blog – Words Deferred

Week 4 — 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 four: Jan. 24 – Jan. 30

Stats

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

Goals and Results

The goals I set for this week were:

Clean up another story (F-TIB) for Critters
Revise a story (Red Eyes)
Do just enough new writing to meet my self-imposed quota

My first goal went very smoothly. I usually don’t do a lot of heavy editing on a story initially, unless I get seriously negative feedback from my first readers or I feel like it has big structural problems. This particular story is fairly short—about 2300 words—and feels pretty good after some light cleanup.

My biggest concern isn’t a story structure thing, it’s the fact that one of the two main characters is trans, and their transition is an important plot point. I’m not trans, and I want to do right by the character and by that community. I haven’t worked with a sensitivity reader (formal or informal), but that’s something I might explore for this piece.

Goal number two is a work in progress. I won’t talk too much more about it. I’ve already mentioned that Red Eyes is a fairly long story (6600 words) that does need some structural adjustments, and that’s ongoing. I think this is an interesting example of the editorial process, so I may publish a longer post-mortem when I’m done.

Goal three was an abject failure. I barely wrote anything new this week. That doesn’t bother me, since I’m making progress on my revisions and that’s what I need to do to get more stories ready for submission. My word count goals are very reasonable, and I can still easily make up those words in a few hours of solid work.

Looking Back on the First Month

It’s hard to believe that January is over. One month down, eleven to go. I’m happy to report that I feel like I’ve struck a good equilibrium with my goals. I don’t feel overwhelmed, but I am getting things done.

So far, that isn’t reflected much in the stats at the top of these posts. I’ve been working on several stories, but haven’t yet pushed one over the line to be ready for submission. If we go by my goals for the year, I should be finishing one story per month. So I will necessarily have to ramp that up.

The number of submissions is also slightly low, if we go by the raw math of splitting 50 submissions over 12 months. This flows from completing stories, so it makes sense. Naturally, as I finish more stories I will be able to submit more, so I expect this to ramp up throughout the year.

My final goal for the year was orthogonal to writing short fiction: essentially keeping the blog active by posting 100 times. Conveniently, this works out to roughly two posts per week. So far I’ve remained comfortably on track.

I was struck by multiple ideas for the blog this week, which was a small distraction from writing fiction, but a welcome one. I was able to build up a small backlog of posts over my holiday vacation, and I’m happy to be able to maintain a healthy buffer for those inevitable times when the well of ideas runs dry. It’s a nice way to keep the writing muscles in shape while taking a break from fiction, and a good excuse to think about and discuss process.

Next Week

For the upcoming week, my goals are:

Finish or get close to finishing Red Eyes revisions.
Catch up on writing word count.

Taco Cat Employee Manual still has roughly two weeks in the Critters queue before I start to get feedback, and I now have F-TIB ready to submit for critique immediately after that. Red Eyes progress has been slow, so I’m mostly clearing my week to work on that. I’d really like to have it done by the time the critiques start rolling in so I can move on to addressing those.

Catching up on word count is a secondary goal, and one that will be fairly easy to achieve if I get in the right mood for it, but I’ll be happy to let it slide if I can make significant progress on revisions instead.

Recommendations

Blogs are ancient technology, an elegant weapon from a more civilized age, and nowadays they can be found mainly in museums. However, back in their heyday, blogs were so popular that their authors would post lists of their favorite blogs on their own blogs in a sort of blogception. They called it a blogroll. Yes, people once used the term “blogroll” with utter seriousness.

Being an ancient artifact myself, I’ve been thinking for a while that I ought to make one of these blogroll things. I’ve also occasionally thought about off-topic posts where I talk about my favorite music or movies, but we all know that successful blogging requires total focus on your chosen topic, and if I veered off into something like music, I’d never get any views or subscriptions ever again.

Luckily, I’ve found a loophole. I’ve created the Recommendations page! It’s in the menu! You can get to it from every page!

Now I can have lists of my favorite blogs, books, movies, games, TV, music, tabletop games, and more—all without cluttering up that precious RSS feed—another ancient technology that I’m sure you’re all using. I’ll be updating these lists…sometimes. Occasionally. Whenever I come across something so good it needs to go in a top ten list for a while.

And as long as we’re being off-topic, feel free to comment and tell me about whatever show, movie, song, game, book, podcast, TTRPG, or anything else that’s got you excited today.

Monetizing Myself

Being a writer is strange. You have to be full of yourself to believe that others will want to read these things you’ve written, but you also need to be insecure enough to spend endless hours obsessively revising and improving those same things.

Gone are the days when a moderately successful writer could live out of a Parisian hotel. Now, you’re lucky if you don’t have to be your own marketing department and shell out thousands up front for an editor, while still holding down a day job.

Money and writing often feel like a Venn diagram that’s just two separate circles. The writerly split self-image is necessary here too. You’ve got to simultaneously think that someone might actually want to pay you, and continue working hard even when nobody does.

This is all a very roundabout way of explaining that I’ve added a new page to the menu where you can support me by buying things on Bookshop.org, signing up for Libro.fm, or directly sending me a dollar. I don’t expect that anyone is clamoring to give me their money just because I run this little blog, but now the option is there, just in case.

