Category: year of short stories

Week 3 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is week three: Jan. 17 – Jan. 23.

Stats

  • Stories Finished: 0
  • Submissions Currently Out: 2
  • Submissions Total: 1
  • Rejections: 2
  • Acceptances: 0

Keeping up the Pace

These first few weeks of the year have been about setting up a scaffold for the work yet to come. I’m now feeling like I’m in a comfortable place.

Each week I have some “standard” work: completing a Critters critique, meeting my first draft writing quota and my revision quota, and writing something for the blog. I like having some checklist items that I can work on without too much thought at the end of a long day. Beyond that, I can choose my own adventure.

I’m also getting back into the habit of scouring Duotrope’s upcoming themed submissions calendar. This is something I like to do pretty regularly when I’m writing short stories. Occasionally, a theme will inspire an idea for a new story, and if I already happen to have a story that fits a theme, those are great places to submit.

I didn’t find anything in the near future, but there were a couple themes opening in the next month or two that fit the stories I’m already shopping around.

Goals and Results

My goals from last week were to submit a story to Critters, revise another story, and keep up with my self-imposed quotas.

First, I spent some time cleaning up my newest and shortest story in progress, Taco Cat Employee Manual v7.1. As is typical, these are pretty light revisions based on feedback from my in-house beta readers (my wife and daughter) and anything that stands out to me after letting the story sit for a week or two. With that done, I sent it off to the Critters queue, and it should go out for feedback in early February. I’ll be curious to see how many responses it gets as a flash fiction piece that will only count for half credit.

In addition to those revisions, I dug into Red Eyes, a much longer story with a laundry list of improvements that need to be made. I made some progress, but there’s a long way to go.

The work I put into those two stories just about got me caught up on my revisions quota. Most of my writing quota was knocked out by working on a little horror story I’m calling Estate Sale, which I did partly while waiting at the DMV on a Friday afternoon. Once again, having a story in progress on my phone has paid off, even if I have to type with my thumbs. (Yeah, I probably could have brought the laptop. But I didn’t want to.)

Next Week

My first goal for next week is to work on Red Eyes revisions. I’m going to try to get the story done in the next two weeks. My second goal is to do some light cleanup on one of my stories that’s still in need of critique. That way, I will have Red Eyes ready to submit to publications by the time the Critters feedback for Taco Cat comes rolling in. I can immediately submit the next piece to Critters and work on the Taco Cat revisions while it works its way through the queue. Like a short story assembly line.

That’s all for week three. See you next Monday.

Week 2 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

This is week two: Jan. 10 – Jan. 16.

Stats

  • Stories Finished: 0
  • Submissions Currently Out: 2
  • Submissions Total: 0
  • Rejections: 2
  • Acceptances: 0

Finding a Groove

I’m still getting back into the rhythm of short story writing, but it’s less daunting than it was in 2024. I’ve done this before, and now it’s just a matter of doing it better.

I’m going to have a standard block of stats at the top of these posts. I haven’t decided exactly what those will be yet. I’ll finalize it when I feel more settled into a process.

Last week, I thought about splitting out the weekly stats from the yearly stats, but now I’m second-guessing that. The numbers just don’t change very much from week to week, and I don’t think it would be very interesting. Last week I also included a “stories in progress” count, but it’s hard to decide what that means. I have quite a few half-finished stories and first drafts in need of revision. Whether a story is “in progress” mostly comes down to whether I’m spending time thinking about it or actively rearranging the words.

What really matters is stories that are done done, and stories submitted to publishers. So I’m sticking to that for now.

This is also an appropriate time to note that for some people (like myself), there’s an allure to this kind of unnecessary bookkeeping. It can make you feel productive. It can also be an excuse to procrastinate by poking around the outskirts of writing-related activities without getting the core work done.

Goals and Results

Last week, I said that I had three goals.

#1 – The Rewrite

One of my stories had come back from the publisher with a rewrite request. The story centers on two characters who are friends, and it lightly hints at a bit more than that. The problem was that I submitted to a themed issue around relationships. The rewrite request, logically enough, suggested that I put the hinted relationship clearly on the page.

