Tag: short story

Year of Short Stories — Week #40 and #41

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 – 6
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 24 (9 personalized)

Mini-Update

Despite the two weeks since my last update, I don’t have a lot to report on. Stories are still out on submission. Red Eyes is queued for critique. I’m working on getting my Critters ratio back up to 75%, but it’s slow going.

I suppose the cynical and expedient thing to do would be to bang out some smaller, quick critiques just to get it done. However, I really do enjoy critiquing. When I first started with Critters, I used to struggle to write a few hundred words of (hopefully!) helpful feedback. Now I find that my critiques can easily hit a thousand words or more.

November Plans

Last year I posted daily updates for my NaNoWriMo experience. I considered doing the same thing this year and working on the second half of that same novel, but I don’t really want to put the year of short stories on hold for a month, especially in the home stretch.

Instead, I’ve decided that I’ll be sticking to the conventional NaNoWriMo goal of writing 40,000 words in a month, but attempting to hit that goal by writing short stories.

How many? As many as it takes.

Do I have enough ideas and half-finished stories for that? I guess we’ll find out together!

Goals for Next Week

  • Keep on critiquing!
  • Plan out the stories I’ll be writing in November.

Year of Short Stories — Week #38 and #39

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 – 1
  • Submissions Currently Out – 6
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 24 (9 personalized)

I missed last week’s update, so this will cover the past two weeks.

Submissions

As expected, Clarkesworld provided their usual speedy form rejection for The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk. I have to appreciate them as the fastest responders in professionally-paying sci-fi and fantasy, even if they are a very tough publication to get a foot in the door. I’ll keep trying.

I sent Bluefinch out again, and received no responses on other stories, despite having five other submissions out.

Red Eyes

It feels like I’ve been picking at my current story, Red Eyes, for ages, but I have made some progress. I finished this round of revisions at 6500 words. It’s still longer than I’d like, but I’ve submitted the story to Critters for critique. I’ll also be getting feedback from my local, non-internet readers.

I haven’t yet caught up on my Critters quota, but submitting this story will put me on the clock, as it won’t go out until I’m caught up. I’ll be spending my writing time doing that this week, instead of jumping into another story.

Present and Future

It’s hard to believe, but it’s week 39 of my year of short stories, and that means I’m 3/4 of the way done! In some ways I feel like I made less progress than I had originally hoped—I had plans to write a story per month—but I also feel like I’ve accomplished quite a bit. I’ve been able to submit a lot, I got a story accepted, and accumulated a pretty decent number of “near-miss” rejections. 

Writing and submitting short stories is a strange mix of the craft and business sides of writing. This year has allowed me to cycle a number of pieces through draft, critique, revision and polish, and given me useful experience finding places to submit, crafting cover letters, writing brief bios, and tweaking each manuscript to different publications’ slight variations on standard manuscript format.

I believe my writing has improved considerably over the year so far, and I’m excited to continue adding to my stable of stories, and submitting them.

I’m not certain at this point if I’m going to do something NaNoWriMo-related in November, as is my semi-regular tradition. If I do, I’ll count that as a break in my year of short stories. Alternately, I might try to stay on theme and do some sort of month-long short story challenge instead.

Goals for Next Week

  • Get caught up on critiques!
  • Figure out what I’m doing in November

Year of Short Stories — Week #32

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 – 3
  • Submissions Currently Out – 9
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)

Goal

Last week I set myself a word count goal: 1,000 words per day. Sadly, I only managed about 50% of that. Most of those words were on my newest story, temp titled The Scout. So far, it’s one of those stories where I am really enjoying certain aspects, and other aspects are very obviously falling short. Stories like that just need time and effort to find the pieces that will click into place and make the whole thing work.

Even though I didn’t meet my goal, it was a useful motivator, so I’m setting the same goal this week (1k words/day).

Submissions and Responses

It continues to be quiet. I received no responses on my current submissions; maybe the editors are all enjoying the last few weeks of summer.

I have purposely stuck to publications that accept simultaneous submissions for my drabbles so that I could submit widely. I sent each of these three stories out again this week. Of course, Murphy’s Law of Short Story Submissions ensures that after weeks with no responses, I’ll eventually get them all back at once.

Goals for Next Week

Once again, I’m shooting for 1,000 words on my works in progress per day, and planning to send out one or two more simultaneous submissions.

Year of Short Stories — Week #29

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
  • Submit some drabbles

Year of Short Stories — Week #28

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 – 1
  • Submissions Currently Out – 3
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)

The Vine

I have the excuse of a busy schedule over the past month or two, but I haven’t been getting as much done on my stories as I would like. Perhaps counterintuitively, I decided to unblock myself by starting work on yet another story.

