Business of Writing – Words Deferred

January Writing Update

Stories In Progress: 3
Submissions Sent: 0
Submissions Currently Out: 4
Acceptances: 1
Rejections: 1

I intended to write this update a couple weeks ago, but I got derailed. More about that in my February update.

I started the year on a positive note, with an acceptance for The Blue Finch and the Chipmunk! It’s scheduled to be published in April, and I’ll have more info on that as it gets closer to release.

Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug remained held for consideration at an anthology. Of course, I hope that this will eventually result in an acceptance, but I’m thinking I may try to send out some simultaneous submissions.

I received a single rejection in January. This was a drabble submission that I felt was a long-shot anyway.

January Goals

As I mentioned in my New Year’s writing resolutions, I will be setting myself monthly goals in 2025. In January, I set myself a goal of writing an average of one page (250 words) of short stories per day.

I’m happy to say that I met that goal, and my total for the month is just under 8000 words. I wasn’t writing every day, but the real benefit of a light goal like this is that it made it possible for me to catch up on the days when I did write. Over the years, I’ve learned that the hardest part of writing for me is getting started, so small goals like this work well, because I’ll often overshoot the word count once I’ve actually gotten going.

The ability to catch up also helps me stay motivated. In the past, I have succeeded with larger goals, like the 1667 words per day that’s standard for NaNoWriMo. Unfortunately, I don’t find that pace sustainable over the long term, and it’s very easy to become demotivated after missing one or two days.

Thanks to my January writing, I now have a nice backlog of completed stories that need editing. I still need to complete post-critique revisions on Red Eyes, and I have two first drafts: a short story I’m currently calling F-TIB, and another called The Scout. I wrote The Scout with less outlining than usual, and it is far too long and unfocused as a result. I will need to figure out which parts I like and then take a hatchet to the rest.

February Plans

My original plan for February was to switch to revision mode in order to get some of these stories edited. I can tell you right now, that plan didn’t end up happening. But I’ll save that for my February writing update.

Year of Short Stories — Week #48

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

Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 5
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 28 (11 higher tier)

Submissions

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

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

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

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

Further Consideration

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

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

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

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

Stories in Progress

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

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

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

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

Goals for Next Week

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

Reblog: Rejection Doesn’t Have to Hurt — Lev Raphael

Today’s reblog comes courtesy of the Lit Mag News Substack. Lev Raphael spins us a classic yarn of years of rejection finally turning into success. The secret: understanding why you write, and knowing who you’re writing for.

What eventually turned the tide? Distance and introspection. Away from New York and its toxic ideas of success, I asked myself a simple question: who might be my audience, given that I was writing so much about children of Holocaust survivors? The answer was obvious and should have hit me sooner: Jewish readers. As if by magic, once I started sending these Jewish-themed stories to Jewish magazines and newspapers, I was back on the publishing track and making money at it too.

Most writers are excited about writing, but many are deeply unexcited about marketing themselves or figuring out the commercial niches that their work fits into. Unfortunately for most of us, it’s a necessary skill to learn to sell our work, whether that be sending out short stories to the right publications, or seeking agents and publishers (or self-publishing) for books.

As Raphael says,

The main thing I learned from being accepted by publishers is that a book and its author are commodities that need to be sold, and the author has to work hard to sell both. You need to push aside any embarrassment and pull up your cyber sleeves.

Tag: Business of Writing