short story – Page 2 – Words Deferred

Week 1 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Jan. 1 – Jan. 9

Due to the new year, I had to incorporate a partial week here at the start. This “week” was nine days.

Stories in Progress – 2
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 3

Yearly Totals

Submissions: 0
Rejections: 1
Acceptances: 0

Starting the Year

It’s always hard to get back into the swing of things after a vacation. Tacking on some New Year’s resolutions doesn’t help. Just when I would prefer to slow-roll into the new year, I’ve got to do all that stuff 2025-me promised? What a drag.

Firstly, I set up a writing spreadsheet. It’s not as detailed as some I’ve tried in the past, which will hopefully make it easier to keep up to date. For now, I’m tracking my daily words and rough minutes of revision time, aiming to write a minimum of about 100 words per day on average. I know that’s not a lot, but it’s a minimum, and at this point I’m just getting in my reps.

To aid in this, I made a plan to always have a short story in progress on my phone. This gives me the opportunity to jot down a few words when I might otherwise waste time. I’d guess writing on a phone sounds awful to most authors, but I’ve found that e-books and audio-books on my phone have greatly increased my capacity for reading. Why not try the same thing with my writing? There are usually a few times during the day when I have a spare few minutes, and the phone is always in my pocket. Besides, it’s not too onerous when I’m only jotting down a hundred words at a time.

Secondly, I reset my critique ratio on Critters. For those who aren’t familiar, Critters has a system that requires submitting about three critiques a month to be allowed to submit your own stories for critique. I haven’t done any critiques for the better part of a year, so I requested a reset. This wipes out my deeply negative ratio, putting my count at only -1. I plan to submit a couple critiques this upcoming week so I can put a story written in 2025 into the queue for feedback.

Submissions and Responses

I have a few submissions still out from late 2025. One of those came back this week as the first form rejection of 2026. Nothing too exciting there.

I also got something of a soft rejection. I had submitted a story with admittedly very light romance elements to a themed contest, and they responded with the suggestion that I resubmit with the relationship angle more front-and-center. The wording was ambiguous as to whether that was just politeness or significant interest, but I’ll likely give it a shot and resend.

Goals for Next Week

My to-do list is already longer than I’d like, and I’m working on being realistic about the time I have and what I can get done. It’s a balancing act between self-honesty and pushing myself to be a little more productive.

Top of the list is that story rewrite, since that’s the most time-sensitive. Next is catching up on critiques, as that will facilitate revisions. Getting “finished” stories polished is my fastest track to having more to submit, and that’s key if I want to meet my goals for the year. Lastly, I’d like to work on ways to fit more revision time into my week. This might mean putting some new story writing time on the back-burner, so I’m not simply wracking up more and more stories that aren’t ready for submission.

The Short Fiction Posts

In 2026, I’m once again focusing on short stories, so this seems like a perfect time to revive a series of six posts I did in 2024, all focused on short stories.

In this series, I cover why short stories are important to read and write, how they’re generally categorized by publishers, and how to revise and submit for publication. Finally, I wrapped it all up with a comparison of the two most popular websites for tracking your submissions: Duotrope and Submission Grinder.

Interpreting Short Fiction Rejection Letters

I recently crossed the threshold of 50 short story submissions, and I’ve decided to celebrate that milestone by talking about rejections! For most writers, rejections are a natural part of the submission process, and it’s expected for a short story to rack up at least a few before finding a publishing home.

Why Bother?

For most writers, feedback on a story comes through beta readers, critiques, or a writer’s group or workshop. The feedback found in rejection letters is usually paltry in comparison.

The one advantage of this feedback is that it comes directly from the editors and readers that you are selling to. Hopefully you submit to editors and publications you believe have good artistic taste, but if nothing else, these are the opinions that matter for getting a story to print (and money in the writer’s bank account).

Occasionally, this feedback might expose a flaw in the story, or in your submission process. I have a story that I submitted to fantasy publications, but it has only a single fantastic element and could be seen more as magical realism or slipstream. A helpful editor explained in a rejection, “your story has some interesting concepts, but on evaluation, it doesn’t fit well in our definition of the fantasy genre.”

