year of short stories – Words Deferred

Week 26 — Year of Short Stories 2026

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

This is the weeks of Jun 29 – Jul 5.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 5
Submissions Total: 20
Rejections: 17
Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

All quiet this week. No new submissions or responses.

Goals and Results

Last time, my goals were:

Revise Beneath the House in Caen to completion, or close to it.
Clean up and trim T.I.M., consider whether it needs another round of Critters.

As usual, this was optimistic, but I did want to leave the week open to work on either of these stories, depending on what I felt like doing. In the end, it was Beneath the House at Caen that I ended up working on. This was productive revision, trimming about 200 words and cleaning up quite a few small things.

My process for dealing with workshop feedback has evolved into roughly three steps. First, I do the initial read-through of all of it, and copy it over into a single unwieldy OneNote document. Then I take a second pass through all of it, decide what I’m going to discount or ignore, and begin taking bullet-point notes. The result is a stack of bullet points and a few pages of little feedback snippets at the top of the doc, and everything else relegated to the wasteland at the bottom of the doc. The final refinement is to go through the snippets and either immediately change something in the story to address them, or convert them into a bullet point.

Similar feedback gets combined. If I’m clever, I come up with a fix that addresses several things at once. Eventually, what I’m left with is a long list of bullet points (about 50 in the case of Caen). Some are still easy fixes, some require more thought. Then I work through them.

The Halfway Mark

Week 26 means we are halfway through the year. I figured this would be a good time to review my goals and see where I stand.

Finish and submit twelve short stories — Current: 2 / Goal: 6
Send 50 submissions — Current: 20 / Goal: 25
Post 100 times on Words Deferred — Current: 43 / Goal: 50

I’m a little behind on all of these metrics. The biggest issue is actually getting those stories across the finish line so they can be sent out. However, even if I get the two in progress finished soon, I’ll still be behind there. I always knew that a story per month was going to be difficult for me, but I’d still like to get this number higher.

My submission count, on the other hand, is solid. I’ve been doing more simultaneous submissions this year, which helps a lot. If I can get a few more stories in rotation, that will make this goal easy to hit.

The state of the third goal can be clearly seen on my WordPress stats. All I have to do to meet that goal is two posts per week, and one of them is this weekly update. I absolutely hit that standard the first three months of the year, but I trailed off in the second quarter. Part of that comes down to finding something interesting to talk about. I have no interest in writing something that bores me and you. If I had to pick one goal to not achieve, it would be this one. After all, it’s the “Year of Short Stories,” not the “Year of Blogging.” That was somewhere around 2006.

Next Week

I’m a broken record:

Revise Beneath the House in Caen to completion, or close to it.
Clean up and trim T.I.M., consider whether it needs another round of Critters.

Week 24 & 25 — Year of Short Stories 2026

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

This is the weeks of Jun 15 – Jun 28.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 5
Submissions Total: 22
Rejections: 19
Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

Two submissions came back to me over this two-week period.

One was for The Incident at Pleasant Hills, and was a very pleasant personalized rejection that said several nice things about the story before the usual “we get 1000 submissions each submission period and only have 10 slots” let-down. The one piece of feedback was that the beginning was too slow, so I might review the story and see if there’s anything I can tighten up next time I send it out.

The other response was an honorable mention in the Writers of the Future contest for my story, Red Eye. This is the second time I’ve submitted, and the second honorable mention I’ve received. So that’s something.

I do not know how many submissions they receive for their quarterly contests, but I am sure that a paying contest with no submission fee receives quite a few. They have a multi-tiered system: honorable mentions, “silver” honorable mentions, finalists, and 1st/2nd/3rd place. Judging by Duotrope stats, I would guess that something like 10-20% of entrants fall into all those categories. So I’d say an honorable mention is about on par with a tier 2 rejection from a paying publication. More or less.

I still narrowly meet their “new writer” criteria, so I’ll likely send more stories their way as long as I am able. Being an L. Ron Hubbard joint, they are at least nominally associated with Scientology, something I am certainly not a fan of. But all that Tom Cruise money pays for a free contest with good prizes. I figure the cult cash might as well go to me, rather than all the other shady things they get up to.

Goals and Results

Last time, my goals were:

Finish T.I.M. (Formerly F-TIB)
Start working on Beneath the House in Caen revisions.

I “finished” T.I.M., clocking a little over 2,000 more words, and bringing the total to 6,000. That’s a significant bump from the original 2,300-word story. It’s also not surprising since it went from 5-ish nebulous short scenes to eleven. It still needs significant cleanup, and maybe another Critters run, and will hopefully shed words along the way. However, for the moment I am happy to let it rest.

