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!
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.
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 – 2
Submissions Currently Out – 6
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 18 (9 personalized)
The Subs and the Pubs
Last week, Dr. Clipboard and Bluefinch came back to me, so this week I sent them out again–one to a publisher that usually responds in a few days, and one that typically takes more than a month. Luckily, I snuck this submission in right at the end of their quarterly deadline. I’m hoping that will make the response slightly faster.
Tom, Dick, and Larry also came back, with one of those odd rejections that mostly sounds like a form letter, but has just enough specificity that I suspect it’s not. The end result is the same, but these editors don’t seem to understand that I have to categorize the response for my stats!
The Edits
I continued to trim Red Eyes, shaving another hundred words off, and making a few other adjustments. I’m hoping I can trim around 400 more in this round of edits, to get it down to about 6,000 words.
I logged back into Critters.org after taking several months off. I’m several critiques behind, so I’m planning to do a couple per week to get caught up. I’ll need to get my ratio to 75% again by the time Red Eyes goes out for critique. Since it takes several weeks to get a story through the queue, and I haven’t submitted it yet, I should have plenty of time.
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.
Amazingly, it has been almost four years since I started this blog. It has become such a part of my life that I have a hard time remembering the days when I didn’t send my thoughts out to the internet on a semi-weekly basis.
I strive to document my process, if only for the curiosity of other writers—from my Razor Mountain project documenting the first draft of a novel, to my NaNoWriMo series, to my current series where I’m spending the year writing and submitting short fiction.
My “State of the Blog” posts document the blog itself. I used to do these every six months, but I switched to a yearly schedule in 2023.
The fairly obvious narrative when comparing the stats to 2023 is that the blog has slowed down considerably. In my first three years, I averaged 126 posts per year, which is about 2.5 posts per week. This year, I produced only 95 posts, or 1.8 posts per week, and the daily posts during last year’s NaNoWriMo even skew that a bit higher compared to the rest of the year. Sheer posting volume isn’t the be-all, end-all for a blog, but it does have an impact. All other things being equal, more posts make the stats go up.
I did plan to reduce my post frequency in 2024, although I ended up posting even less than I planned. Part of that was the intrusion of non-writing priorities. I moved to a new house, and my family and day job have kept me plenty busy.
Part of it was that I didn’t have a project like Razor Mountain, which lent itself to frequent posts. My “Year of Short Stories” series was, in some ways, the replacement for my Razor Mountain series, but that’s one post per week and occasionally less.
Another explanation for these statistics is the sort of content I’ve been posting. Razor Mountain (and the NaNoWriMo series, to some extent) had the advantage of an ongoing story to bring readers back on a regular basis, as well as the “development” portions that were more focused on the writing process. I’m very purposely excluding my actual fiction from my “Year of Short Stories” series, because you can’t sell first rights to a story if it’s already been publicly published—even on a blog. I’m writing approximately the same amount, but less of it is blog fodder.
I also don’t expect that “Year of Short Stories” is always the most exciting content for my readership. I hope it provides some value, if only for writers to compare to their own experiences and expectations, but I do it partly for myself. It gives me a record of what I’ve been working on, and motivates me to keep making progress every week.
New Content
Seeing the WordPress graphs go up is not the most important thing in the world, but I would like to feel that I’m providing something interesting for more readers. To that end, I have been thinking about how to spruce up the blog and post more. However, I am still committing the bulk of my writing time to work that isn’t going up on the blog. I think it’s the only way to progress my writing career. So, I want to post more things that readers like. I just don’t want it to take too much time or effort. Easy, right?
My first new experiment is the Story Idea Vault series, which started this past week. I’m excited about this, because I think most writers like prompts and ideas, and these are easy posts to write. I have huge documents full of story ideas, so I could write weekly posts for years without running out. This also gives me a good excuse to do a little brainstorming every week or two, in order to come up with new ideas.
And while I haven’t been posting as much in 2024, I’ve developed a backlog of half-finished posts. I may put a little more time into finishing some of those to give the blog more life. Still, what I would really like to find is another ongoing series that focuses more on the craft side of writing, as these are the type of posts that have mostly been MIA in the past year.
Razor Mountain
I was recently contacted by one of my old beta readers for Razor Mountain, wondering about the status of the story. I was a little sad to tell them that it’s effectively on hiatus.
As much as I enjoyed the experiment of writing a novel in public, the first draft is really only half of the work. To make it the best book it can be, I would need to dedicate months of effort to revision and critique. That would be a nice second act to the Razor Mountain series, and I do think it’s important to shed light on that part of the process. There is depressingly little writing about the struggles of editing and revision (and not just the grammar and copy-editing parts).
Unfortunately, writing Razor Mountain in public means that it would be very difficult to get a traditional agent or publisher interested in it. Unless the blog suddenly blew up and got millions of views, traditional publishing doesn’t want something that people have already seen. And despite my best efforts, I just can’t get myself excited about self-publishing.
I understand, at an intellectual level, that self-pub is a significant chunk of the landscape these days, and that it’s the way that many authors make their careers. Even so, I grew up in the era where traditional publishing was the only game in town, and I still have a certain…romanticism?…bias?…toward trad pub. Could I feel satisfied with a physical copy of my book, if I hadn’t first convinced a jaded, chain-smoking agent and an overworked, sassy editor that the book was worth spending time and money on? I don’t know. Say what you want about my biases, but we all have to follow the path that feels right. For me, that doesn’t include self-publishing, at least for now.
I haven’t given up on properly finishing Razor Mountain, but I won’t be picking it up again in 2024. I’m enjoying writing short fiction and getting involved in all the aspects of writing from idea to submission. It’s fun and satisfying to produce a heap of stories in the time that one novel would take. That doesn’t mean Razor Mountain is dead. It’s sleeping. I just need to figure out how to get excited about it again.
Thanks for Reading!
If you’re one of my regular (or even occasional) readers, know that you’re appreciated. As writers, we’re all throwing words out into the world and hoping that someone will read them. You doing that for me may not feel like much, but it’s nice to be heard.
If you have any thoughts about Words Deferred, or more generally, what you’re looking for or enjoying in blogs, feel free to drop a comment and let me know.
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.
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 