Tag: critters.org

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is the week of Aug 10 – Aug 16.

Stats

• Stories Finished: 3
• Submissions Currently Out: 9
• Submissions Total: 29
• Rejections: 22
• Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

One form rejection this week, for Taco Cat. I still have one other submission out for this story, but I may look for more places to send it.

Goals

My goals from last week:

1. Keep up with critiques
2. Finish Estate Sale revisions and submit for critique

I am back in the swing of doing a critique per week, so that’s an easy box to check.

I worked on Estate Sale, but it’s still not ready yet. I’m thinking about better titles, with Magpie being the current frontrunner. Ideally, I’d prefer something with a little more malice for a horror story.

Learn, Learn Again

I often find that many of my difficulties in life are self-inflicted. Few things are more irritating than thinking I’ve learned a lesson, only to realize some time later that I failed to internalize it and slid back into old behaviors.

I started this year with daily quotas for words written and revision per day, and my intent was to try to actually hit those numbers each day instead of cramming all of my writing time into the weekends. The quotas are small: 100 words and ten minutes, so they’re not hard to meet and it’s possible to catch up from missed days.

Now it’s August, and I find that I’ve slipped into old habits. I only write on the weekends, I have been revising with little new work, and my word count is weeks behind. I instinctively reach for the usual excuses: end of summer busyness and the imminent return of school, work, and my indie game project. Plus, it’s so hard to come home from work, cook dinner, do chores, and then find energy for writing, right? Never mind the folks in significantly harder circumstances who somehow find the time to bang out fine literature.

So, with that ritual self-flagellation out of the way, I’m going to try to relearn my lesson this week, and meet my quotas every day.

The Times, They Are A-Changin’

I’ll also mention that I think it’s a very interesting time to be a writer, and I mean that both literally and as the faux Chinese curse.

I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about the direct and indirect effects of AI on writing and publishing. Fiction, like everything involving written words, is in the midst of major disruptions, and these come on the heels of the e-book and self-publishing revolutions that have already caused major upheavals and consolidation of power in the industry. There are  more ways to publish work than there ever have been, though it’s still not easy (and maybe getting harder) to be paid to do so.

Scandals around allegedly AI-written books are making it into the general news cycle, but I suspect short fiction is feeling the impact far more, if only because of sheer accessibility of submissions and comparatively lower effort. I’ll have a post or two on these topics in the near future.

Next Week

Goals:

1. Keep up with critiques
2. Hit writing/editing quotas every day.

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is the week of Aug 2 – Aug 9.

Stats

• Stories Finished: 3
• Submissions Currently Out: 10
• Submissions Total: 29
• Rejections: 21
• Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

No new submissions or responses this week.

Goals

My goals from last week:

1. Keep up with critiques
2. Revise Estate Sale
3. If time and energy allow – review T.I.M.

After last week’s reset, I’ve been blasting through critiques to get ahead of the game. Now I just need a story to put in the queue.

On that front, I worked on revisions for both T.I.M. and Estate Sale. This was the first time I’ve read through T.I.M. since the major rewrite, and since it has been a few weeks, I felt like I could give it an honest look. It was better than I thought it might be. The main problem is that it’s now 6000 words, and I’d like to really trim that down. It also has a weak ending that will need to be improved.

Estate Sale feels closer to done, but I’m going to try a new revision technique with it.

Externalizing The Inner Critic

The idea I’m going to try is pretty simple. Now that I have the story in a pretty good place, I’m looking at it, pretending I’m a critiquer, and trying to anticipate where the critiques might complain about the story.

The reason I’m doing this is because I have had a couple cases recently where I managed to convince myself that a niggling problem with a story is not a big deal, only to have critiques come back and call out exactly that problem.

Now, sometimes fellow writers will critique a story, and it’s clear that they want to make it the kind of story they like, rather than the best version of the story you want to tell. I try to avoid this when I’m critiquing. So it’s still important to not water down the story in hopes of making it “something lots of readers will like.”

I suppose I’m just trying a new tactic to try to separate my critical brain from my writing brain for editing.

Next Week

Goals:

1. Keep up with critiques
2. Finish Estate Sale revisions and submit for critique

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is the week of Jul 27 – Aug 2.

Stats

• Stories Finished: 3
• Submissions Currently Out: 10
• Submissions Total: 29
• Rejections: 21
• Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

The only response I received this week was a single form rejection—the very first for my new story, Beneath the House at Caen. I’m never looking for a rejection, but I do appreciate a publication with a quick turnaround on submissions. Now Caen feels “broken-in.”