This let me know that I needed to be more careful in submitting this story to publications that have a more “traditional” view of fantasy. It also gave me a better idea of what that particular publication was looking for. And since they finished the rejection with a positive note and a suggestion to submit again, I did exactly that—with a story that was a better fit—and got an acceptance.

Not every rejection will work out so well, but it’s still valuable to read the tea leaves of your rejections.

Form Rejections

These are the lowest tier of rejection, but by the probabilities of the slush pile, they are also the most common by far. Most publications (especially those that pay) receive dozens or hundreds of submissions for each one they publish, and they simply don’t have the time to give personalized feedback to each.

Unfortunately, form rejections differ slightly between publications. They typically follow a format like this:

Dear Author,

Thank you for sending us Story Name. Unfortunately the piece is not right for us at the moment. [Possibly additional sentences about how it’s not you, it’s us.] Good luck placing it elsewhere.

Sincerely,

Editors

A typical form rejection politely states that the piece is not accepted, and doesn’t offer any specific notes or ask you to submit again. However, I have occasionally received what appears to be a straight form rejection that encourages the writer to submit other work to the publication, so that shouldn’t necessarily be taken too seriously.

Some form rejections say something to the effect of “sorry for sending a form letter, we’re really busy,” which I actually quite like, because it removes any ambiguity.

Tiered Rejections

Some publications (usually bigger and more successful markets) have a tiered reading or evaluation process. They may pass each story to multiple readers, or have slush pile readers who recommend their favorites to editors for additional scrutiny. If you’re lucky, they will describe this process on their submissions page, and if you’re doubly lucky they will explain what kind of rejection a piece receives based on the “tier” where it was removed from contention.

Getting to any tier beyond the first reader already marks the story as highly-regarded by the publication. Usually the significant majority of stories get an immediate, first-tier form rejection. Since far fewer stories make it to the subsequent tiers, a rejection at this stage is much more likely to have a small, personalized note to explain why it was rejected.

In my experience, this type of rejection will almost always ask you to submit more work. Take note of this! If you get to this stage, you likely have storytelling sensibilities that align with the editors. There is no small amount of subjectivity when evaluating fiction, and for a story to get published it has to not only be well-written, but also match the vibes of the publication.

Personalized Rejections

If your story makes it into higher tiers of editorial evaluation, or you happen to submit to a rare, incredibly generous editor, you may get some personalized feedback in a rejection. This typically takes the form of a couple sentences of “what we liked and what we didn’t like,” since the story usually has some solid points that let it escape the slush pile and some weaknesses (or incompatibility with the publication’s sensibilities) that caused it to lose out to the stories that were accepted.

Some publications also offer an option to support them by paying for feedback on submissions. Use this at your own discretion. There is no guarantee that the feedback will be particularly helpful, and while most of these offers are an honestly-provided service that also helps keep the publication stay afloat financially, some less scrupulous markets don’t provide much for the fee.

I would suggest paying for a service like this only if you think highly of the publication and would be happy to support them even if you weren’t getting feedback. However, if you don’t mind dropping the money, you can always try these and see if the response feels worth it. In most cases, you’ll get considerably less than you’d get out of a writer’s circle, workshop, or critique group, so keep that in mind.

Holds

On rare occasions, you may receive a “hold” request. A hold is short fiction limbo—it’s essentially a notification that you’re going to have to wait even longer for a response.

A hold will only be issued if the publication thinks they might want to buy the story, so this is a great sign. However, it can also mean the publication is hedging their bets in case they get a submission they like more, especially if there’s a long submission window for something like an anthology.

Holds can also be a way for a publication to collect stories while trying to suss out the overall tone or theme for an issue. They may like your story, but find that it doesn’t fit well with several other stories they want to publish. As a result, a perfectly good story ends up rejected because editors have to worry about the total package of what they’re publishing.

Non-Response

If you submit enough, you’ll eventually run into a non-response. Among the hundreds of submissions publications receive every day, a few are bound to fall through the cracks. These days, many publications use submission managers like Submittable or Duosuma to help with this, but some are still working with shared email inboxes.

