Sunday, March 4, 2018

What happened in February?

Happy March! We got about a foot of snow to welcome the month with! Wouldn't it be nice if that didn't happen? I got a snow day, anyway.

My story "A Thing With Feathers" that I talked about in my January post is now live on the Mythic Delirium website!

ALSO!  A.C. Wise reviewed "A Thing With Feathers" in her "Words for Thought" column posted by Apex Magazine , and I think wrote some very good and thoughtful things on the piece. I appreciate both her review and the understanding of my story that she possesses!

In other fiction news, the acceptance that I mentioned is my story "Surveillance Fatigue", which is currently scheduled to go live at Escape Pod on April 12! It will be available there in both text and audio, so if listening to stories isn't your jam, you can still take it in.

I wrote one short story in February, tried furiously to finish it for the Sword & Sonnet deadline so I could sub a second story, and then realized, first, that it was 1500 words too long and there wasn't any way I was going to cut it down in time and second, it kind of didn't fit the theme anymore anyway? So I only subbed one story to that anthology, which was rejected, but sent on to the next market! So we march on ever hopeful, etc.

Fireside Magazine is opening for submissions in April, from April 23-April 27 (and with a  limit of 4k words!), and I know what I'm going to send them.

Interestingly, "too long" is not a story problem I tend to have. Many (most?) of my shorts are between 1500 and 3k words, with some reaching upwards of that, at 5k, and a couple of random novellas. It does make submissions interesting, though, if your story is too long for one venue and too short for another one. Submission guidelines are an important thing to pay attention to, friends!

2 comments:

  1. Congrats!

    Usually I'm more likely to struggle hitting the minimum word count for a submission, but there have been a couple times when I needed to cut to make the story shorter. And then recently, I was panicking over how much over I went...and then realized I had my submission guidelines mixed up and I was still in the preferred zone. OOPS.

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  2. Congratulations on all your successes in writing! That's great! "Too long" is a story problem I've dealt with a lot. I heard the writer Matthew Pearl speak and he said he keeps a file that he called "Extras"; that way, he can take the lines/passages that he cuts from his stories and put them in that file, rather than get rid of them altogether. He said he does it in case they become useful for another story later on.

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