I have to admit, I had a hard time getting started on that rewrite. I’m not sure if it was because I had to dive back into a story that I’ve considered “done” for a while, or some other mental block. However, when I actually sat down to do it, the rewrite was fairly straightforward. It was easy to identify a handful of places that needed to change.

The story is better now. It makes sense: the characters have stronger feelings toward each other, and that only increases the tension when they find themselves at odds. Even if the publisher ends up rejecting the rewritten story, this is a good result. Their suggestion helped me improve it in a way that I wouldn’t have gotten to on my own.

#2 – Critiques

I knew going into the new year that I was going to be doing another year of short stories. While I continued doing some writing in 2025, I had not done any critiques on Critters. So I reset my count around the start of the year, but I had to complete three critiques to get caught up to the point where I could submit my own work to the queue.

I completed my three critiques across two weekly batches—Critters runs on a Wednesday to Wednesday schedule—and then discovered that I only got 2.5 credits. Now half-credits are normal for critiques of stories under 2000 words, as a way to encourage people to look at the longer stories. But the story was well over 2000. So I completed one more just to ensure I was fully caught up, and sent a message to Andrew Burt, who runs the site.

Burt responded very quickly and fixed the issue. So now I’ve got credit to spare. (That guy should be canonized a Saint of the Writing Internet for the time, energy, and money he has dedicated to that site over the years!)

Critters is a standard part of my process when I’m writing short stories. Now that I’m caught up, I’ll be doing roughly a critique per week for the rest of the year, and I always run my stories through Critters in the rewrite process.

#3 – More Revision

My final goal was to find more time for revisions. At the end of 2025 I found myself in the unusual (for me) position of having three short story first drafts written and waiting for edits. I want to start the year by polishing up those stories. If I’m going to hit my goal of 50 submissions this year, I need more stories to submit.

So far, I’m finding the writing spreadsheet helpful for this. My writing goal is an average of 100 words of new writing per day, and 10 minutes of revision time. The spreadsheet tracks that and tells me how ahead or behind I am for the year so far. As of Week 2, I’m about an hour and a half behind on my revisions, but seeing that number does actually work as a motivator, and I’m catching up.

Thanks to that rewrite request and Critters critiques, I found myself naturally in a revising state of mind. However, I didn’t revise one of those 2025 stories. I revised a completely new story. Which brings me to…

Taco Cat

I wrote yet another story. I exacerbated my too-many-first-drafts problem. But it’s okay. I’m pretty happy about it.

I mentioned in Week 1 that I was going to keep a story in progress stashed on my phone, so I could write in little bits of down time throughout the day. The result was that I wrote an 1100-word flash fiction piece over the course of the week. It’s currently titled Taco Cat Employee Manual 7.1, and it’s a strange little story in the form of a hacked fast food employee manual from a cyberpunk dystopian future.

So even though it still feels a little weird to write fiction on my phone, it feels like a resounding success two weeks in. It’s a great alternative to social media or mindless mobile games. I’ve already started a new phone story and put a few hundred words into that one.

Revising on the tiny screen, however, does not feel so good. My revision process involves copying and pasting, making notes and referring back to those notes repeatedly. I end up changing things that can thread throughout a story. None of this works very well on the small screen. I’m going to keep trying to figure out ways to make it work, even if that ends up being something like jotting ideas and notes during the day and doing the brunt of the editing work in front of the computer at night and on the weekends.

Goals for Next Week

  1. Submit a story to Critters
  2. Revise a story—Red Eyes
  3. Do just enough new writing

Critters limits the number of stories that go out to the group each week, to ensure that they all get a decent number of critiques. Usually, it takes a couple of weeks for a story to percolate up through the queue. So this week I want to do some cursory cleanup on one of my stories—probably Taco Cat—and submit it to Critters for additional feedback. It’ll likely go out in early February.

Next, I’m going to work on revisions for a story that went through Critters over a year ago: Red Eyes. Unfortunately, I think these edits are going to be significant and complicated, and it’s a long story.

Finally, I plan to do just enough new writing to keep up with the very modest quota I set for myself in my spreadsheet. The bottleneck in my process is clearly revision at this point, but hey, writing new things is fun.