I scoured the listings and sent out three more submissions this week, bringing my total in flight up to a healthy ten. Trying to find publications for Red Eye and Taco Cat once again drove home the challenge of selling a 6700-word story vs. selling a 1000-word story. Even though 1000 words is too short for a few publications, there are still far more listings than for the long story. Not only that, but the places that do take longer stories trend toward the bigger, older publications, and they often reply very slowly and don’t like simultaneous submissions, making the process even more arduous.

Remember kids, you have to write what feels right to you, but size does matter when it comes time to actually sell that story.

Goals

My goals carried over from the previous week:

1. Submit stories
2. Catch up on critiques
3. Clean up and trim T.I.M.
4. Other revisions: Estate Sale?

With the additional story submission this week, I’m in pretty good shape. Now I’m just keeping my eyes open for opportunities to submit Red Eye and waiting for responses.

I also reviewed my Critters admin panel and found that I was far enough behind to warrant a ratio reset. I’ll be working on a couple critiques this week to get myself back in the critique gods’ good graces.

I’m still not quite ready to come back to T.I.M., so I worked on revising Estate Sale this week. Having let it sit for a while and come back, I found it fairly readable. I don’t think this one will need too much more work, at least until I get some reader feedback.

Next week, the goals get a little shuffle.

Next Week

Goals:

1. Keep up with critiques
2. Revise Estate Sale
3. If time and energy allow – review T.I.M.

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is the weeks of Jun 15 – Jun 28.

Stats

• Stories Finished: 2
• Submissions Currently Out: 5
• Submissions Total: 22
• Rejections: 19
• Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

Two submissions came back to me over this two-week period.

One was for The Incident at Pleasant Hills, and was a very pleasant personalized rejection that said several nice things about the story before the usual “we get 1000 submissions each submission period and only have 10 slots” let-down. The one piece of feedback was that the beginning was too slow, so I might review the story and see if there’s anything I can tighten up next time I send it out.

The other response was an honorable mention in the Writers of the Future contest for my story, Red Eye. This is the second time I’ve submitted, and the second honorable mention I’ve received. So that’s something.

I do not know how many submissions they receive for their quarterly contests, but I am sure that a paying contest with no submission fee receives quite a few. They have a multi-tiered system: honorable mentions, “silver” honorable mentions, finalists, and 1st/2nd/3rd place. Judging by Duotrope stats, I would guess that something like 10-20% of entrants fall into all those categories. So I’d say an honorable mention is about on par with a tier 2 rejection from a paying publication. More or less.

I still narrowly meet their “new writer” criteria, so I’ll likely send more stories their way as long as I am able. Being an L. Ron Hubbard joint, they are at least nominally associated with Scientology, something I am certainly not a fan of. But all that Tom Cruise money pays for a free contest with good prizes. I figure the cult cash might as well go to me, rather than all the other shady things they get up to.

Goals and Results

Last time, my goals were:

1. Finish T.I.M. (Formerly F-TIB)
2. Start working on Beneath the House in Caen revisions.

I “finished” T.I.M., clocking a little over 2,000 more words, and bringing the total to 6,000. That’s a significant bump from the original 2,300-word story. It’s also not surprising since it went from 5-ish nebulous short scenes to eleven. It still needs significant cleanup, and maybe another Critters run, and will hopefully shed words along the way. However, for the moment I am happy to let it rest.

Meanwhile, I collected all the Critters feedback for Beneath the House in Caen into a single document and started creating a bullet list of things to work on.

I have to say, there are a lot of things I like about Critters, and the fact that Andrew Burt keeps the enterprise going year after year when he undoubtedly loses money on it makes him a saint among writers. But dear God, the website and the email infrastructure feel like they are from the 90s, and the critique emails come in with bizarre formatting. Every time I submit a story, I think about creating some scripts reformat the critiques for readability. Maybe I’ll get around to that some day.

Beneath the House in Caen feels to me like a story that needs much less work than T.I.M., and I think the feedback bears that out. I’ll try to bounce back and forth between this and T.I.M. over the next week and see what I can get done.

Next Week

My goals for next week are flip-flopped versions of the previous weeks:

1. Revise Beneath the House in Caen to completion, or close to it.
2. Clean up and trim T.I.M., consider whether it needs another round of Critters.

Next week will be Week 26—the halfway mark of this Year of Short Stories. I plan to review my goals and see how they compare to my current progress. Spoiler: I’m a bit behind. However, I’m not that far behind, so I suspect I picked my goals well. More on that next week.

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is the weeks of May 4 – 17.