Firstly, if you’re submitting directly through email, it pays to whitelist the address. It’s easy to miss a response that gets caught in the spam filter, and this is much more likely to happen when the publication uses a random gmail address. It’s also worth watching your inbox and checking spam regularly, although I’ll admit I’m not very good at this.

When submitting, make sure you follow the formatting instructions provided by the publication on their submissions page. Don’t rely solely on tools like Duotrope or Submission Grinder, which can occasionally be out of date or incorrect. If you use the incorrect formatting, or ignore instructions like removing identifying information from your manuscript for blind reading, some publications will toss your submission. This may seem callous, but editors who need to weed through hundreds of submissions don’t have the time to deal with submissions that aren’t correctly formatted. Correct submission format is a basic expectation to be taken seriously as a professional writer.

Finally, pay attention to information the publication provides about its own responses. What’s their expected response time? A few publications have a policy of not responding to rejected stories, so a non-response is effectively a silent rejection. Be aware of this when submitting.

If you’re beyond the expected response time, feel free to send a short, polite query letter asking about the status of your submission. Provide your name and the title of your story. If you received an acknowledgement of the original submission, there might also be a submission number or other identifier to include.

Sometimes It’s a Mystery

While there can be valuable tidbits of information to be found in rejection letters, not every rejection will be useful. Sometimes the value is only apparent in aggregate over a number of submissions.

As a writer, I would love it if all the publishers in the world got together and organized around some standard wording for rejections so I always know exactly where I stand. However, writing (and publishing) are creative enterprises, and there are no hard and fast rules. There will always be publications that buck trends and give strange or inscrutable responses.

The best way to develop a better understanding of rejections is to submit frequently and widely. I’ve accumulated dozens of rejections, but I still have a long way to go compared to some authors who have hundreds or thousands.

Finally, it’s important to remember that a perfectly good story still needs to find the right fit to make it into print. Being patient with repeated submissions may be necessary for some stories to find an acceptance.

My Writing Year in Review — 2025

I don’t say much here about my life outside of writing, and I won’t change that now, but writing never happens in a vacuum. Other aspects of life inevitably intrude and intertwine with our art. Life also provides plenty of things to do besides writing, and it’s never hard to find reasons to procrastinate and put projects off.

Family medical issues and the mental energy required for my day job were the big challenges this year. Thankfully, everyone in my house is now healthy, and I am grateful to have an interesting and well-paying day job in a world where that is becoming steadily more difficult to obtain.

I am incredibly lucky to be able to visit the emergency room or get an unexpected car repair without my first worry being my bank account, and I am able to put presents under the tree for my kids. I don’t take that for granted.

Words Deferred

I’ll try to avoid repeating myself from the State of the Blog 2025.

I was shocked to learn from my stats page that I had posted almost 150 times this year. Then I looked back and realized that I definitely haven’t. It looks like there’s a quirk in WordPress statistics where it counts updates to static pages as new posts. So in actuality I posted less than 100 times (and quite inconsistently in the first half of the year).

It’s strange to realize that this site is the majority of my word count. Sometimes that feels bad, because it’s not advancing my writing career in a tangible way. (Maybe some day it will check some box for a publisher’s marketing department. Or maybe that’s not something they care about anymore and they’ll make me start Instagram and TikTok accounts.)

On the other hand, the site has been the single most effective tool for keeping me writing—and thinking about writing—regularly. It’s hard to quantify, but I do think this site helps fuel my energy for other writing projects and endeavors. Plus, you know, I enjoy it.

In terms of blog stats, this has been my best year ever along most axes. It feels a little odd, since I didn’t do anything different to “earn” it. The will of the internet is mysterious. It giveth and it taketh away.

After three years of steady growth, it was admittedly a little disheartening to see a significant dip last year. Likewise it feels good to see it bounce back this year. However, I’m not playing SEO games or trying in any concerted way to turn this site into a money-making venture. The numbers aren’t really important, except that my words might be getting out to a few more people, and that’s nice.

Even if the numbers flat-lined, I probably wouldn’t stop doing this. I’m in too deep now; there’s no getting out.

Short Fiction

I submitted short fiction 35 times in 2024. In 2025, that number dropped to 18 submissions.