Week 1 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Jan. 1 – Jan. 9

Due to the new year, I had to incorporate a partial week here at the start. This “week” was nine days.

  • Stories in Progress – 2
  • Submissions This Week – 0
  • Submissions Currently Out – 3

Yearly Totals

  • Submissions: 0
  • Rejections: 1
  • Acceptances: 0

Starting the Year

It’s always hard to get back into the swing of things after a vacation. Tacking on some New Year’s resolutions doesn’t help. Just when I would prefer to slow-roll into the new year, I’ve got to do all that stuff 2025-me promised? What a drag.

Firstly, I set up a writing spreadsheet. It’s not as detailed as some I’ve tried in the past, which will hopefully make it easier to keep up to date. For now, I’m tracking my daily words and rough minutes of revision time, aiming to write a minimum of about 100 words per day on average. I know that’s not a lot, but it’s a minimum, and at this point I’m just getting in my reps.

To aid in this, I made a plan to always have a short story in progress on my phone. This gives me the opportunity to jot down a few words when I might otherwise waste time. I’d guess writing on a phone sounds awful to most authors, but I’ve found that e-books and audio-books on my phone have greatly increased my capacity for reading. Why not try the same thing with my writing? There are usually a few times during the day when I have a spare few minutes, and the phone is always in my pocket. Besides, it’s not too onerous when I’m only jotting down a hundred words at a time.

Secondly, I reset my critique ratio on Critters. For those who aren’t familiar, Critters has a system that requires submitting about three critiques a month to be allowed to submit your own stories for critique. I haven’t done any critiques for the better part of a year, so I requested a reset. This wipes out my deeply negative ratio, putting my count at only -1. I plan to submit a couple critiques this upcoming week so I can put a story written in 2025 into the queue for feedback.

Submissions and Responses

I have a few submissions still out from late 2025. One of those came back this week as the first form rejection of 2026. Nothing too exciting there.

I also got something of a soft rejection. I had submitted a story with admittedly very light romance elements to a themed contest, and they responded with the suggestion that I resubmit with the relationship angle more front-and-center. The wording was ambiguous as to whether that was just politeness or significant interest, but I’ll likely give it a shot and resend.

Goals for Next Week

My to-do list is already longer than I’d like, and I’m working on being realistic about the time I have and what I can get done. It’s a balancing act between self-honesty and pushing myself to be a little more productive.

Top of the list is that story rewrite, since that’s the most time-sensitive. Next is catching up on critiques, as that will facilitate revisions. Getting “finished” stories polished is my fastest track to having more to submit, and that’s key if I want to meet my goals for the year. Lastly, I’d like to work on ways to fit more revision time into my week. This might mean putting some new story writing time on the back-burner, so I’m not simply wracking up more and more stories that aren’t ready for submission.

New Year’s Writing Resolutions — 2026

Another year is in the books, and a new one looming on the horizon. Last post I recapped my 2025. In this post, I’ll get into my plans for 2026.

Another Year of Short Stories

Way back in 2024, I declared it my year of short stories (or YOSS for the acronymically-inclined). I focused on writing, editing, and submitting short fiction on a scale that I had never done before. Not only was this a lot of fun, but I feel that it really helped me improve a variety of writing skills.

At the start of 2025, I was hesitant to repeat myself. Well, screw it! I’m getting old and set in my ways, so I’m doing it again in 2026.

With 2024 as my baseline, I aim to make YOSS 2026 bigger and better. My goals are:

  1. Finish and submit at least twelve short stories
  2. Send at least 50 submissions
  3. While I’m at it, post on Words Deferred 100 times.

Completing a short story per month will be the biggest challenge. However, I think it’s doable. I currently have four or five stories already written that need various amounts of revision. I have another three stories that are partly written. That gives me a decent head start.

In 2024, the original Year of Short Stories, I managed about 35 submissions. With a dozen new stories, getting to fifty submissions should be fairly straightforward.  I expect that to be the easiest goal to achieve. I also have a few stories already out, and I’ll be keeping my eyes open for reprint opportunities as well.

