At 138 words, this is not quite drabble-length, so it needs to hit hard and fast. It’s a story about the loss of someone loved, with the sci-fi element being their replacement by an artificial duplicate.
The opening is a metaphor unfurling: salt as grief. The end is a callback to the title. Great structural choices for micro-fiction.
The mix of italics and quotes is something I’ve done myself, but it’s dangerously ambiguous. Is the robot speaking non-verbally? Is it the protagonist’s internal voice of their lost loved one? Any lack of clarity can be catastrophic in a story so short.
The theme is imminently relatable; we’ve all experienced loss of a loved one, by death or lesser proxy. I don’t quite get that gut-punch emotional reaction I want from a short story, but that’s always the biggest challenge of micro-fiction, where you are fighting for every word.
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.
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 – 2
Submissions Currently Out – 5
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 29 (11 higher tier)
Submissions
I missed last week, so this is a double update. I’m also pretty sure that I started this series a few weeks into the year, and yet I’m approaching week fifty-two…which makes me suspect my count got messed up somewhere. In any case, we’re approaching the end of the year!
One of my drabbles came back two weeks ago, and I had another that had been sitting idle, so I spent some time digging through Duotrope for good places to submit them. I still struggle to find good potential homes for these, as they’re technically “reprints” that have been on the blog previously. I’m currently looking at non-paying markets to expand my options.
Payment in cents per word are generally paltry for 100-word stories anyway, so pursuing the paid options is really just for the ego boost of getting into a bigger, more difficult-to-crack publication.
The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk also came back to me in the past week with a form rejection, which is always disappointing after a longish wait. So it goes. I sent it back out alongside one of the drabbles.
Revisions
I haven’t been doing much on the Red Eyes revisions, and whenever I’m not getting things done, I have that feeling that I ought to work harder. However, I did have several new ideas for the story in the past week, and this is something that happens fairly often when I’m not actively working much on a story, but I have it on my mind. It makes me wonder if the extra time is necessary, or if I’d get to a similar place by spending more time at the keyboard (or at least staring at the screen).
This sort of thing also makes me wonder whether it’s better to let stories sit like this, and work on other things in the meantime, or whether it’s better to stick to one thing to completion. Switching between stories means thinking less about that story in waiting, which means those new ideas and changes in perspective may not come.
I tend to vacillate back and forth on this, sometimes focusing more on a single thing, and sometimes switching between several. Maybe that’s the way to do it.
Goals for Next Week
None. I’m going to enjoy the holidays with my family. If I write, I write. If I don’t, that’s fine too.
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 – 4
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 29 (11 higher tier)
A Quick Update
I don’t have a lot to report this week. A single rejection came back for No More Kings, which was something of a long-shot to begin with, being a drabble and a reprint. I’ve got a couple of these drabbles just hanging around taking up space, and I should probably spend some time finding places to submit them again in the next week or two.
I’m still working on Red Eyes revisions, although I admittedly didn’t get a lot done this week. Still, any progress is good progress, and a long winter vacation is on the horizon.
Approaching the End of the Year
I’m beginning to feel the end of 2024 closing in. For my first year really dedicated to short stories, I’m fairly pleased with the results. I’m sure I’ll do a final retrospective, but I’ve already managed to make 30 submissions. Not too shabby.
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 – 22 (8 personalized)
Doubling Up
I missed last week’s post, so I’m doing a twofer this week. The upside is that I have more news to talk about. After a long period of slow responses, I received updates on five submissions.
Responses
Two of the responses I received were form rejections for drabbles. This isn’t too surprising since I “shotgun” submitted these, and I feel like they’re long-shots outside a very few specialized flash fiction publications.
The other three responses were for The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk and Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug. I was a little disappointed by the Dr. Clipboard form rejection. This was for a contest run by a magazine that had given me a “close, but no cigar” rejection on another story. It’s also the first submission I’ve actually paid for, with significant cash prizes on the line.
Bluefinch received one rote form rejection, and one very nice personalized rejection that said it had made it to the final round of consideration. It’s not as nice as an acceptance, but that kind of positive feedback from a pro-payment market at least gives me confidence that the story is solid.
With those responses, Bluefinch and Dr. Clipboard are freed up for submission once again, and I will be sending them out in the next couple days.
Perspective
After the long silent period, these rejections felt worse than usual. An important part of the process of submitting short fiction this year has been building up a tolerance for rejection. It never feels good to have a story rejected, but you get used to it by repeated exposure.
I think one reason so many authors don’t submit their work or choose an indie/self-publishing route is to avoid rejection. If you don’t ask, you can’t be told “no.” If you throw that e-book on Amazon and nobody buys it, that doesn’t feel good, but it’s still different from someone explicitly and directly telling you they don’t want it.
Every route in publishing is hard, and it seems likely that anyone who perseveres in the industry is either masochistic or has a screw loose. I think I’m probably the latter.
I checked Duotrope’s statistics for the contest where I received the rejection. All 14 submissions by Duotrope members were rejected. Only one even got a personalized response.