I only sent stories out in a handful of weekend sessions, but my numbers were boosted by sending more simultaneous submissions to semi-pro markets. You can send to a lot more markets when you don’t have to do it sequentially.

I wrote 3 new original stories this year, and utterly failed to revise any of them enough to send out. I also wrote two goofy little fanfic stories, which is something I haven’t done before, and may very well never do again.

My main short fiction takeaways from the year are that simultaneous submissions are great, even if the markets tend to be lower-paying and less prestigious, and I need to work on revising work to completion.

Long Fiction

I did no novel writing in 2025.

I occasionally think about spending the time necessary to revise Razor Mountain, but so far I haven’t. In one sense it’s a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end. It was an interesting process to document here on Words Deferred. But unless I go back and really polish it to the best of my ability, it will always feel like an unfinished project.

I’ve talked about it before, but I have a hard time getting motivated to polish a book that is already “out there” online, and therefore is less appealing to send out to traditional agents and publishers. The idea of self-publishing a novel remains unexciting to me as well.

I fully accept that this attitude is a symptom of being an old man, and perhaps out of step with the state of the modern publishing industry. For now, at least, that’s just who I am.

Looking Forward

It’s good to look back and reflect on the year, but now I’m ready to look forward. In my next post, I’ll talk about plans for 2026.

Some Short Story Submissions

After focusing intensely on submitting short stories in 2024, I have to admit, I fell off hard in 2025. However, I haven’t been completely dormant. I’ve been writing a little and submitting a little, so I figured it’s about time for an update.

The Joy of Simultaneous Submissions

I have two stories out on submission right now, and both have been rejected a few times, mostly by big pro markets.

I submit to these big markets first, simply because an acceptance will come with a bigger check and more prestige. It would be fun to have my name on a cover that has been graced with genre greats; the magazines that I read when I was young.

Am I confident that my stories are a high enough caliber for those markets? No, but judging the quality of fiction is such a personal, opinionated thing, and doubly so when you’re the one who wrote it. So why not? It’s worth a shot.

The big magazines and websites can afford to be picky and demanding. They often have months-long slush pile backlogs, and don’t allow multiple or simultaneous submissions. Once you’ve submitted, your story could be in limbo for a quarter, six months, sometimes even longer. All for that <1% chance at a big acceptance.

The stories I have out right now are past all that. They had their shot. Now I’m submitting to lower-paying and less well-known markets. There are three reasons why this is nice.

There are a lot of them! Even in the face of limited reading windows, narrow topics/genres, and themed issues, most stories have at least a couple reasonable places to submit in a given month.
They have smaller slush piles, and that often equates to higher acceptance rates and faster responses.
Many of them accept simultaneous submissions, which means you can send a story to several places at once.

So even though I only have two stories I’m currently submitting, I’ve been able to make 11 submissions, which isn’t too bad.

Timing the Market

Another thing I’ve noticed is that there seem to be a lot of markets that open for submissions in the summer, and close at the end of July or August. There are reading windows all year round, but there are also these larger trends. December and January seem to be the worst times to submit, with so many people out on holiday in the US and Europe.

I still check the Duotrope themed submissions calendar and publishing news pages fairly frequently. Their “Fiction publishers that have recently opened to submissions” list is a great way to track reading windows without trying to keep tabs on all the markets in your genres. The theme deadlines list is easy to glance through to see if anything matches any of the stories that I’m currently shopping around.

Drafts and Critiques

I’m still very behind on my rough drafts and critiques. I wrote a couple stories this year, and I’m now sitting on four that are somewhere between “technically complete” and “needs a final polish.”

The downside of using Critters for critique is that I’m not very good at keeping up my three(ish) critiques per month, so when I have stories I want to submit, I tend to have to do a couple months of critiques to get caught back up. However, with my finished stories out on submission, I really have no excuse. Aside from revision being the toughest part of the job.

The rest of August is going to be busy. I have a family vacation planned for the end of the month, and the kids are back in school the week after.

I’ve set myself a lofty goal of trying to get all four stories edited before the end of the year. That works out to almost one story per month. Doesn’t sound too implausible…until you compare it to my track record for the year so far.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print. How is your summer writing going? Let me know in the comments.