One hundred posts on Words Deferred works out to slightly less than two per week, which is what I’ve already been aiming for over the past year. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of short fiction-related topics as a part of a second Year of Short Stories. Beyond that, as I mentioned in my most recent State of the Blog post, I’ve developed a number of series or templates I can use to keep things interesting:  the Idea Vault, Games for People Who Prefer to Read, Reference Desk, Read Reports, and perhaps a few reblogs here and there.

The Enduring Allure of an Organized Schedule

I suspect that anyone going through my old posts can easily see that I have a love-hate relationship with organization and scheduling. Long have I aspired to the “write every day” mantra advocated by Stephen King and Dorothea Brande, but my attempts at keeping up that schedule rarely last more than a month. (Of course, it’s a little easier when you’re a full-time writer who can dedicate a few hours to writing time each and every day.)

Still, as much as I try to cultivate a creative mind, I also have the brain of a lifelong engineer. I like order. I actually enjoy planning. I write outlines. It galls me a little bit to be so unstructured when it comes to writing. So I keep on trying.

This year, I’m going to start with a loose plan—a set of weekly checkboxes to tick off, but no particular order. I plan to use a very basic agile loop: setting goals at the start of the week, working through the tasks, and reviewing the results at the end of the week.

One of the things I really enjoyed about writing short stories in 2024 was that it requires the exercise of many different writerly skills: ideation, writing, revision, polish, and submitting the work (with all the little businessy bits that entails). It’s hard to get all that variety of experience on a regular basis when you’re exclusively working on longer work. I intend to set my goals across this full spectrum of writing.

What About You?

Do you have any New Year’s writing resolutions? Anything you found challenging in the past year that you’re looking to overcome? Or exciting new goals? Let me know in the comments.

Year of Short Stories — Week #52 Retrospective

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.

The Final Tally

  • Stories – 7
  • Submissions this year – 35 (5 still out)
  • Acceptances – 1
  • Rejections – 29 (11 higher tier)

Thus ends my Year of Short Stories.

Looking at these numbers, I do wish I had gotten more stories out the door, and I would have loved to get more acceptances. However, I think this is an excellent starting point. If nothing else, I have had a ton of fun writing and submitting stories, and I feel very comfortable with the process now.

The only thing I can do to increase that acceptance count is to write more stories to the best of my ability and continue sending them out.

Refining the Process

Prior to this year, I wrote short stories haphazardly, when an idea struck me and kept my interest. I submitted pieces occasionally, but I never pursued it with any seriousness.

This year, I took it seriously. I polished up a couple of finished stories and wrote several more. I sent stories through Critters critique, while submitting more than 50 of my own critiques of others’ work. I revised those stories far more than anything I have written before.

I know that many authors will grind their teeth while thinking about submitting their work to publishers, but I will argue that this is important practice. Internalizing the standard formatting, writing your own biographical blurb, and learning to write a cover letter—however brief—is valuable. Adjusting all of it to a publisher’s expectations is also important experience.

Today’s technology makes it possible to write alone, revise alone, and publish instantly. I don’t think that’s the way to produce great work, and the long tail of Amazon e-books is evidence of it. The old stereotype of the reclusive author is the exception, not the rule. Creativity is a feedback loop, and that means authors who want to take their craft seriously need to develop professional skills (like selling themselves and their work), and seek honest and tough feedback to actively improve.

Getting a story published by a small website; or a big podcast; or a top-tier, pro-payment magazine tells you something about what you’ve written. “This isn’t quite what we’re looking for” rejections and “send us more of your stuff” rejections are little puzzle pieces that slowly assemble themselves into way markers for future stories.

The indie publishing pundits loves to rag on all the gatekeepers of traditional publishing, and I don’t think anyone should feel beholden to the gatekeepers. But I do think that your writing will become a lot stronger if you push yourself to write stories that can compete with hundreds of other submissions in a slush pile, and catch the eye of jaded, chain-smoking editors who have read more stories in the past year than most of us read in our lifetimes.

That editor doesn’t get to unilaterally decide what’s a good story and what isn’t. But if you can’t find anyone immersed in stories who really likes the thing you’ve written, then it might be time to revise it, or set it aside and write the next thing.

