Category: year of short stories

Year of Short Stories — Week #37

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

  • Stories in Progress – 1
  • Submissions This Week – 2
  • Submissions Currently Out – 6
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 18 (9 personalized)

The Subs and the Pubs

Last week, Dr. Clipboard and Bluefinch came back to me, so this week I sent them out again–one to a publisher that usually responds in a few days, and one that typically takes more than a month. Luckily, I snuck this submission in right at the end of their quarterly deadline. I’m hoping that will make the response slightly faster.

Tom, Dick, and Larry also came back, with one of those odd rejections that mostly sounds like a form letter, but has just enough specificity that I suspect it’s not. The end result is the same, but these editors don’t seem to understand that I have to categorize the response for my stats!

The Edits

I continued to trim Red Eyes, shaving another hundred words off, and making a few other adjustments. I’m hoping I can trim around 400 more in this round of edits, to get it down to about 6,000 words.

I logged back into Critters.org after taking several months off. I’m several critiques behind, so I’m planning to do a couple per week to get caught up. I’ll need to get my ratio to 75% again by the time Red Eyes goes out for critique. Since it takes several weeks to get a story through the queue, and I haven’t submitted it yet, I should have plenty of time.

Goals for Next Week

  • Trim Red Eyes to 6,000 words
  • Finish 2 critiques

Year of Short Stories — Week #35 and 36

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

  • Stories in Progress – 1
  • Submissions This Week – 0
  • Submissions Currently Out – 5
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 22 (8 personalized)

Doubling Up

I missed last week’s post, so I’m doing a twofer this week. The upside is that I have more news to talk about. After a long period of slow responses, I received updates on five submissions.

Responses

Two of the responses I received were form rejections for drabbles. This isn’t too surprising since I “shotgun” submitted these, and I feel like they’re long-shots outside a very few specialized flash fiction publications.

The other three responses were for The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk and Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug. I was a little disappointed by the Dr. Clipboard form rejection. This was for a contest run by a magazine that had given me a “close, but no cigar” rejection on another story. It’s also the first submission I’ve actually paid for, with significant cash prizes on the line.

Bluefinch received one rote form rejection, and one very nice personalized rejection that said it had made it to the final round of consideration. It’s not as nice as an acceptance, but that kind of positive feedback from a pro-payment market at least gives me confidence that the story is solid.

With those responses, Bluefinch and Dr. Clipboard are freed up for submission once again, and I will be sending them out in the next couple days.

Perspective

After the long silent period, these rejections felt worse than usual. An important part of the process of submitting short fiction this year has been building up a tolerance for rejection. It never feels good to have a story rejected, but you get used to it by repeated exposure.

I think one reason so many authors don’t submit their work or choose an indie/self-publishing route is to avoid rejection. If you don’t ask, you can’t be told “no.” If you throw that e-book on Amazon and nobody buys it, that doesn’t feel good, but it’s still different from someone explicitly and directly telling you they don’t want it.

Every route in publishing is hard, and it seems likely that anyone who perseveres in the industry is either masochistic or has a screw loose. I think I’m probably the latter.

I checked Duotrope’s statistics for the contest where I received the rejection. All 14 submissions by Duotrope members were rejected. Only one even got a personalized response.

So far this year, I have a <5% acceptance rate on my story submissions. That sounds pretty bad. And yet, when I go to that Duotrope dashboard, I see this little notice:

Being good isn’t enough. You need perseverance too.

Work in Progress

In my last update, I talked about focusing on one story in an effort to get something done on my works in progress. I’ve been focusing on the story Red Eyes, to try to get it fit for Critters critique.

I spent a good amount of time completely rewriting a scene that wasn’t working, and I’m happy with the result. I also fixed a few smaller issues. The main challenge, however, is that it’s still quite long. I trimmed about 400 words through tiny cuts throughout, but it’s still almost 6700 words.

I reverse-engineered an outline of the eleven (!!!) scenes and their word counts, so I can see where the bulk of the story is. This is an interesting exercise, because some scenes definitely felt longer or shorter than they actually are. I plan to take at least one more general pass through the entire story and then focus on several of the longer sections to find places to trim.

Goals for Next Week

  • Submit Dr. Clipboard and Bluefinch again
  • Continue Editing Red Eyes

Year of Short Stories — Week #34

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

  • Stories in Progress – 2
  • Submissions This Week – 0
  • Submissions Currently Out – 9
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 18 (7 personalized)

Submissions

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

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

Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goals for Next Week

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

Year of Short Stories — Week #33

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

  • Stories in Progress – 4
  • Submissions This Week – 1
  • Submissions Currently Out – 10
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)

Quick Update This Week

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

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

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

Goals for Next Week

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

Year of Short Stories — Week #32

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

  • Stories in Progress – 4
  • Submissions This Week – 3
  • Submissions Currently Out – 9
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)

Goal

Last week I set myself a word count goal: 1,000 words per day. Sadly, I only managed about 50% of that. Most of those words were on my newest story, temp titled The Scout. So far, it’s one of those stories where I am really enjoying certain aspects, and other aspects are very obviously falling short. Stories like that just need time and effort to find the pieces that will click into place and make the whole thing work.

