “Dr. Clipboard,” and that’s at least partly because I spent a few days deciding where to submit.

Work In Progress

I have one story in progress, a 2000-word sci-fi story called “The Incident at Pleasant Hills,” about the detonation of an architecture bomb with the power to reshape a city. It has been through critique and needs some revisions before it’ll be ready to go out the door.

The final story I’ll talk about this week is one that I’m just starting, tentatively titled “Portrait of the Artist in Wartime.” It’s a science fiction story about a performance artist who uses time travel to create his magnum opus. I’m going to try to write this in the form of an interview with the artist’s former assistant.

It’s interesting to note that the core ideas of both of these stories came from my brainstorming sessions with Story Engine cards.

Goals for Next Week

  • Revise “Pleasant Hills”
  • Research more publications and submit at least one drabble
  • Begin writing “Portrait of the Artist in Wartime”

2024 is the Year of Short Stories

Early in the life of this blog, way back in 2020, I made my novel Razor Mountain a main feature. I thought it would be interesting to document the process of writing a book from start to finish, and put it out episodically. This had the added benefit of aligning my blogging with the fiction I wanted to complete. It kept me writing, and kept the blog active. I believe the tech bros call this “leveraging synergies.”

However, all good things come to an end, or at least slow to a crawl. I’m still in the process of revising Razor Mountain, but I’ve found that there just isn’t as much worth writing about in the revision process as there was when I was working toward a first draft.

In November, I participated in NaNoWriMo, and it turned into a similar project almost by accident. I started writing about the process every day, and decided to stick with it for the entire month. The result was an extremely smooth NaNoWriMo experience, where I was able to reflect on what I was writing.

2024

Now, a new year has been released from a secret compartment in the ceiling, and threatens to roll over us like that boulder from Indiana Jones. I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions, but I do have a new goal for the year, which is both simple and difficult: write, edit, and submit as many short stories as possible.

Since it has worked well for me with other projects, I’m going to try blogging my way through this as well. This is self-serving: I want my writing here to encourage me to accomplish my fiction goals. The current plan is to do weekly updates, but I may adjust that depending on how much I have to say.

For each short story, I expect to

  1. Come up with a concept
  2. Write a draft
  3. Revise
  4. Submit to Critters for feedback
  5. Revise again
  6. Find a suitable publication via Duotrope
  7. Submit the story

As usual with the traditional publishing process, rejection is the norm. So once a story is out for submission, it will likely rack up a number of rejections. Even for successful short story authors, this is pretty normal. It’s rough out there.

As with my previous projects, my goal is to provide transparency for the curious. I’ll be honest about my successes and failures, and I expect there to be plenty of failures. But it should be fun, and I have no doubt I’ll learn a lot in the process.

The Short Story Series

As long as we’re talking about short stories, I’ll take a moment to plug my series about writing short stories. I wrote these in mid-2022. I’ve been thinking about a project like this for a while.

Drabble — A Going Away Party

The residents of the last escape ship wake up early and decide what events to attend. A Shakespeare reading or a striptease? A fistfight or a folk dance? A prayer service or a rave? An orgy or a tea ceremony?

The sacred, profane and mundane are represented in equal measure.

We disable the fire suppression systems for makeshift campfires. We sing songs and eat nutrient paste s’mores. Some laugh, some weep.

Enemy ships close in, faster and more powerful than ours. We take our sedatives, and sleep in each other’s arms.

All in all, not a bad send-off for humanity.

For more drabbles, check out the fiction section of Words Deferred…

Short Story Advice Roundup

The Short Story Series

This is the end of my short story series, at least for now. If you’re a writer who only writes long-form fiction, I’d like to try one more time to encourage you to at least give short story writing a try. I’m a firm believer that the more techniques and styles you have in your arsenal, the more they all inform each other and add depth to all your writing. Besides, short stories are fun to write and fun to read!

I wanted to wrap things up by pointing you to more short story writing resources. If you want to dig deeper, there are tons of articles. Here are a handful of the ones I’ve found useful.

