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
Words Deferred 