The new story is tentatively titled “The Vine,” and is one that I’ve been kicking around for a while. (It inspired a piece of microfiction way back in the summer of 2021.) It’s about a plant that gets inside you and makes you feel empathy for others.

When I find myself getting stuck like this, it’s usually because there is some issue that I’m not recognizing and addressing, and it can be helpful to step away and work on something else. When I return, I’ll have a little more distance to evaluate the problems in my other stories and address them.

The Drabble Publishing List

I mentioned in previous weeks that I have a couple of drabbles that I’m interested in submitting, but some would qualify as reprints (since they already appeared on this site), and I think a good percentage of publications aren’t interested in stories that short.

So I dug deep on Duotrope and sifted through nearly two hundred publications that say they accept SFF flash fiction. I poured over submission requirements, editorial interviews and mastheads, and created a list of about thirty paying and thirty non-paying markets that might be good places to submit.

My next step will be to read some stories from as many of these as possible, especially the ones that specialize in shorter formats.

The Grind

It was a quiet week for submissions, with no new responses. I resubmitted The Incident at Pleasant Hills (which came back to me last week).

Goals for Next Week

  • Continue narrowing my drabble publisher list
  • Work on The Vine

Year of Short Stories — Week #27

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 – 2
  • Acceptances This Year: 1
  • Rejections This Year – 17 (7 personalized)

Acceptance

It was a busy week for submissions, but the exciting news is that I received my first acceptance of the year. My drabble, Renter’s Dilemma, will be published in an upcoming horror anthology.

Part of being a writer is the “skill” of being simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, so my inner critic immediately looked for some reasons to get less excited: it’s just a drabble, it’s a big anthology series with lots of authors, and there’s no payment. But hey, the truth is that there are fewer and fewer publications that pay, and a writing credit is a writing credit. I’ll take a win, and keep on submitting. And I’ll post links when it’s released.

A Little Clarity?

I also received an odd email this week that made me realize even those who work in publishing sometimes have trouble communicating clearly.

This email was in response to a submission I had sent, and it said that the story had been “accepted for further consideration.” Since this publication accepts submissions via email, I am assuming this is nothing more than an acknowledgement that they received my story. (Duotrope’s guidelines for their normal response times also backs this up.) However, many publications do require submissions to pass through multiple readers or editors before acceptance, so this could conceivably be a note that the story made it through a first round.

The word “accepted” is a very loaded word in a response to a submission, so this phrasing that starts with the story “accepted” and ends with “further consideration” ends up being a linguistic rug pull for expectant writers.

Rejections

I received two speedy rejections this week: one for my recently renamed drabble, Tom, Dick and Larry, and one for Incident at Pleasant Hills.

I don’t normally talk about where I’m submitting, but I did want to mention how much I appreciate Clarkesworld Magazine. They are an excellent sci-fi mag with a very nice homemade online submission system, and they are remarkably fast at responding to submissions, despite being one of the biggest English language sci-fi markets.

Goals for Next Week

Quick turnarounds on submissions are a mixed blessing. It means I’m getting stories in front of more editors, sooner, but it also means I’m spending more time prepping and sending stories. It’s a lot easier to get to some of my other writing goals when stories aren’t coming back to me in 3-4 days.

As usual, I find myself with a lot of things I’d like to do, and not enough time to get them all done. I need to re-send those rejected stories, and I need to continue working on my stories in progress. That’s the bread-and-butter work.

I do still have a couple of completed drabbles that I have not been sending out, and this is mostly because it’s a pain to find places that are interested in a 100-word story. I also haven’t really done any simultaneous submissions, even when I’m sending stories to publications that allow it. That’s another way to get more stories in front of more editors.

Finally, there are always Critters critiques to catch up on. Those tend to be the first thing I let slide when I have too much to do. Luckily, I’ve built up a lot of credit, but it will eventually run out, and I don’t want to end up with a story blocked, waiting in the queue while I try to catch up on my quota.

So, I’ll throw down all of these as goals, with the understanding that I’m only going to get some of them done in the next week:

  • Resubmit rejected stories
  • Look for simultaneous submission options for The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk
  • Submit more drabbles
  • Work on incomplete stories
  • Catch up on critiques

Year of Short Stories — Week #26

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 – 4
  • Submissions Currently Out – 5
  • Rejections This Year – 15 (7 personalized)

Playing Catch-Up

First thing this week, I queried the final submission that was still outstanding after my one-month writing break. The magazine responded promptly, and it was a rejection that was likely eaten by my spam filter. I’ll need to be a little more vigilant checking for responses in the future.