Meanwhile, I collected all the Critters feedback for Beneath the House in Caen into a single document and started creating a bullet list of things to work on.

I have to say, there are a lot of things I like about Critters, and the fact that Andrew Burt keeps the enterprise going year after year when he undoubtedly loses money on it makes him a saint among writers. But dear God, the website and the email infrastructure feel like they are from the 90s, and the critique emails come in with bizarre formatting. Every time I submit a story, I think about creating some scripts reformat the critiques for readability. Maybe I’ll get around to that some day.

Beneath the House in Caen feels to me like a story that needs much less work than T.I.M., and I think the feedback bears that out. I’ll try to bounce back and forth between this and T.I.M. over the next week and see what I can get done.

Next Week

My goals for next week are flip-flopped versions of the previous weeks:

Revise Beneath the House in Caen to completion, or close to it.
Clean up and trim T.I.M., consider whether it needs another round of Critters.

Next week will be Week 26—the halfway mark of this Year of Short Stories. I plan to review my goals and see how they compare to my current progress. Spoiler: I’m a bit behind. However, I’m not that far behind, so I suspect I picked my goals well. More on that next week.

Week 23 — Year of Short Stories 2026

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

This is the weeks of Jun 8 – Jun 15.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 7
Submissions Total: 20
Rejections: 17
Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

We seem to be in the summer lull. No responses to any of my submissions this week.

Goals and Results

I continue the rework of T.I.M., finishing another 1500 words or so. I had a tough time figuring out the right way through one of my new scenes, but I think I cracked it. I have two scenes left. If I can get through those next week, I’ll do a cursory clean-up pass and set it aside to look at the Critters feedback for Beneath the House in Caen. The feedback for that story was fairly positive, so I don’t think I’ll have nearly as much rework to do.

T.I.M. has gone through enough of a re-work that I will probably submit the new version to Critters to see how it is received. This is unusual for me; I usually do one round of critiques, and then tighten the story with that feedback to my own satisfaction before sending it out to publishers. However, I’ve been doing more rework after the critique phase recently, so a second round is beginning to feel more justified.

I don’t know whether that means I’m refining my process, or if these last couple stories have just needed more rework than usual.

Next Week

Finish T.I.M.
Start working on Beneath the House in Caen revisions.

Week 21 & 22 — Year of Short Stories 2026

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

This is for the weeks of May 25 – Jun 7.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 7
Submissions Total: 20
Rejections: 17
Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

Two weeks, and one form rejection for Incident at Pleasant Hills. All my stories are still on submission in at least one place, so I’m not sending out more at the moment.

Goals and Results

Last post, two weeks ago, I had a singular goal. Finish revising F-TIB.

Well, it’s still not done, but some progress has been made. Firstly, the story has a new name! It’s now called T.I.M.

After critiques came back, I did a lot of rethinking, which resulted in a whole new outline and roughly twice as many scenes. I’ve now written a couple thousand words of fresh or mostly fresh material toward that outline, and I’m approximately halfway done. It’s looking like the updated story will be a little more than double the word count of the original, at least until it gets its follow-up trimming.

I think I may be able to get this new version of the story written by next week. However, I have had…

A Distraction!

I don’t talk too much about my non-writing hobbies here, but something has been absorbing a decent amount of my time and attention lately. I’m making a game.

It’s not a big exciting game, and I don’t expect it to end up on Steam or consoles or anything like that. It’s a traditional roguelike, which is a very niche genre, and I’m currently making it strictly for fun. And perhaps surprisingly, part of the reason I’m enjoying the process is AI.

When it comes to writing fiction, I have a very cut-and-dry opinion on AI, one that seems to be largely shared by other writers: it’s pointless to use it. Writing fiction is self-expression, and if AI is mucking about with all the words, it’s inherently taking away at least some of that self-expression. If I read something, I want it to be written entirely by a human being. The words and their entertainment value are only part of the equation—I also want to feel that I’m receiving a coded signal from the author, a signal that tells me something about them, as vague and ephemeral as that might be. I want to make art and consume art, not just content.

So it might seem odd that I’d use AI for software development. However, I’ve always felt that there is a messy blend of art and craft when it comes to programming. There is certainly an aspect of self-expression, but there is also the purely mechanical part. A program is a machine that can carry out a series of (often incredibly complex) tasks. As of the past six months or so, AI has become quite good at building many of the mechanical aspects. Since I’m working with some tools I’m not highly familiar with, it has been a helpful assistant in building the machinery, while I focus on the design and the…gaminess of it all.