Even though I didn’t meet my goal, it was a useful motivator, so I’m setting the same goal this week (1k words/day).

Submissions and Responses

It continues to be quiet. I received no responses on my current submissions; maybe the editors are all enjoying the last few weeks of summer.

I have purposely stuck to publications that accept simultaneous submissions for my drabbles so that I could submit widely. I sent each of these three stories out again this week. Of course, Murphy’s Law of Short Story Submissions ensures that after weeks with no responses, I’ll eventually get them all back at once.

Goals for Next Week

Once again, I’m shooting for 1,000 words on my works in progress per day, and planning to send out one or two more simultaneous submissions.

Year of Short Stories — Week #31

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

  • Stories in Progress – 4
  • Submissions This Week – 0
  • Submissions Currently Out – 6
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)

Another Story

Last week, feeling blocked on my stories in progress, I started working on a new story. This week, inspiration struck for yet another idea. Since I was excited about that, I let the momentum carry me and started on a fourth story.

I do believe that it’s important to work on finishing things, and that writers can fall into a bad habit of chasing ideas without ever putting in the work to revise and polish. Unfortunately, revision is never as thrilling as that first discovery of a new story, and sometimes working on exciting new ideas can be a good emotional reset. Working on the thing that excites you at the moment can be a good way to boost word count as well.

Simultaneous Subs

This was the second week in a row with no responses to my current submissions. Since I purposely picked publications that accept simultaneous submissions for my drabbles, I should probably send those to at least one or two more places.

Goals for Next Week

This upcoming week, I’m going to try to motivate myself with a word count goal. I plan to write 1,000 words on one of these stories in progress every day. That should get me close to finishing at least one of them—although my first drafts tend to run long.

Year of Short Stories — Week #30

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

  • Stories in Progress – 3
  • Submissions This Week – 3
  • Submissions Currently Out – 7
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)

Release

I’m happy to report that my tongue-in-cheek horror drabble, “Renter’s Dilemma,” is in the anthology Dead Girls Walking (The Red Volume) which released this week. It is available in EPUB and paperback.

Submissions

Since I finally finished my big ‘ol list of publications that seem like they’d be interested in drabbles, I figured I had better send out the ones I’ve had sitting around.

I sent out Tom, Dick, and Larry; A Going Away Party; and No More Kings.

Goals for Next Week

Short update this week. I just didn’t get much done besides submissions.

It’s starting to feel like I haven’t finished a new story in a while, so this week I’m going to focus on really churning through my stories in progress.

Year of Short Stories — Week #29

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

  • Stories in Progress – 3
  • Submissions This Week – 0
  • Submissions Currently Out – 3
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)

No Submissions, No Responses

My stories are currently submitted to publishers with longer turnaround times, so I had no responses this week. It was a nice break to get caught up on other writing tasks. I still haven’t submitted those drabbles that have been sitting around. More on that below.

The Writing Pipeline

Recently, I’ve been thinking about my writing pipeline. When I find myself doing the same type of work (like editing drafts) for too long, I lose focus and slow down. It is good to actually finish projects instead of endlessly jumping between half-finished things, but when I’m getting stuck on a project, it’s better to make some progress on another piece than grind ineffectively.

This week, I tried to diversify my writing more than I have been. I spent some dedicated brainstorming time generating new story ideas, which I haven’t done in quite a while. I also started outlining the new story I mentioned last week, The Vine. Finally, I wrote more of Portrait of the Artist in Wartime, a story where I suspect I will end up with a large word count and have to pare down.

What I didn’t do this week is any editing of Red Eyes, which is the story I was stuck on.

Next week, I’m going to try the same tactic and split my time among a few projects, and I might go back to Red Eyes to see if I can be more productive.

The List

The last thing I did this week is finish compiling my big list of potential publications for submitting drabbles.

One interesting discovery (which is obvious in retrospect) is that many publications will pay a fixed amount per story, and while $5-20 per story doesn’t seem like much, it ranges from a respectable semi-pro to top-tier professional pay rate when the story is exactly 100 words.

My next step will be to rearrange these publications into a rough ranking. I’d like to try more simultaneous submissions, but that will be limited by the amount of time I want to spend submitting.

