year of short stories – Page 4

Year of Short Stories — Week #9

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 – 3
Rejections This Year – 5 (1 personal)

Stories in Progress

This week, I had a single incredibly fast rejection—coming back in less than two days. This is not a small publication either, so that’s quite impressive. It’s interesting how much variation there is—some places ask you to give them 90 days to respond!

I edited “The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk,” which was a fairly quick process. Now it’s in the Critters queue for critique (and on my kitchen counter for my in-house readers). I’ll come back to it later in the month, when I have all that feedback in hand.

Unfortunately, the next old story I’m working on is considerably larger and rougher around the edges. It’s almost 7,000 words, which is getting into territory that will limit the places I can submit it. If possible, I’d like to chop it down to less than 5,000, but I’m not yet sure if that’s something I can manage. It may require some architectural changes.

I’ve got a busy few days coming up, so I fully expect that those edits will take up my writing time for the next two weeks.

Goals for Next Week

Major reconstructive surgery on the story tentatively titled “Red Eyes.”

Year of Short Stories —Week #8

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 – 3
Rejections This Year – 4 (1 personal)

Let’s Get Personal

Two stories returned to me this week, both rejections. No problem; I’m developing that thick skin that’s needed for short story submissions. I get a story back, I send it out again, and I keep working on the next thing.

I was pleased to note that one of these rejections was “personal.” If you’re not familiar, there is a bit of a spectrum of rejections for short fiction. The typical rejection response says something to the effect of “Thank you for submitting, we read it and we decided to pass. Good luck elsewhere.” Short, polite, clearly uninterested. There’s really no useful information you can glean from a rejection like this. They might have hated it, or thought it was just okay. Because there are so many people submitting fiction, the vast majority of responses fall into this category, usually upwards of 90%.

However, many publications also have slightly more encouraging variations on rejection. These are usually along the lines of “We liked your story, but we have to reject it anyway.” That may mean that some editors/readers liked it and others didn’t, or that they liked it, but not as much as other stories. Unfortunately, the nature of the business is that a magazine will often have more good stories than they can publish.

A personal rejection is still not a sale, but it’s nice to have a magazine with pretty good pay rates (and thus, lots of submissions) telling me that they’d like to see more of my work.

Delving Into the Trunk

As I mentioned last week, I decided to open up my metaphorical trunk of old stories. It was fun to go back and look at how many stories I’ve written over the years. Not surprisingly, there are a number of these old short stories that are just not very good. They’ll be staying in the trunk. However, I was also surprised to discover several old stories that held up pretty well. In fact, I found three stories that I think are worth dusting off.

Admittedly, these stories need some work. I like to think that my skills are still steadily improving, and I immediately identified some opportunities to make these stories better. Two of them are too long and need better endings. Those will take a fair amount of effort. But the shortest one just needs some polishing.

That first old story is called “The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk,” and I’ve already done one editing pass. I’ll probably do one or two more in the upcoming week, put it in the Critters queue for critique, and start hacking one of the bigger stories down to a manageable size.

I’m happy that I dug up these old stories, because one of my current weaknesses is my ability to edit. This gives me an opportunity to work on that.

Developing a System

It’s still the first quarter of the year, and I feel like I’m just beginning to hit my stride in this project. So far, I am really enjoying it, far more than I thought I would. There is a joyous momentum to writing and submitting short stories that is just not present when writing a novel. A novel requires so much focus for so long that it’s sometimes hard to remember what life was like before you began the project, and hard to believe that it will someday end.

Writing short stories is a kind of willful amnesia. It’s a burst of intense focus to make a little thing as perfect as possible, and then it goes out into the world to meet its fate. Maybe it will succeed, maybe it will fail. In the meantime, I get to make something completely different.

Researching markets and submitting stories might sound like an unpleasant distraction to writers who want to focus completely on craft, but I’m finding the logistics of submissions interesting as well. Even with tools like Duotrope or Submission Grinder, it’s a surprising amount of work to find the “best” fit for a given story, especially when you’re optimizing for themes and pay rates. I haven’t even dealt with simultaneous submissions or publications that ask you to wait some amount of time before submitting something else. It’s a lot to track.

Right now, I’m still figuring out what’s important and what isn’t, and each submission feels like a new little adventure. Eventually, I expect to develop a rhythm, and I’ll find that I’m carrying out the same tasks for each submission. When I get to that comfort level, I’ll write a post describing that process, and hopefully it will save some new author a little bit of effort when they decide they want to start submitting their own short stories.

Goals for Next Week

Get a draft of “The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk” ready for critique.
Start editing another old story, tentatively titled “Red Eyes.”

Year of Short Stories — Week #7

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 – 3
Rejections This Year – 2

Thanks to a failure of scheduled posts, this is going out on a Wednesday night, not a Monday morning. Oops…

Torpedo Away

As I mentioned last week, I was waiting for final notes from my wife on the revised version of “The Incident at Pleasant Hills.” She gave me that feedback, and I ended up spending another few days editing again.

However, I finally decided that enough was enough, and sent it out. I’m sure I could go through it another five times and change another word here or there, but eventually you just have to admit it’s about as good as it’s going to get and move on to something new.

Something New

Hopefully, now that I’m really, truly done with Pleasant Hills, I can spend more time this week figuring out what to work on next. Oddly, because I had a few stories ready to send out and one in progress, this is the first time this year that I’ve had to sit down and begin something new.

I poked and prodded at “Portrait of the Artist in Wartime,” which is still theoretically the next story on the docket. I still like the idea, but I realized this week that I don’t yet have everything I need to make it into a proper story. The central conflict is conspicuously absent. I’m going to need to solve that problem, or else find a different story to work on.

To that end, I sifted through my old writing files, looking for other half-baked ideas and drafts that might inspire me. There are a few that I would like to revisit, but I didn’t have any epiphanies.

Goals for Next Week

Just one: decide on the next project and put together an outline.

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”