So far this year, I have a <5% acceptance rate on my story submissions. That sounds pretty bad. And yet, when I go to that Duotrope dashboard, I see this little notice:
Being good isn’t enough. You need perseverance too.
Work in Progress
In my last update, I talked about focusing on one story in an effort to get something done on my works in progress. I’ve been focusing on the story Red Eyes, to try to get it fit for Critters critique.
I spent a good amount of time completely rewriting a scene that wasn’t working, and I’m happy with the result. I also fixed a few smaller issues. The main challenge, however, is that it’s still quite long. I trimmed about 400 words through tiny cuts throughout, but it’s still almost 6700 words.
I reverse-engineered an outline of the eleven (!!!) scenes and their word counts, so I can see where the bulk of the story is. This is an interesting exercise, because some scenes definitely felt longer or shorter than they actually are. I plan to take at least one more general pass through the entire story and then focus on several of the longer sections to find places to trim.
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.
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 – 4
Submissions This Week – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 10
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)
Quick Update This Week
I’m going to be brief this week, because there’s not a lot to report. I continued to make progress on my unfinished stories, although I’ve been switching back and forth. This week I worked on The Vine again. My biggest worry was that it would end up being too long, but I had some ideas this week that I think will tighten it up quite a bit.
Once again, I received no responses to my submissions this week, but I did send out The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk to another publication that recently opened for submissions and seemed like a good fit.
Keeping tabs on Duotrope’s “What’s New in Fiction Publishing?” page also continues to pay off, as I noticed a couple of new or recently opened venues for my drabbles. I’ll be reviewing those this week to see if they’re worth a submission.
Goals for Next Week
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, my main goal is to continue making headway on my (too many) stories in progress. I may also submit a drabble or two if these new publications look promising.
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 – 4
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 6
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)
Another Story
Last week, feeling blocked on my stories in progress, I started working on a new story. This week, inspiration struck for yet another idea. Since I was excited about that, I let the momentum carry me and started on a fourth story.
I do believe that it’s important to work on finishing things, and that writers can fall into a bad habit of chasing ideas without ever putting in the work to revise and polish. Unfortunately, revision is never as thrilling as that first discovery of a new story, and sometimes working on exciting new ideas can be a good emotional reset. Working on the thing that excites you at the moment can be a good way to boost word count as well.
Simultaneous Subs
This was the second week in a row with no responses to my current submissions. Since I purposely picked publications that accept simultaneous submissions for my drabbles, I should probably send those to at least one or two more places.
Goals for Next Week
This upcoming week, I’m going to try to motivate myself with a word count goal. I plan to write 1,000 words on one of these stories in progress every day. That should get me close to finishing at least one of them—although my first drafts tend to run long.
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 – 3
Submissions This Week – 3
Submissions Currently Out – 7
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)
Release
I’m happy to report that my tongue-in-cheek horror drabble, “Renter’s Dilemma,” is in the anthology Dead Girls Walking (The Red Volume) which released this week. It is available in EPUB and paperback.
Submissions
Since I finally finished my big ‘ol list of publications that seem like they’d be interested in drabbles, I figured I had better send out the ones I’ve had sitting around.
I sent out Tom, Dick, and Larry; A Going Away Party; and No More Kings.
Goals for Next Week
Short update this week. I just didn’t get much done besides submissions.
It’s starting to feel like I haven’t finished a new story in a while, so this week I’m going to focus on really churning through my stories in progress.
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 – 3
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 3
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)
No Submissions, No Responses
My stories are currently submitted to publishers with longer turnaround times, so I had no responses this week. It was a nice break to get caught up on other writing tasks. I still haven’t submitted those drabbles that have been sitting around. More on that below.
The Writing Pipeline
Recently, I’ve been thinking about my writing pipeline. When I find myself doing the same type of work (like editing drafts) for too long, I lose focus and slow down. It is good to actually finish projects instead of endlessly jumping between half-finished things, but when I’m getting stuck on a project, it’s better to make some progress on another piece than grind ineffectively.
This week, I tried to diversify my writing more than I have been. I spent some dedicated brainstorming time generating new story ideas, which I haven’t done in quite a while. I also started outlining the new story I mentioned last week, The Vine. Finally, I wrote more of Portrait of the Artist in Wartime, a story where I suspect I will end up with a large word count and have to pare down.
What I didn’t do this week is any editing of Red Eyes, which is the story I was stuck on.
Next week, I’m going to try the same tactic and split my time among a few projects, and I might go back to Red Eyes to see if I can be more productive.
The List
The last thing I did this week is finish compiling my big list of potential publications for submitting drabbles.
One interesting discovery (which is obvious in retrospect) is that many publications will pay a fixed amount per story, and while $5-20 per story doesn’t seem like much, it ranges from a respectable semi-pro to top-tier professional pay rate when the story is exactly 100 words.
My next step will be to rearrange these publications into a rough ranking. I’d like to try more simultaneous submissions, but that will be limited by the amount of time I want to spend submitting.
Goals for Next Week
Work on brainstorming, The Vine, Portrait, and Red Eyes – whatever feels most productive
Words Deferred 