Publishing stories the traditional also way forces you to find your audience. You have to learn what kind of readers and editors like the stuff you’re writing, and that’s incredibly valuable information if you want to get your stories in front of readers who will love them.

The Joy of Short Stories

I love novels, and I’m sure they account for the vast majority of the words I’ve read in my lifetime. Unfortunately, writing a novel is like slaying a giant—it’s not the best thing to try when you’re still learning how to swing a sword.

This past year of experience has confirmed for me that writing short stories is a fantastic way to improve my writing quickly. Writing short stories allows me to jump between genres, to try out new characters and new settings. I can spend a few thousand words with an idea and then let it go. The price of failure is low, and the joy of experimentation is sky-high.

Writing short stories and actively submitting them means I’m exercising all of my authorial muscles. I’m jumping between first drafts, revisions, critiques, and submissions. I’m constantly iterating and incorporating feedback into individual works, but also into my process as a whole.

Rejection and Acceptance

The final takeaway that I have from the past year of writing short stories is more of a Zen attitude toward my own work.

Writing is often incredibly personal. We joke about our stories being like our children. But that kind of protective love makes it harder to improve. It’s hard to take negative feedback on a story if you think of it as your baby. It’s hard to take rejection.

Luckily, the easiest way to overcome those feelings is through brute force. Write lots of stories. Get as much criticism as you can, and then improve them. Send them out, and get rejected, repeatedly. By the time you’ve built up your own little one-person story factory, those pointed critiques start to be fun, because they provide opportunities to make the story better. The rejections roll off your back, and you submit again and move on.

I recently listened to David Sedaris on a podcast, and he said one of the keys to his success was never confusing the writing with the publishing. Ironically, I think the best way to internalize that sentiment is to be repeatedly rejected by publishers.

If you really want to, you can try to follow the market trends. You can improve your odds of publication by submitting to venues that fit your work, and submitting relentlessly. Trying to get paid is hard. Every submission is a job interview with hundreds or thousands of applicants.

And yet, if you already love the writing, getting paid is just a bonus.

Goals for 2025

My Year of Short Stories may be done, but my short story writing will continue. If anything, I’d like to finish more stories this year than I did in 2024. After all, the story factory is built, and I have no shortage of ideas.

Of course, I’d like to get a few more stories published in the upcoming year as well, but I have less control over that. So I’ll just keep submitting.

Year of Short Stories — Weeks #50 and #51

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 – 2
  • Submissions Currently Out – 5
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 29 (11 higher tier)

Submissions

I missed last week, so this is a double update. I’m also pretty sure that I started this series a few weeks into the year, and yet I’m approaching week fifty-two…which makes me suspect my count got messed up somewhere. In any case, we’re approaching the end of the year!

One of my drabbles came back two weeks ago, and I had another that had been sitting idle, so I spent some time digging through Duotrope for good places to submit them. I still struggle to find good potential homes for these, as they’re technically “reprints” that have been on the blog previously. I’m currently looking at non-paying markets to expand my options.

Payment in cents per word are generally paltry for 100-word stories anyway, so pursuing the paid options is really just for the ego boost of getting into a bigger, more difficult-to-crack publication.

The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk also came back to me in the past week with a form rejection, which is always disappointing after a longish wait. So it goes. I sent it back out alongside one of the drabbles.

Revisions

I haven’t been doing much on the Red Eyes revisions, and whenever I’m not getting things done, I have that feeling that I ought to work harder. However, I did have several new ideas for the story in the past week, and this is something that happens fairly often when I’m not actively working much on a story, but I have it on my mind. It makes me wonder if the extra time is necessary, or if I’d get to a similar place by spending more time at the keyboard (or at least staring at the screen).

This sort of thing also makes me wonder whether it’s better to let stories sit like this, and work on other things in the meantime, or whether it’s better to stick to one thing to completion. Switching between stories means thinking less about that story in waiting, which means those new ideas and changes in perspective may not come.

I tend to vacillate back and forth on this, sometimes focusing more on a single thing, and sometimes switching between several. Maybe that’s the way to do it.