Exhalation — Read Report

Buy on Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Buy audio book at Libro.fm (affiliate link)

(As I mentioned in my May Read Report, I’m going to try breaking out these posts per-book instead of the monthly summary that I have been writing. That’ll mean more of these posts, but each one shorter and more focused.)

Chiang first appeared on my radar via the 2016 movie Arrival, which is based on his short story “Story of Your Life.” The film made an impression on me by the many things it was able to juggle simultaneously. It is a great first contact sci-fi story and an emotionally fraught personal story that are intimately connected. It’s a great example of Chuck Wendig’s principle from Damn Fine Story—the inner emotional story drives the external action. On top of that, it is told in a cleverly non-linear way that not only enhances the tension, but fits with the key themes of the plot. It remains one of my favorite sci-fi movies.

Exhalation is a collection of nine stories. Two of the longest, The Lifecycle of Software Objects and Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom account for about half of the total length, and the other seven are much shorter in comparison.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects begins with the invention of a rudimentary AI system that is designed to learn and grow. The main character is a former zookeeper turned software developer who is brought in to train and develop these AI companions for the company that hopes to sell them as an advanced Tomagatchi.

The AI companions are a success at first, enough that robot bodies are even produced to allow them to movie around in the real world, albeit a bit clumsily. However, the fad soon loses its momentum as consumers begin to realize that raising these AI is just as much work as raising a human child. They learn slowly, ask difficult questions, and show none of the super-human capabilities that sci-fi has long imagined from AI. The company goes under, but the protagonist and a dwindling group of die-hard believers in the project continue to raise their AI children with the understanding that it will be just as difficult as parenting a human child.

There are no shortage of stories out there about superintelligent AI taking over the world, but far fewer that suggest non-human lifeforms might need just as much raising and growing up as their human counterparts.

In Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom, a device called a “prism” can create a quantum event at the moment of initialization, with two possible outcomes. The result is two parallel realities that diverge at that exact moment, a clunky briefcase laptop linking them with text chat and video calls to its parallel-universe counterpart. Each briefcase has a limited amount of memory it can use to communicate between the two worlds before it is used up, making older or less-used machines more valuable and rare.

The story explores various ways people are affected by this tech. Some obsessively compare their own lives to those of their alternate-universe selves or use alternate realities to justify their decisions. Some use it as an opportunity to “work together” with their alternate selves, or talk with alternates of people who have died in their own world.

While the prism device is the conceit on which the story hinges, it’s really about the choices we make. Alternate realities may make some question the value of a given choice, when the exact opposite is chosen in other worlds. But each choice still has consequences in this one, and an associated moral weight. Is a person defined by the accumulation of their choices across one life, or across infinite parallel lives?

There is little “hard” sci-fi or far-future technology in Chiang’s stories. Stories like The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny, and Exhalation dip their toes in steampunk sensibilities, while The Lifecycle of Software Objects, What’s Expected of Us, and Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom posit worlds that could essentially be the one we live in today, but for one or two technological additions.

It’s also apparent from these stories that there are a few themes that Chiang keeps returning to, the bigger planets in his solar system, whose gravity is obvious across his work. Time travel and alternate universes are a recurring theme, but this may be because he is so intent on explorations of choice, free will, and whether our decisions have meaning.

As with any sci-fi, technology is at the heart of these stories, but they are not cold and robotic as sci-fi can sometimes be. Writers like Asimov are often critiqued for clockwork plots with flat characters who are merely parts in the machine. That’s certainly not a problem for Chiang. Most of his stories are character-forward, and are about human behavior and belief in the face of the changes wrought by technology. It’s easy to relate to these characters, because they face decidedly human problems in worlds much like ours, where technology drives change and sometimes creates new joys and new pains.

I often want to roll my eyes when speculative fiction authors escape the genre fiction ghetto and get themselves shelved under that haughty label of “literature.” It seems like a flimsy excuse by the gatekeepers to allow themselves to enjoy what they would otherwise be required to look down upon, due to the presence of spaceships or elves. For Chiang, I’ll make an exception. I think he deserves to be widely read, and I’d rather not see people put off by the time machines and intelligent robots.