Stats

• Stories Finished: 2
• Submissions Currently Out: 8
• Submissions Total: 19
• Rejections: 15
• Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

In the past two weeks I had a single rejection for Taco Cat Employee Manual. It was one of those where it’s either a very brief personalized rejection or a very positive form rejection.

As I mentioned in the previous post, the last open submission for The Incident at Pleasant Hills had come back, so I spent some time scouring Duotrope and submitting. The end result was one new anthology submission for Taco Cat and three new submissions for Pleasant Hills.

I’m still pretty much on par or slightly ahead on my goal of hitting 50 short story submissions by the end of the year. Now, if I could just finish a few more stories, that would help me blow that goal out of the water.

Goals and Results

Last week’s goals (well, technically two weeks ago):

1. Submit The Incident at Pleasant Hills
2. Continue revising F-TIB.
3. Outline Arbor Grove (and maybe start on the next version)
4. Review critiques for Beneath the House at Caen.

Between work and my kids school activities, life has been busy. As usual, I’ve made progress, but perhaps not as much as I would like. I submitted Pleasant Hills and did a cursory read-through of the critiques that came in for House at Caen.

I’ve now gotten a couple notes from critters who mentioned that they liked some previous story I had submitted, so they picked up one of my newer stories when it came up in the feed. It’s nice to hear that the quality on rough drafts was at least high enough to pique some interest, and a good indicator that it pays to submit regularly so the more prolific critters have a chance to notice you and submit useful feedback.

The main downside of Critters compared to a traditional writers’ group is that it’s less personal and harder to get to know others. It’s nice to see that there is some community to be found in the group if you’re active enough.

Arbor Grove was really the one  goal that I didn’t work on, although it has been in the back of my mind. This week I’m thinking that I’d rather just fall behind on my word count goals and spend my time working on the drafts that are closer to completion.

Then again, I’ve never been very good at sticking to any one thing for long, so I may go back to it if I get the itch.

I rewrote a couple scenes in F-TIB (or rather made scenes out of the messy montages). There’s still more work to be done there, and I haven’t quite gotten it all to fit together in my head in the way that tells me I’ve cracked it. So I’ll continue.

This Week’s Mini-Topic: Revisionary Disassembly

As part of my work on F-TIB this week, I broke the story down into its scenes and characters, which really helped to show that a good chunk of the story didn’t have discrete scenes (as well as highlight the problems critters pointed out with two of the characters).

The pattern that I noticed is that major revisions are often a process of disassembly and reassembly.

I often find that once I’ve finished a first draft and done some polishing, it starts to feel like a single unit with no seams. It’s easy enough to deal with line edits, because those don’t typically change the shape of the story, but when problems revealed in characters or scenes or anything that cuts across the story as a whole, they feel much more overwhelming. When the story is a contiguous sequence of A then B then C, how can anything be significantly modified?

This is where I’ve found it effective to break the story back down into individual components. Look at the scenes and what happens within them. Look at the characters and see how they interact and how they drive the plot.

These smaller pieces are discrete components with interfaces to other components of the story. If you modify one of them, you just look at the linkages to other characters and scenes, and make the necessary adjustments to make them fit. Sometimes that means a changes in one place necessitates a cascade of changes, but those can be identified and addressed one after another.

So, next time you’re having trouble with revisions, consider making a reverse outline or listing out your characters and what their purposes are within the story.

Next Week

I’m going back to focus mode, with a single goal:

1. Continue revising F-TIB.

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 fifteen: Apr. 13-19.

Stats

• Stories Finished: 2
• Submissions Currently Out: 6
• Submissions Total: 15
• Rejections: 13
• Acceptances: 0

Goals and Results

Last week’s goals:

1. Write ~2k words of Arbor Grove.
2. Revise F-TIB.

This was a fairly quiet week. I made good progress on Arbor Grove, but didn’t quite hit 2k. I revised F-TIB, but it still has a ways to go. I got a single form rejection for Taco Cat.

I also did some extra critiques this week. I’ve found that I tend to slack off on critiques when I don’t have a story in the queue (which luckily is not that often this year), so I’ve been trying to not only stay caught up, but get a little ahead. That way I’ll have some wiggle room when things come up and I have to miss a week.

Next Week

Even though I made progress this week, my goals for next week are essentially unchanged. However, I’m moving F-TIB into the top spot because it would be nice to get it ready for submission before Beneath the House in Caen goes out for critique at the end of April.

Goals for next week:

1. Revise F-TIB.
2. Write Arbor Grove.
3. More critiques!