PerShoStoWriMo

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 #43

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 – 5+
Submissions This Week – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 6
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 26 (10 personalized)

Week one of my personal short story writing month is in the books, and it didn’t go well!

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I definitely didn’t pull NaNoWriMo “par” numbers, and I missed three days entirely. I’m currently trending toward about 50% of the goal wordcount of 50,000 words by the end of November. And yet, I’m pretty happy with my progress. I’ve blasted through drafts of four short stories so far, and I’m deep into a fifth (considerably longer) story.

I’m being productive with the time I have available. As usual I’m juggling my day job, my kids activities, and other family stuff.

Plus, I have over a week of vacation planned in November, so I may have some time to catch up. Even if I don’t, I’ll still be glad to have gotten quite a few words on the page.

Submissions

I resubmitted The Incident at Pleasant Hills, which came back to me last week.

I’m hoping that I’ll get some responses in the next month or so, but with end-of-year holidays fast approaching, I expect anything that I submit through the end of the year to be out until 2025.

Critiques

I’m still getting caught up on Critters critiques, but the end is in sight now. I’ll catch up sometime this week. This past week is actually when Red Eyes would have hit the top of the queue, so I’m not doing too bad in that regard.

Goals for Next Week

Get caught up on critiques!
Keep writing short stories for PerShoStoWriMo!

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!

PerShoStoWriMo

It’s November, and you know what that means. It’s the month when a bunch of writers try to string 50,000 words together into something almost, but not entirely unlike a novel.

Over the years, NaNoWriMo has grown from a thing that more and more people do to a full-fledged nonprofit corporation with a website and forums and programs and email lists. Somewhere in that process, it has become apparent that this organization has a penchant for saying and doing some questionable things. The most recent controversies involved a moderator grooming minors on the forums, and a statement on AI that suggested that any stance against AI-generated writing was ableist and exclusionary.

NaNoWriMo, the Unnecessary Organization

Thankfully, we still live in a world where pretty much everyone agrees that child-predators are the scum of the earth, and the forum debacle resulted in the whole forum more or less being shut down and a major shakeup in the organization.

The statement on AI, unsurprisingly to everyone except the people making it, did not go over well with the core NaNoWriMo demographic of people who like to write things themselves. It resulted in little more than a bunch of grumpy articles across the web, a quiet backtracking of the original stance, and a response from the NaNoWriMo organization that amounted to “Oh, guys, we didn’t mean it like that.“

Rather than write my own screed about how dumb this is, I’ll just point to a pair of rants by Chuck Wendig: one about the NaNoWriMo thing in particular, and another about the problems of generative AI. I agree with about 90% of what he says on this topic, and he’s just really good at channeling angry outbursts into blog form.

I’ve done my best to ignore the NaNoWriMo organization’s antics in recent years, but I think I’m finally done with them. What will I miss out on? A not-entirely terrible online word count tracker and a Discord that I never use? It seems clear that NaNoWriMo works pretty well as a thing people do, and not so well as an organization. So let’s treat it that way from now on.

PerShoStoWriMo

This year, I’m not writing a novel, or even something vaguely similar. No, it’s my Year of Short Stories, and I’m going to spend the month attempting to write 50,000 words of short stories. To get in the proper spirit, I’ve christened the month with a new, even more insane pseudo-acronym. It’s my Personal Short Story Writing Month: PerShoStoWriMo.

The advantage of a novel-sized story idea is that I generally don’t run out of plot in 50,000 words. I write sci-fi and fantasy, where 100,000-word novels are considered to be a bit on the short side. But when it comes to short stories, I try to actually stay on the short end of the spectrum. This poses a big question.

How many stories am I going to have to write to hit 50,000 words?

I don’t know, but I can make some educated guesses. If we ignore microfiction, my stories range from around 1400 words to 6500 words. The halfway point in that range is about 4000 words, and while I probably write more stories on the shorter end of the spectrum, I also tend to write long drafts and pare them down in editing.

So, to meet my goal, I’ll most likely have to write 10-15 stories.

Hmm. It sounds a little insane when I say it like that. I’ve written fewer stories over the past year. Still, those other stories were properly edited, then critiqued, then edited again. There will be no editing this month. That goes against the ethos of PerShoStoWriMo.

I do have a few short story ideas lined up or in progress. I’ve talked about The Vine, Portrait of the Artist in Wartime, and The Scout, and I’ve got one or two others rattling around in the back of my head. I also have a secret project in the works, and this will result in another couple of stories, at least.

An Exciting November

All in all, this PerShoStoWriMo thing feels right. It’s got a ridiculous name, it will force me to get a bunch of writing done, and it’s right on the edge of what feels possible.

I’ll keep you posted throughout the month, and we’ll see how it goes.

Are you doing any writing challenges in November? Let me know in the comments.