Goals for Next Week

None. I’m going to enjoy the holidays with my family. If I write, I write. If I don’t, that’s fine too.

Year of Short Stories — Week #49

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 – 4
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 29 (11 higher tier)

A Quick Update

I don’t have a lot to report this week. A single rejection came back for No More Kings, which was something of a long-shot to begin with, being a drabble and a reprint. I’ve got a couple of these drabbles just hanging around taking up space, and I should probably spend some time finding places to submit them again in the next week or two.

I’m still working on Red Eyes revisions, although I admittedly didn’t get a lot done this week. Still, any progress is good progress, and a long winter vacation is on the horizon.

Approaching the End of the Year

I’m beginning to feel the end of 2024 closing in. For my first year really dedicated to short stories, I’m fairly pleased with the results. I’m sure I’ll do a final retrospective, but I’ve already managed to make 30 submissions. Not too shabby.

Goals for Next Week

  • Look for places to send drabbles
  • Continue Red Eyes revisions

Year of Short Stories — Week #48

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 – 28 (11 higher tier)

Submissions

No rejections or new submissions this past week (or rather, this past 4-5 days, since I was late in posting last week’s update). My lone submission the previous week was Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug, which had just come back to me with a contest honorable mention.

Since I do a lot of my writing work on the weekends, I often resend stories and write blog posts in the same day. Before I do that, I look at the Duotrope Theme and Deadline Calendar, and the Publishing News. The calendar gives me a convenient list of themed issues and anthologies with deadlines in the next month, and the news page gives me a list of new publishers and those that have recently opened to submissions. These two lists are incredibly valuable when you’re sending out short stories.

Most weeks, I don’t find anything particularly exciting in the theme calendar, but it’s still worth checking because I occasionally find an upcoming issue or anthology whose theme fits one of the stories that I’m resubmitting that week.

Last week was one of those weeks, and I found an anthology that sounds perfect for Dr. Clipboard. Sure enough, I got a response within a few hours, holding the story for further consideration.

Further Consideration

This is the first time I’ve gotten this style of response for a story submission. As is typical for anything related to short story submissions, Aeryn Rudel has an article. He puts holds, further consideration, and short listing all in the same bucket—a story that someone at the publisher read and liked enough to consider publishing it.

Since most markets are inundated with submissions and will only end up publishing a fraction of the stories they like, it makes sense for them to keep their options open until the end of their submission window.

Not every publisher notifies the writer that their story is being held. They’ll just hold it and either send an acceptance or rejection when they’ve made a final decision. As a writer, you can appreciate a publisher that communicates the hold, or you can be frustrated to have yet another reason to get your hopes up, and possibly disappointed if that hold results in a rejection.

Personally, I’d rather have the additional information. Even if the story ends up being rejected, a positive, personalized response still tells me that the story is probably solid, and I just need to find the right publication for it.

Stories in Progress

I still have some projects lingering from my truncated November “PerShoStoWriMo.” I haven’t gotten a lot of words down for those stories, but they’re still taking up brain space, and I may spend more time with them in the coming weeks.

I’m still in the process of condensing the critiques I received for Red Eyes into actionable changes. In some cases this is a straightforward rewording or cut, but in other cases it requires a fair amount of thought to figure out how I want to address a concern (or if I want to address it at all). I may write a post in the future about this process.

The most interesting piece of feedback I received was that the length of the story is good. It clocks in around 6,500 words, which is long for me, and I explicitly asked readers if they saw any good places to trim that word count. A few readers ignored the question, but most of them said there were no good places to make a significant cut. A couple even said that they’d like to see a longer version of the story. One suggested a novelette, the other suggested a full-blown novel.

While I don’t plan to follow that advice, the unified response does alleviate my fears that the story is too long. I suppose I’m just stuck with a longer story, and I’ll have to deal with that when I’m finished editing and have to look for markets to submit to.

Goals for Next Week

  • Continue revising Red Eyes
  • Spend some time on one of those other story ideas

Year of Short Stories — Week #46 & 47

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

  • Stories in Progress – 2
  • Submissions This Week – 1
  • Submissions Currently Out – 5
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 28 (11 higher tier)

Happenings

It has been a busy two weeks, and I’ve been neglecting the blog. My wife and I had a double 40th birthday party, which necessitated the first thorough cleaning of the new house. We also finally finished putting away all the little things that had been neglected since the move, and added some finishing touches, like hanging pictures and paint touch-ups.