Monetization Options

That begs the question, what would I need to do to be “worthy” of a random dollar here or there from passing internet pedestrians?

In the modern futuristic gig economy, the cool thing to do would be to set up some kind of crowd-funding or techno-patronage system like a Kickstarter or a Patreon. I’d be interested in doing something like that some day, but it would require having a plan, a good sales pitch, and an exciting product or service provided on a deadline.

In the writing and fiction space, there are a few successful examples of this in print magazines and web zines. It varies from just another magazine subscription system to added bonus content or physical editions, to just regularly begging for donations. I also occasionally see individual authors monetizing, which usually involves either a Substack/Medium blog subscription, or a little storefront for selling self-published work.

The paid blog route really requires a time and effort investment in blogging or newsletters. That’s something I know I could do, because I’ve written fairly consistently and frequently for this blog in the past. However, it would make this feel more like a job—without any guaranteed paycheck. I enjoy blogging and the meta aspect of discussing everything writing-related, but I see it as a fun side project to my fiction. Monetizing the side project would force it to be the main project, and I don’t want fiction to be a side gig to the blog.

For the Patreon route, I’d want to send out fiction as a reward. I’d be hesitant to commit to something like a new story each month, but building up a set of 12 stories in advance sounds feasible. Heck, it could be a good way to give new life to stories that have already been published, without the hassle of trying to sell reprints to magazines or anthologies.

I could also see doing something with Razor Mountain, if I ever get around to properly revising it. A novel might be more appealing for some readers than a collection of short stories, and I could add in some of the material I documented about the process of writing a novel, which was the main appeal (at least to me) of that whole project.

Finding an Audience

Crowd funding doesn’t do any good without a crowd. The real challenge is getting any project like this in front of people who might be legitimately interested in it.

I’ve blogged long enough to know that it’s not easy to build an audience. Having work published and blogging with focus and consistency are probably the two best ways to build that, but there’s also a strong element of luck. Even with all three, it can take years or decades to find people, and it’s easy to lose them by shifting focus or just taking time off.

I have been hesitant to put any monetization on the blog because my audience just isn’t very big. On the other hand, it’s not clear when the right time is to start monetizing. My current thinking is that as long as it’s unobtrusive, it’s unlikely to turn people off, and I can start small and figure things out as I go.

What’s Next?

As usual, I’ll treat this as an experiment and try to be open about it in case the information is useful to others. I don’t have any specific plans and I don’t expect to add more monetization soon.

I’m interested to hear from any other bloggers/authors who are doing any kind monetization. What have you tried? What works or doesn’t work for you? Let me know in the comments.

Disappearing is Easy, It’s Reappearing That’s Hard

I look at my dashboard today and see that it has been a month since I last posted, and the previous post was a month before that. I don’t think I’ve taken that much time off since starting Words Deferred back in 2020.

Sorry for the lack of communication. I didn’t know I was going to disappear either. I’d like to claim I had an exciting reason, like being black-bagged by the CIA or abducted by aliens, but my life is much more mundane.

Spring has been a struggle, with a seemingly never-ending series of cold and flu germs rampaging through my family. When everyone is well, the kids are now getting to the age where their school activities are taking up a lot of our time. Plus, there’s that general late-winter Minnesota malaise, as we eagerly await the warmer weather.

At the beginning of February, I was sick and struggling to write much of anything. I started a few blog posts, and then left them unfinished. I let myself get distracted, and as days slipped by without writing anything, it felt like a bigger and bigger task just to put pen to paper.

Starting to Write Again

I’ve always struggled with consistency when it comes to my writing, and I know I’m not the only one. Over the years, I’ve noticed two genres of blog post and online discourse among writers (and especially amateur writers):

How to write consistently
Oh no, I can’t seem to write consistently, what do I do?

These conversations often take as given that you have to be consistent to be successful, and therefore inconsistency is tantamount to failure. Writers just love self-flagellation.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more consistent. Through trial and error, I’ve found ways to motivate myself and fight back against some of my less helpful habits. I’ve learned how to write more and better. I’ve also come to understand that consistency is a moving target. I suspect I will never feel as productive as I would like, no matter how much I improve.

Each writer is on a different stage of that journey, and starting from a different place. Some people are lucky to have the built-in drive and consistency to simply set themselves goals and then work toward them, day after day. Some of us have to treat getting stuff done like a heist, with elaborate plans to trick ourselves into productivity.

I’m happy to be in the position now where I know how to get going again. I’ve done it many times before. Unfortunately it’s still a pain in the ass. I have to get my brain back into that mode.

Other Updates

A few stories came back to me in February, all rejections. One of these was Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug, which had been on hold at an anthology for a while, so that was a bit of a let-down.

After making myself a word count mini-goal in January, I had planned to dedicate February to revisions. That never happened, and I’ll most likely try again in April. February was a lost month as far as writing was concerned, and I’m taking March to get back into the groove of writing regularly again. That means the blog will be coming back to life. Otherwise, I’ll be doing a mix of things—whatever gets my fingers on the keyboard.

That’s All

This post was a little more off-the-cuff than usual. I needed to write something without worrying too much about format. I don’t really have a conclusion, except to say that I’m back, and you should expect to see me around more.