I re-submitted the four stories that came back to me over the past month. The process still takes a while, but I’m getting better at having publications lined up for each story, so it’s mostly a matter of checking the particulars and making sure my cover letter and formatting match their expectations.

I submitted Dr. Clipboard to a contest with a small submission fee. This is the first time I’ve spent money on a submission. I received positive feedback on a different story from the magazine running the contest, so I’m hoping that their tastes align with my style.

The Halfway Point

We’re over halfway through the year, but I got a late start on my “year of short stories” project, so this is week 26 by my count—the official halfway point.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping I’d have an acceptance at this point, but the process is slow, and I have received positive feedback. I’m also feeling more and more comfortable with the short story grind, from writing and editing to submission. It’s quite a bit of work, but I’m having a lot of fun.

Goals for Next Week

With my finished stories back in submission, I really need to get back to writing. I’ve also been neglecting my Critters critiques, and I need to get back into that habit as well.

  • Get back to writing stories and get my word count up
  • Finish a few Critters critiques

Year of Short Stories — Week #25

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 – 2
  • Rejections This Year – 14 (7 personalized)

A Month Of Responses

As I mentioned in my previous post, I took a writing break in June, so my works in progress are still in progress. I haven’t sent anything new out, but I did receive several responses.

For “The Incident at Pleasant Hills,” I received a very positive personalized rejection, indicating I had gotten past several rounds of evaluation. This confirms to me that the story is solid, and this is a publication I should keep in mind for future submissions.

“Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug,” received a rather strange rejection that was generally positive about the story, but concluded that it didn’t fit the editors’ definition of the fantasy genre. To my sensibilities, it’s more of a modern fantasy or new weird story, but this response makes me think it might be worth trying some “softer” sci-fi magazines as well.

“The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk” received a form rejection.

My drabble, “Tom, Dick, and Larry,” has the distinction of being the first submission of the year that didn’t get a response at all. A few magazines state in their submission guidelines that they won’t respond for rejections, but this was not one of them. It’s possible that the story got lost in the shuffle, or the response was eaten by internet goblins or spam filters. I’ll be sending a query to see if I can get a clear response.

Goals for Next Week

  • Send a query to get the status of “Tom, Dick, and Larry”
  • Re-send all the stories that came back to me
  • Get back into the writing groove and work on at least one short story

Year of Short Stories — Week #17 and 18

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 Past Two Weeks – 3
  • Submissions Currently Out – 5
  • Rejections This Year – 10 (4 personalized)

Moving

Well, I missed my usual Monday post last week, and as soon as I did, I lost all my blogging ambition. So this week will be a double-whammy and include the stats for last week too.

In exciting non-writing news, I’ll be moving house in about a month. We’re just getting all the paperwork sorted and starting on the packing, but I have no doubt it’ll be a big time suck. We’ve had more than a decade at the current house, and boy oh boy, stuff accumulates. At least it gives us an opportunity to go through everything and do some Spring cleaning. It’ll be a good thing, but it may eat into my writing time in the next few weeks.

Submissions

Luckily, the Year of Short Stories continues full-bore. With more than a quarter of a year under my belt, I’m up to five short stories currently out for submission, and feeling like a proper short story writer.

I finally finished The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk and sent it out. I also found a good themed anthology that accepts reprints, and submitted an old drabble, Haunted, under a new name: Renter’s Dilemma. I also got a rejection on Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug and sent it out again. I’ve just about exhausted the professional-paying options for this story, so I’m moving on to the semi-pro publications.

New Stories

I’ve noticed that I tend to slow down when I’m working on a single story, so I’ve decided that it makes sense to have a couple irons in the fire. Now that Bluefinch is done, I’m going back to Red Eyes, another story from the trunk that I’m in the process of revising. I’m also working on a fresh story, Portrait of the Artist in Wartime, in the hopes that if I don’t feel like working on one of these stories, I can make progress on the other.

Goals for Next Week

  • Make some progress on Red Eyes and Portrait

Year of Short Stories — Week #15

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 – 3
  • Rejections This Year – 9 (4 personalized)

Quick Update

I don’t have much in short story news this week. It turned out to be busy, so I got little writing done. Bluefinch remains just shy of fully revised.

I was excited to discover a brand new, pro-rate-paying magazine that specializes in speculative fiction drabbles: 100-Foot Crow. In fact, it’s so new that it hasn’t actually published yet. The timing is perfect, since I got a quick, personalized rejection for Tom, Dick, and Derek a few days ago.

That’s all for now. I hope to have more news next week.