And that’s what’s been distracting me. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how to split my time between game development and writing. We’ll see how it goes.

Next Week

That same dang goal, with a new title: finish T.I.M.

Week 20 — Year of Short Stories 2026

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

This is the week of May 18 – 24.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out:8
Submissions Total: 20
Rejections: 16
Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

I had one story come back to me this past week—a form rejection for Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug. So I sent it back out.

The rejection and new submission were both publications that don’t accept simultaneous submissions (that is, submitting the same story to several places at the same time). It used to be like this almost everywhere, but explicitly allowing simultaneous submissions has become more and more common. Generally a good thing for writers. The remaining sticklers tend to be the more prestigious or higher-paying markets.

Some writers will say that nobody can stop you from submitting all you want, and it’s unlikely any publication will catch you. That is generally true. If you are lucky enough to be accepted by more than one publication—well, Lucy, you might have some ’splainin to do. Accepted stories do sometimes get withdrawn, though it’s unlikely to ingratiate you with any editors.

As someone who likes to spend some time vetting publications and submitting to those where I think my stories have the best shot, I don’t necessarily mind some of my stories being submitted to a single publication at a time, so long as those publications don’t have annoyingly long turnaround times. I sometimes find it hard to keep up with submissions anyway. I can spend that time working on other stories instead.

** Goals and Results

Last week’s singular goal:

Continue revising F-TIB.

Here’s where I sound like a broken record and complain that I haven’t had much time to write over the past week. A couple hours on the weekend doesn’t feel like it goes very far.

I have gone through all the critique feedback for F-TIB and decided what to address and what to ignore. I then took that, along with my breakdown of the story structure, and used it to outline a new structure that I believe will fix the things that need fixing.

The result is an outline with twice as many scenes as the original, but that’s a misleading description. Certainly at least twice as much happening. The first draft only had a couple real scenes embedded in a kind of montage of description. It felt stylized when I was writing it, but it’s clear that many of my readers found it bland, messy, and too fast to earn the emotional payoff that I was trying to build at the end of the story.

In the current draft I’m building more traditional scenes and spending more time ramping into the key moments so they feel earned.

Next Week

It has been far too long that I’ve been slowly chipping at F-TIB, so I’m upgrading last week’s goal:

Finish revising F-TIB!

I might put in some late evenings this week, just to try to get this done.

Weeks 18 & 19 — Year of Short Stories 2026

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

This is the weeks of May 4 – 17.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 8
Submissions Total: 19
Rejections: 15
Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

In the past two weeks I had a single rejection for Taco Cat Employee Manual. It was one of those where it’s either a very brief personalized rejection or a very positive form rejection.

As I mentioned in the previous post, the last open submission for The Incident at Pleasant Hills had come back, so I spent some time scouring Duotrope and submitting. The end result was one new anthology submission for Taco Cat and three new submissions for Pleasant Hills.

I’m still pretty much on par or slightly ahead on my goal of hitting 50 short story submissions by the end of the year. Now, if I could just finish a few more stories, that would help me blow that goal out of the water.

Goals and Results

Last week’s goals (well, technically two weeks ago):

Submit The Incident at Pleasant Hills
Continue revising F-TIB.
Outline Arbor Grove (and maybe start on the next version)
Review critiques for Beneath the House at Caen.

Between work and my kids school activities, life has been busy. As usual, I’ve made progress, but perhaps not as much as I would like. I submitted Pleasant Hills and did a cursory read-through of the critiques that came in for House at Caen.

I’ve now gotten a couple notes from critters who mentioned that they liked some previous story I had submitted, so they picked up one of my newer stories when it came up in the feed. It’s nice to hear that the quality on rough drafts was at least high enough to pique some interest, and a good indicator that it pays to submit regularly so the more prolific critters have a chance to notice you and submit useful feedback.

The main downside of Critters compared to a traditional writers’ group is that it’s less personal and harder to get to know others. It’s nice to see that there is some community to be found in the group if you’re active enough.

Arbor Grove was really the one goal that I didn’t work on, although it has been in the back of my mind. This week I’m thinking that I’d rather just fall behind on my word count goals and spend my time working on the drafts that are closer to completion.

Then again, I’ve never been very good at sticking to any one thing for long, so I may go back to it if I get the itch.

I rewrote a couple scenes in F-TIB (or rather made scenes out of the messy montages). There’s still more work to be done there, and I haven’t quite gotten it all to fit together in my head in the way that tells me I’ve cracked it. So I’ll continue.