PerShoStoWriMo (my short-story-writing replacement for NaNoWriMo) was a bust. I tend to do well in these kinds of challenges when I have a good plan at the start and get ahead early. Unfortunately, I started this November a day behind, with merely a concept of a plan, and fell steadily further behind.

I did write drafts for several stories, but I’m nowhere near the original word count goal. Yes, there are still a couple days of November left, but I’m ending it here. It was fun and moderately productive, and that’s good enough.

I do still have one story, tentatively called The Loneliest Number, that’s partly done, and I may still finish it before the end of the month. However, I’ve also got other important things to do, like eat a huge Thanksgiving meal and lay on the couch.

Work in Progress

One of the things that distracted me from PerShoStoWriMo was critiquing. I did a ton of Critters critiques in November so my story, Red Eyes, could go out. Happily, I am now caught up, and I received ten responses, which is pretty good for a 6500-word story.

My next step is to compile all that feedback into a bullet-point list of bigger issues, smaller issues, and potential solutions. Then I’ll get into the revisions.

Submissions

I received two responses for previously submitted stories. My drabble, A Going Away Party, got a form rejection. Interestingly, this was a double submission to a publisher with separate handling of sci-fi and fantasy submissions. The second submission is still marked as “in progress.”

It’s always difficult to guess what’s happening with submissions, but it’s at least potentially a good sign that the second story didn’t get rejected around the same time as the first. Maybe it’s at least being held for consideration. Of course, it could just be a completely separate queue and editors for each story, and the delay doesn’t really mean anything.

The other response was from the Writers of the Future contest, for Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug. It received an honorable mention, which is nice, although a little further investigation reveals that the contest has quite a few tiers below first, second and third place. There are about a dozen finalists and semi-finalists. Then there are about fifty “silver” honorable mentions, and even more regular honorable mentions beneath that.

There’s no way to determine exactly how many entries the contest gets each quarter, but it’s free to enter and has a big cash prize, so it’s certainly a lot. At least hundreds, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more than a thousand. So an honorable mention has some value, but I’d peg it as similar to one of those nice rejection letters that says “we liked your story, keep trying.”

I already sent Dr. Clipboard out again, this time to an anthology with a theme that feels like a pretty good fit. A Going Away Party is a drabble and technically a reprint, which makes it a little harder to find good places to send. I may just hang on to it until I see something like a theme issue where it makes sense to submit.

Goals for Next Week

  • Finish The Loneliest Number
  • Sift through Red Eyes critiques

Year of Short Stories — Week #43

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 – 5+
  • Submissions This Week – 1
  • Submissions Currently Out – 6
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 26 (10 personalized)

PerShoStoWriMo

Week one of my personal short story writing month is in the books, and it didn’t go well!

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I definitely didn’t pull NaNoWriMo “par” numbers, and I missed three days entirely. I’m currently trending toward about 50% of the goal wordcount of 50,000 words by the end of November. And yet, I’m pretty happy with my progress. I’ve blasted through drafts of four short stories so far, and I’m deep into a fifth (considerably longer) story.

I’m being productive with the time I have available. As usual I’m juggling my day job, my kids activities, and other family stuff.

Plus, I have over a week of vacation planned in November, so I may have some time to catch up. Even if I don’t, I’ll still be glad to have gotten quite a few words on the page.

Submissions

I resubmitted The Incident at Pleasant Hills, which came back to me last week.

I’m hoping that I’ll get some responses in the next month or so, but with end-of-year holidays fast approaching, I expect anything that I submit through the end of the year to be out until 2025.

Critiques

I’m still getting caught up on Critters critiques, but the end is in sight now. I’ll catch up sometime this week. This past week is actually when Red Eyes would have hit the top of the queue, so I’m not doing too bad in that regard.

Goals for Next Week

  • Get caught up on critiques!
  • Keep writing short stories for PerShoStoWriMo!