The Blue Finch and the Chipmunk

I’m happy to announce that my short story, The Blue Finch and the Chipmunk, is in the April issue of Sally Port magazine.

A young apprentice sorcerer must choose whether to help her cantankerous master out of a sticky situation…or use it to her advantage.

Click here to buy the issue or subscribe.

January Writing Update

Stories In Progress: 3
Submissions Sent: 0
Submissions Currently Out: 4
Acceptances: 1
Rejections: 1

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.

New Year’s Writing Resolutions

The champagne popped, the ball dropped, and New Year’s is behind us. Now that we’re firmly in the frigid grip of a new January, it’s time for some updates.

I normally don’t go in for New Year’s resolutions, but with my year of short stories now complete, it feels like a good time to reevaluate my writing, the blog, and my goals.

New Monthly Goals

With my serial novel Razor Mountain, I spent two years focused on a single project and eventually ended up burned out. My 2024 year of short stories allowed me to pursue a looser goal where I could work on a variety of different short stories.

In 2025, I’d like to work on something I’ve long struggled with: output. Between my day job and my family, I’m a fairly busy person. I’m also a natural procrastinator, and I know that I often need deadlines (even if they’re artificial ones) to get things done. Previous years’ projects have helped me focus and finish things, but I’m always dogged by the desire to get more done.

My initial idea for 2025 was a simple daily word count, fairly low so I could get used to it. At the beginning of January I decided I would write about a page per day—250 words. My January has already been a little crazy, and I’ve only written on about 50% of the days so far, but I have managed to “catch up” the days I missed, and I’ve stuck to my overall page-per-day requirement. I expect to have at least two short story drafts finished by the end of the month, which is very good for me.

However, I’m already seeing a problem with this word count quota. It’s getting me to write those first drafts, but I’m going to be kicking the can on revisions. I already had Red Eyes revisions carried over from last year, and now I’ll have at least two other drafts that need to be critiqued and polished.

So, instead of carrying my page-per-day goal through the whole year, I’ll only commit to it in January. When February rolls around, I’ll pick a new daily goal, like fifteen minutes of revisions per day. This flexibility will hopefully keep me productive, while allowing me to adjust my goals throughout the year.

The Return of Razor Mountain

That flexibility also gives me the opportunity to do something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I “finished” Razor Mountain in the sense that it’s a complete story, but it could be better. I’ve had some time away from it, and I’m excited to bring it back in 2025. I haven’t decided how much time I’ll spend, but I do plan to start working on revisions again.

The whole point of Razor Mountain was to document the process of writing a novel, so I will also continue that tradition by posting all the details of my process, my struggles, and my successes.

More Bloggy Stuff?

I don’t yet know how much of my short story work will show up on the blog. I know I’m having a good time, but I suspect my weekly recaps aren’t the most riveting content. In 2025, I’ll probably be more judicious and only post about short stories when I have some bigger topic to talk about.

I will continue some of my long-running series like monthly Read Reports and the Story Idea Vault. I have a backlog of narrative video games to play for my “Games for People Who Prefer to Read” series. I might even perform some necromancy and revive a few of my older posts with new commentary and expanded ideas.

I do sometimes miss the days of years past when I would consistently post here 2-3 times per week. I’d love to say that I’ll be more active like that again, but I think I’d be lying. I just don’t have the bandwidth to do that while pursuing my other writing projects. Still, I love the blog, and I greatly appreciate the folks who continue to stop by. I still expect to post at least once per week.

What About You?

I’m curious if you have any New Year’s writing resolutions. What’s working, what’s not, and what do you plan to change? Let me know in the comments.

Year of Short Stories — Week #52 Retrospective

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.

The Final Tally

Stories – 7
Submissions this year – 35 (5 still out)
Acceptances – 1
Rejections – 29 (11 higher tier)

Thus ends my Year of Short Stories.

Looking at these numbers, I do wish I had gotten more stories out the door, and I would have loved to get more acceptances. However, I think this is an excellent starting point. If nothing else, I have had a ton of fun writing and submitting stories, and I feel very comfortable with the process now.

The only thing I can do to increase that acceptance count is to write more stories to the best of my ability and continue sending them out.

