Tag: critters

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

Year of Short Stories — Week #46 & 47

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 – 5
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 28 (11 higher tier)

Happenings

It has been a busy two weeks, and I’ve been neglecting the blog. My wife and I had a double 40th birthday party, which necessitated the first thorough cleaning of the new house. We also finally finished putting away all the little things that had been neglected since the move, and added some finishing touches, like hanging pictures and paint touch-ups.

PerShoStoWriMo (my short-story-writing replacement for NaNoWriMo) was a bust. I tend to do well in these kinds of challenges when I have a good plan at the start and get ahead early. Unfortunately, I started this November a day behind, with merely a concept of a plan, and fell steadily further behind.

I did write drafts for several stories, but I’m nowhere near the original word count goal. Yes, there are still a couple days of November left, but I’m ending it here. It was fun and moderately productive, and that’s good enough.

I do still have one story, tentatively called The Loneliest Number, that’s partly done, and I may still finish it before the end of the month. However, I’ve also got other important things to do, like eat a huge Thanksgiving meal and lay on the couch.

Work in Progress

One of the things that distracted me from PerShoStoWriMo was critiquing. I did a ton of Critters critiques in November so my story, Red Eyes, could go out. Happily, I am now caught up, and I received ten responses, which is pretty good for a 6500-word story.

My next step is to compile all that feedback into a bullet-point list of bigger issues, smaller issues, and potential solutions. Then I’ll get into the revisions.

Submissions

I received two responses for previously submitted stories. My drabble, A Going Away Party, got a form rejection. Interestingly, this was a double submission to a publisher with separate handling of sci-fi and fantasy submissions. The second submission is still marked as “in progress.”

It’s always difficult to guess what’s happening with submissions, but it’s at least potentially a good sign that the second story didn’t get rejected around the same time as the first. Maybe it’s at least being held for consideration. Of course, it could just be a completely separate queue and editors for each story, and the delay doesn’t really mean anything.

The other response was from the Writers of the Future contest, for Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug. It received an honorable mention, which is nice, although a little further investigation reveals that the contest has quite a few tiers below first, second and third place. There are about a dozen finalists and semi-finalists. Then there are about fifty “silver” honorable mentions, and even more regular honorable mentions beneath that.

There’s no way to determine exactly how many entries the contest gets each quarter, but it’s free to enter and has a big cash prize, so it’s certainly a lot. At least hundreds, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more than a thousand. So an honorable mention has some value, but I’d peg it as similar to one of those nice rejection letters that says “we liked your story, keep trying.”

I already sent Dr. Clipboard out again, this time to an anthology with a theme that feels like a pretty good fit. A Going Away Party is a drabble and technically a reprint, which makes it a little harder to find good places to send. I may just hang on to it until I see something like a theme issue where it makes sense to submit.

Goals for Next Week

  • Finish The Loneliest Number
  • Sift through Red Eyes critiques

Year of Short Stories — Week #42

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 – 26 (10 personalized)

Submissions and rejections

Once again, a fairly quiet week. I did have one bit of news: after three months of waiting, I got a rejection from Analog Science Fiction. Admittedly, I expected to receive a rejection, and I expected it to take a long time. Analog is a bit notorious for very slow submission responses. Duotrope says they average 112 days for a response, with their longest reported response time just barely squeaking in under a year!

What was surprising was that the rejection was actually encouraging. Now, this is traditional publishing, so the encouragement consists of a single sentence: “I like your style of writing and suggest that you try us again.” I think that’s what Aeryn Rudel calls The Improved Form Rejection.

Still, Analog is one of the “big three” SFF magazines, and they’ve published enough Hugo and Nebula award winners to fill a few trophy cases, so I’ll happily take whatever encouragement they give, and I will likely try them again when I have another sci-fi piece.

NaNoWriMo? No. PerShoStoWriMo!

If you missed my previous post, I’m doing something a little different for November, and I’ve given it a dumb name. My guess was that I will write 10-15 short stories this month.

I started off on the right foot by missing Day 1 completely. No words written. On days two and three, I wrote a complete story each day, and comfortably met my “par” word counts (which still leaves me a day behind).

Both of these stories were for a secret project, and I have one or two more that I’m expecting to be similarly-sized. It’s looking like 10-15 stories might be a low estimate, but I’ll have a better feel for how things are going in a week or so.

Critiques

I am still painfully aware that I’m below my ratio on Critters, and Red Eyes is languishing in the holding pen, waiting. Writing 15 other stories probably won’t help with that problem, but I have been making progress and catching up. So long as I can finish a couple per week, Red Eyes should be back in the queue before the end of November.

Goals for Next Week

  • Resend The Incident at Pleasant Hills
  • Continue critiques
  • Blast out stories for PerShoStoWriMo!

Year of Short Stories — Week #38 and #39

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 – 6
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 24 (9 personalized)

I missed last week’s update, so this will cover the past two weeks.

Submissions

As expected, Clarkesworld provided their usual speedy form rejection for The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk. I have to appreciate them as the fastest responders in professionally-paying sci-fi and fantasy, even if they are a very tough publication to get a foot in the door. I’ll keep trying.

I sent Bluefinch out again, and received no responses on other stories, despite having five other submissions out.

Red Eyes

It feels like I’ve been picking at my current story, Red Eyes, for ages, but I have made some progress. I finished this round of revisions at 6500 words. It’s still longer than I’d like, but I’ve submitted the story to Critters for critique. I’ll also be getting feedback from my local, non-internet readers.

I haven’t yet caught up on my Critters quota, but submitting this story will put me on the clock, as it won’t go out until I’m caught up. I’ll be spending my writing time doing that this week, instead of jumping into another story.

Present and Future

It’s hard to believe, but it’s week 39 of my year of short stories, and that means I’m 3/4 of the way done! In some ways I feel like I made less progress than I had originally hoped—I had plans to write a story per month—but I also feel like I’ve accomplished quite a bit. I’ve been able to submit a lot, I got a story accepted, and accumulated a pretty decent number of “near-miss” rejections. 

Writing and submitting short stories is a strange mix of the craft and business sides of writing. This year has allowed me to cycle a number of pieces through draft, critique, revision and polish, and given me useful experience finding places to submit, crafting cover letters, writing brief bios, and tweaking each manuscript to different publications’ slight variations on standard manuscript format.

I believe my writing has improved considerably over the year so far, and I’m excited to continue adding to my stable of stories, and submitting them.

I’m not certain at this point if I’m going to do something NaNoWriMo-related in November, as is my semi-regular tradition. If I do, I’ll count that as a break in my year of short stories. Alternately, I might try to stay on theme and do some sort of month-long short story challenge instead.

Goals for Next Week

  • Get caught up on critiques!
  • Figure out what I’m doing in November

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 #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.”