This Week’s Mini-Topic: Revisionary Disassembly

As part of my work on F-TIB this week, I broke the story down into its scenes and characters, which really helped to show that a good chunk of the story didn’t have discrete scenes (as well as highlight the problems critters pointed out with two of the characters).

The pattern that I noticed is that major revisions are often a process of disassembly and reassembly.

I often find that once I’ve finished a first draft and done some polishing, it starts to feel like a single unit with no seams. It’s easy enough to deal with line edits, because those don’t typically change the shape of the story, but when problems revealed in characters or scenes or anything that cuts across the story as a whole, they feel much more overwhelming. When the story is a contiguous sequence of A then B then C, how can anything be significantly modified?

This is where I’ve found it effective to break the story back down into individual components. Look at the scenes and what happens within them. Look at the characters and see how they interact and how they drive the plot.

These smaller pieces are discrete components with interfaces to other components of the story. If you modify one of them, you just look at the linkages to other characters and scenes, and make the necessary adjustments to make them fit. Sometimes that means a changes in one place necessitates a cascade of changes, but those can be identified and addressed one after another.

So, next time you’re having trouble with revisions, consider making a reverse outline or listing out your characters and what their purposes are within the story.

Next Week

I’m going back to focus mode, with a single goal:

Continue revising F-TIB.

Week 17 — Year of Short Stories 2026

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

This is the week of Apr. 27 – May 3.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 5
Submissions Total: 15
Rejections: 14
Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

One response this week—a rejection for The Incident at Pleasant Hills. This included a little note with some kind words for the story, but they found it too bleak for the publication. This is a good note for future submissions, and another indication that the story is being read positively, even if it hasn’t found a home yet.

Goals and Results

Last week’s goals:

Revise F-TIB.

My horror/dark fantasy story, Beneath the House at Caen, went out to Critters this week. The critiques are coming in, and will continue until Wednesday. As usual, I’m only glancing at this feedback as it dribbles into my inbox. I’ll wait until the crit week is over before collecting it all into a new document, giving it an initial read-through, and sending out a brief thank you to the readers.

I think this was a productive week, but not in a way that helps my word count much. For F-TIB, I’ve been crunching down feedback into plans for revising the story. That involved mapping out the current scenes and thinking about new scenes, brainstorming a new title and new name for a major character, and deciding on some small changes that will still have significant impact on this relatively short story.

One nice thing about this planning work is that I can immediately see several low-level critiques of the story evaporate as the broader structure changes. That’s the main reason why I advocate starting with big changes and working down to the nitty-gritty, and it’s always nice when I can see that philosophy saving time and effort.

I’ve also been working on my foray into solarpunk, Arbor Grove. When I talked about exploratory writing last week, this is the story I was thinking about. I knocked out 2,400 words of Arbor Grove with only some vague ideas of an event that ties the beginning and end together. What I found was that the story had gotten bogged down in boring scenes and failed to do anything interesting.

So, much like F-TIB, I mostly spent my time staring at the screen rather than typing. I’m working through the things that excite me about the story and the things that are dragging it down, and just articulating those things really helps clarify the direction I should be going. I expect some sort of outline to come out of this process, and I will likely end up throwing most of those 2,400 words away, but they were worthwhile as a way to refine the story.

Next Week

My single goal last week was to work on F-TIB because it’s the story that’s closest to completion. Soon I’ll have critique revisions to work on for Beneath the House at Caen. But I’m also enjoying working on Arbor Grove, and I like to indulge the muse by following a project when it feels productive and fun.

At the risk of splitting my focus, I’m setting a few goals for next week.

Submit The Incident at Pleasant Hills
Continue revising F-TIB.
Outline Arbor Grove (and maybe start on the next version)
Review critiques for Beneath the House at Caen.

Week 16 — Year of Short Stories 2026

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

This is the week of Apr. 20-26.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 6
Submissions Total: 15
Rejections: 13
Acceptances: 0

Goals and Results

Last week’s goals:

Revise F-TIB.
Write Arbor Grove.
More critiques.

The stories that were out remain out. I received no responses and sent no new submissions. Critiques are going well and I’m comfortably ahead again.

I continue to make progress on Arbor Grove, although the middle has been muddier and slower than I would like, and as a result I am still a few days behind on my word count. It feels like it’s going to need some trimming when it’s done.