Refining the Process

Prior to this year, I wrote short stories haphazardly, when an idea struck me and kept my interest. I submitted pieces occasionally, but I never pursued it with any seriousness.

This year, I took it seriously. I polished up a couple of finished stories and wrote several more. I sent stories through Critters critique, while submitting more than 50 of my own critiques of others’ work. I revised those stories far more than anything I have written before.

I know that many authors will grind their teeth while thinking about submitting their work to publishers, but I will argue that this is important practice. Internalizing the standard formatting, writing your own biographical blurb, and learning to write a cover letter—however brief—is valuable. Adjusting all of it to a publisher’s expectations is also important experience.

Today’s technology makes it possible to write alone, revise alone, and publish instantly. I don’t think that’s the way to produce great work, and the long tail of Amazon e-books is evidence of it. The old stereotype of the reclusive author is the exception, not the rule. Creativity is a feedback loop, and that means authors who want to take their craft seriously need to develop professional skills (like selling themselves and their work), and seek honest and tough feedback to actively improve.

Getting a story published by a small website; or a big podcast; or a top-tier, pro-payment magazine tells you something about what you’ve written. “This isn’t quite what we’re looking for” rejections and “send us more of your stuff” rejections are little puzzle pieces that slowly assemble themselves into way markers for future stories.

The indie publishing pundits loves to rag on all the gatekeepers of traditional publishing, and I don’t think anyone should feel beholden to the gatekeepers. But I do think that your writing will become a lot stronger if you push yourself to write stories that can compete with hundreds of other submissions in a slush pile, and catch the eye of jaded, chain-smoking editors who have read more stories in the past year than most of us read in our lifetimes.

That editor doesn’t get to unilaterally decide what’s a good story and what isn’t. But if you can’t find anyone immersed in stories who really likes the thing you’ve written, then it might be time to revise it, or set it aside and write the next thing.

Publishing stories the traditional also way forces you to find your audience. You have to learn what kind of readers and editors like the stuff you’re writing, and that’s incredibly valuable information if you want to get your stories in front of readers who will love them.

The Joy of Short Stories

I love novels, and I’m sure they account for the vast majority of the words I’ve read in my lifetime. Unfortunately, writing a novel is like slaying a giant—it’s not the best thing to try when you’re still learning how to swing a sword.

This past year of experience has confirmed for me that writing short stories is a fantastic way to improve my writing quickly. Writing short stories allows me to jump between genres, to try out new characters and new settings. I can spend a few thousand words with an idea and then let it go. The price of failure is low, and the joy of experimentation is sky-high.

Writing short stories and actively submitting them means I’m exercising all of my authorial muscles. I’m jumping between first drafts, revisions, critiques, and submissions. I’m constantly iterating and incorporating feedback into individual works, but also into my process as a whole.

Rejection and Acceptance

The final takeaway that I have from the past year of writing short stories is more of a Zen attitude toward my own work.

Writing is often incredibly personal. We joke about our stories being like our children. But that kind of protective love makes it harder to improve. It’s hard to take negative feedback on a story if you think of it as your baby. It’s hard to take rejection.

Luckily, the easiest way to overcome those feelings is through brute force. Write lots of stories. Get as much criticism as you can, and then improve them. Send them out, and get rejected, repeatedly. By the time you’ve built up your own little one-person story factory, those pointed critiques start to be fun, because they provide opportunities to make the story better. The rejections roll off your back, and you submit again and move on.

I recently listened to David Sedaris on a podcast, and he said one of the keys to his success was never confusing the writing with the publishing. Ironically, I think the best way to internalize that sentiment is to be repeatedly rejected by publishers.

If you really want to, you can try to follow the market trends. You can improve your odds of publication by submitting to venues that fit your work, and submitting relentlessly. Trying to get paid is hard. Every submission is a job interview with hundreds or thousands of applicants.

And yet, if you already love the writing, getting paid is just a bonus.

Goals for 2025

My Year of Short Stories may be done, but my short story writing will continue. If anything, I’d like to finish more stories this year than I did in 2024. After all, the story factory is built, and I have no shortage of ideas.

Of course, I’d like to get a few more stories published in the upcoming year as well, but I have less control over that. So I’ll just keep submitting.