Goals for Next Week

  • Work on brainstorming, The Vine, Portrait, and Red Eyes – whatever feels most productive
  • Submit some drabbles

Year of Short Stories — Week #28

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

  • Stories in Progress – 3
  • Submissions This Week – 1
  • Submissions Currently Out – 3
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)

The Vine

I have the excuse of a busy schedule over the past month or two, but I haven’t been getting as much done on my stories as I would like. Perhaps counterintuitively, I decided to unblock myself by starting work on yet another story.

The new story is tentatively titled “The Vine,” and is one that I’ve been kicking around for a while. (It inspired a piece of microfiction way back in the summer of 2021.) It’s about a plant that gets inside you and makes you feel empathy for others.

When I find myself getting stuck like this, it’s usually because there is some issue that I’m not recognizing and addressing, and it can be helpful to step away and work on something else. When I return, I’ll have a little more distance to evaluate the problems in my other stories and address them.

The Drabble Publishing List

I mentioned in previous weeks that I have a couple of drabbles that I’m interested in submitting, but some would qualify as reprints (since they already appeared on this site), and I think a good percentage of publications aren’t interested in stories that short.

So I dug deep on Duotrope and sifted through nearly two hundred publications that say they accept SFF flash fiction. I poured over submission requirements, editorial interviews and mastheads, and created a list of about thirty paying and thirty non-paying markets that might be good places to submit.

My next step will be to read some stories from as many of these as possible, especially the ones that specialize in shorter formats.

The Grind

It was a quiet week for submissions, with no new responses. I resubmitted The Incident at Pleasant Hills (which came back to me last week).

Goals for Next Week

  • Continue narrowing my drabble publisher list
  • Work on The Vine

Year of Short Stories — Week #27

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

  • Stories in Progress – 2
  • Submissions This Week – 0
  • Submissions Currently Out – 2
  • Acceptances This Year: 1
  • Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)

Acceptance

It was a busy week for submissions, but the exciting news is that I received my first acceptance of the year. My drabble, Renter’s Dilemma, will be published in an upcoming horror anthology.

Part of being a writer is the “skill” of being simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, so my inner critic immediately looked for some reasons to get less excited: it’s just a drabble, it’s a big anthology series with lots of authors, and there’s no payment. But hey, the truth is that there are fewer and fewer publications that pay, and a writing credit is a writing credit. I’ll take a win, and keep on submitting. And I’ll post links when it’s released.

A Little Clarity?

I also received an odd email this week that made me realize even those who work in publishing sometimes have trouble communicating clearly.

This email was in response to a submission I had sent, and it said that the story had been “accepted for further consideration.” Since this publication accepts submissions via email, I am assuming this is nothing more than an acknowledgement that they received my story. (Duotrope’s guidelines for their normal response times also backs this up.) However, many publications do require submissions to pass through multiple readers or editors before acceptance, so this could conceivably be a note that the story made it through a first round.

The word “accepted” is a very loaded word in a response to a submission, so this phrasing that starts with the story “accepted” and ends with “further consideration” ends up being a linguistic rug pull for expectant writers.

Rejections

I received two speedy rejections this week: one for my recently renamed drabble, Tom, Dick and Larry, and one for Incident at Pleasant Hills.

I don’t normally talk about where I’m submitting, but I did want to mention how much I appreciate Clarkesworld Magazine. They are an excellent sci-fi mag with a very nice homemade online submission system, and they are remarkably fast at responding to submissions, despite being one of the biggest English language sci-fi markets.

Goals for Next Week

Quick turnarounds on submissions are a mixed blessing. It means I’m getting stories in front of more editors, sooner, but it also means I’m spending more time prepping and sending stories. It’s a lot easier to get to some of my other writing goals when stories aren’t coming back to me in 3-4 days.

As usual, I find myself with a lot of things I’d like to do, and not enough time to get them all done. I need to re-send those rejected stories, and I need to continue working on my stories in progress. That’s the bread-and-butter work.

I do still have a couple of completed drabbles that I have not been sending out, and this is mostly because it’s a pain to find places that are interested in a 100-word story. I also haven’t really done any simultaneous submissions, even when I’m sending stories to publications that allow it. That’s another way to get more stories in front of more editors.

Finally, there are always Critters critiques to catch up on. Those tend to be the first thing I let slide when I have too much to do. Luckily, I’ve built up a lot of credit, but it will eventually run out, and I don’t want to end up with a story blocked, waiting in the queue while I try to catch up on my quota.

So, I’ll throw down all of these as goals, with the understanding that I’m only going to get some of them done in the next week:

  • Resubmit rejected stories
  • Look for simultaneous submission options for The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk
  • Submit more drabbles
  • Work on incomplete stories
  • Catch up on critiques