For an introduction to some of the possibilities of short stories:

What is a Short Story? — Reedsy

For important elements of a short story:

How to Build a Short Story from the Ground Up — Chris the Story Reading Ape

For some advice on keeping your short story short:

How to Keep Your Short Story Short — Janice Hardy’s Fiction University

To avoid some common mistakes:

Common Mistakes in Short Story Writing — Chris the Story Reading Ape

To keep the reader interested:

Forget Hooks: How to Pull Readers Through a Short Story by Making Promises and Raising Questions — Janice Hardy’s Fiction University

For writing to a specific length and theme:

Gaining Readers Through Writing Short Stories — Life in the Realm of Fantasy

For an annotated description of the process that goes into a short story:

Writing the Short Story, Part 1: Experimenting — Life in the Realm of Fantasy

For advice on which markets to send your stories:

Submit or Surrender? A Tale of Three Publishers — Aeryn Rudel’s Rejectomancy

Reference Desk #15 — Duotrope vs. Submission Grinder

The Short Story Series

It’s the ultimate crossover event! Today we have a continuation of my short story series, as well as my Reference Desk series detailing useful tools for writers. Get ready for a battle of publication catalogues and a submission tracker showdown!

Finding the right place to submit your short fiction isn’t trivial. Back in the olden days, you might have to subscribe to an actual dead-tree trade journal just to have a somewhat up-to-date list of publications. These days, the internet gives us some easier options.

The two most popular submission tools for short fiction writers are Duotrope and Submission Grinder. Both of them are designed to help you find markets for your stories and track your submissions. Today, I’ll be comparing some of the different features between these two tools to give you a better idea of which one you might want to use.

Price

Let’s get this out of the way up front. Duotrope is a paid service. After a 7-day free trial, it costs $5/month or $50/year. Submission Grinder is completely free to use, although they have numerous options to donate.

If you don’t want to pay or can’t afford it, Submission Grinder is the tool for you.

Listings

Duotrope maintains listings of publishers of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and visual art. It also lists literary agents for fiction writers. Submission Grinder maintains fiction and poetry listings.

At the time of writing, Duotrope lists 5,027 fiction markets. They claim that they keep their listings accurate and up-to-date by checking each active listing for changes about once a month. They also run more thorough check twice a year, contacting the editors or agents if anything appears to be inaccurate or if there are signs that the market may be dead or on hiatus. (Websites not being updated is honestly a pretty big problem with small markets.)

At the time of writing, the Submission Grinder has 2,669 listings for fiction and poetry. It’s not entirely clear from the webpage how the listings are kept updated, although there are links for users to suggest a new market listing or suggest a correction, so it seems to be mostly crowdsourced.

Submission Tracking

Both tools let you

  • Add stories to your tracker
  • Add submissions for a story
  • Mark a submission as accepted, rejected, or no response
  • Track and search personal statistics
  • Track deadlines

Both tools also aggregate the statistics across their user base. This allows them to show information like what percentage of submissions are accepted or rejected by a specific market. They both have anonymized feeds of recent activity.

Duotrope has a plethora of statistics*, including the markets that are fastest and slowest to respond, and those that are most or least likely to accept (or even respond!)

*Note: you can see the list, but not the actual statistics, without a subscription

Additional Features

  • Both tools have an optional newsletter with new listings and other publishing news.
  • Duotrope has transcripts from hundreds of editor and literary agent interviews—possibly useful for getting a better idea of what your favorite market is looking for, or just general good practices.
  • Duotrope has some basic guides for writers, especially around submitting your work. It also has guides to using their various tools.

Takeaways

Honestly, both of these tools get the job done. They make it easy to search a lot of different markets, and to track your submissions as you send them out.

Overall, I do find Duotrope to be a little bit nicer. It has a few more features and a little more polish, but that’s to be expected when they have a subscription fee. If you don’t mind spending the money, I think Duotrope is good value for the cost.

Submission Grinder feels a little more like a community project, crowdsourcing market info and relying on donations. Maintaining a popular tool site takes work, and based on their Patreon, I think Submission Grinder is powered more by love than money.

If you have a story or two that you’re looking to send out, you should definitely try out one of these services. It will make it a lot easier to find ideal markets and keep track of what gets sent where.