Despite putting F-TIB at top priority last week, I didn’t actually work on revisions that much. I did ruminate on changes and parts that don’t quite feel right, but that doesn’t tend to feel as productive as fingers-on-keyboard work, even if it is sometimes a necessary step of the process.

Next Week

Beneath the House in Caen goes out for critique at the end of April. In order to try to make good progress on F-TIB before I have another story to revise, I’m going to make it my singular priority for the week.

Goals for next week:

Revise F-TIB.

Changing Things Up

Shocking as it is, we’re approaching the 1/3 mark for the year of 2026.

In writing the most recent update or two, I’ve begun to feel that these posts are becoming a little too rote. Rather than continuing to bore everyone, I thought it might be time for a change.

My reason for this series is partly to improve my habit of regular writing. Repetition develops habits, but it also breeds complacency. With that in mind, I’m going to try something new. Going forward, I’ll try to find a mini-topic of the week that relates to whatever I’ve been writing. I’ll still have the stats and goals to keep me motivated, but this bonus topic should give us some variety.

This Week’s Mini-Topic: Exploratory Writing

I’ve discussed exploratory writing before, and while I don’t begrudge writers who like to find their story as they write it, I’ve never considered myself one of them. It still makes me slightly nauseous to think about writing a novel without having a firm outline.

For the writers who insist this is the way they have to write, dead-ends, plot-holes, and heavy revisions are the cost of doing business. It just galls me to think about potentially throwing away whole chapters when something doesn’t work.

Admittedly, having an outline doesn’t guarantee that a scene or section will work. Planners can miss plot holes, and scenes can look good in summary only to die on the page. Still, outlining lets me feel that I have a fighting chance to catch a wide spectrum of issues up front, before I’ve wasted my precious time.

Only, that’s not entirely true anymore.

I’ve slowly come around to accepting (and maybe even enjoying) exploratory writing for short stories. The shorter I think the story should be, the happier I am to jump into it blind. This makes some sense, because I generally don’t outline short stories in the same way I would outline a novel. When a story is under three thousand words, a major rewrite doesn’t feel quite so unreasonable.

I also find that short stories, more than longer work, can run on an engine of mood, style, or a unique viewpoint. Plot can be less of a concern in a short story, even if I remain firmly against “plotless” fiction.

I draw the line at endings though. I might find a better ending than I thought, but I still don’t like to start a story without having some idea of how it could end. That’s just crazy talk.

Week 15 — 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 fifteen: Apr. 13-19.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 6
Submissions Total: 15
Rejections: 13
Acceptances: 0

Goals and Results

Last week’s goals:

Write ~2k words of Arbor Grove.
Revise F-TIB.

This was a fairly quiet week. I made good progress on Arbor Grove, but didn’t quite hit 2k. I revised F-TIB, but it still has a ways to go. I got a single form rejection for Taco Cat.

I also did some extra critiques this week. I’ve found that I tend to slack off on critiques when I don’t have a story in the queue (which luckily is not that often this year), so I’ve been trying to not only stay caught up, but get a little ahead. That way I’ll have some wiggle room when things come up and I have to miss a week.

Next Week

Even though I made progress this week, my goals for next week are essentially unchanged. However, I’m moving F-TIB into the top spot because it would be nice to get it ready for submission before Beneath the House in Caen goes out for critique at the end of April.

Goals for next week:

Revise F-TIB.
Write Arbor Grove.
More critiques!

Week 13 & 14 — 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 fourteen: Apr. 6-12.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 7
Submissions Total: 15
Rejections: 12
Acceptances: 0

Goals and Results

It’s a double week, since I took a week off. It’s been quiet—not a single response to my submissions.

I had a single goal from week 12, and that was to get a story into the Critters queue.

The story that I had in mind went by the bland working title of Hunter’s Apprentice, and although I liked the idea and the general structure, it needed more tension/conflict. I added that in the form of the main character being less sure of the big choice she has to make, and I changed the title to Beneath the House in Caen, which I think is a much more evocative title.

That story is now off to the Critters queue, and should go out right around the end of the month.

Next Week

Lately, I’m finding that it’s pretty easy to hit my self-set revision quotas. Thanks to a backlog of first drafts, I have no shortage of stories to clean up and get critiqued, then thoroughly revise when the critiques roll in.

However, I have been falling behind on my word count goal for new stories. That needs to be remedied. I have a solarpunk story called Arbor Grove that I’ve just started, and I think that will be the target for this week.

Assuming I get that done, I need to work on the post-critique revisions of F-TIB.

Goals for next week:

Write ~2k words of Arbor Grove.
Revise F-TIB.