Welcome to 2020!

Happy New Year! I hope you had a safe and happy holiday, and that you have a good and prosperous year ahead of you!

2019 was a pretty darn good publishing year for me. I tweeted about it, but I'm happy to recount here!

I submitted stories 162 times and received 11 acceptances! 11!!!

109 of my rejections were forms, 39 were personals, and I still have 18 stories pending.

I had 4 original short stories printed: "For Whatever We Lose", "The Pearls That Were His Eyes", "Fundamentals of Search and Rescue", and "One Hundred Years".

In addition, 2019 was certainly the Year of the Reprint!

"Sugar and Spice" and "Daddy's Girl" were both reprinted in audio format. "The Wave", from my Patreon, was reprinted in actual print.

I wrote 4 short stories, and started far more (at least a few of which are pushing the boundary of what 'short story' means and are edging more into novella and novelette territory, which is great, because there are so many places to send those pieces [Narrator: there are not.]) I wrote 1 novella, Run With the Hunted 2: Ctrl Alt Delete. I wrote 1 novel, which I will be querying, after people read it, I polish it, more people read it, and I polish it more.  Oh and after I write a query letter and a synopsis.

I feel like when I was querying The Last Song, far fewer agents wanted a synopsis up front. I don't know if this is because many agents are using Querymanager now, or if in general it's just a better strategy for them. and I knew I'd have to write a synopsis, I just didn't think it'd be immediately.

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!

Writing in January (lots of deadlines!)

It's February already (or finally, depending on how your January went!)

My short story "A Thing With Feathers" is live on Mythic Delirium's website! You can also get the entire issue on Amazon or Weightless Books if that's more your style (no physical magazine, alas).

I finished three stories in January. One of them was something I'd started last year and messed around with a lot, trying to figure out point of view (first? close third? omniscient?) and tense (past? present?) and finally I was able to bring it home. The other two I wrote for submission calls, and have already been rejected for those anthologies. On one hand, that's a letdown. On the other hand, I really like it when responses are prompt. It means I'm not waiting for months. It means I can send another story. Or write another story, depending on how specific what they want is (Sword & Sonnet is pretty specific).

I also got an acceptance in January! They'd held the story for awhile, and also kindly let me send an updated version of it (of course I figured out a better way to end it after submission) and I'm very excited to announce this one when I'm able! I think projected publication date is April, so stay tuned, space cowboys.



Some recommended listening when you read "A Thing With Feathers" (I wrote the story before I ever heard this song or heard of Meg Myers, but it's a good fit!)

Story acceptance! (and May 2017 Goals Roundup)

Happy June!

May seemed to take forever. It was an interminable month. Like, it has always been May and it will be May for the rest of our lives. But, that has passed, and it's starting to be warmer more consistently. Oh yeah and we keep getting freak thunderstorms with hail.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But! I had a story accepted! It will be in the Summer issue of Syntax & Salt , which will go live June 21. Don't worry, I'll remind you.

So in May (you know where this is going) I wrote the first draft of a short story. It's both a mess and not a a mess, a complete story and not a complete story. I may need to shuffle the paragraphs like a deck of cards. I may need to tease apart some of the paragraphs, expanding them into precisely what I meant to say in the first place. I may need to chop words, sentences. I definitely need a title. So really, the normal state of things when I've finished a first draft.

I also began to rewrite a story I'd written back in college. It was a surprisingly large short story, 7500 words, and by "rewrite" I mean "I read the old one again to inform this new story that I'm writing from scratch" rather than "I'm keeping some words/phrases/paragraphs as I shift things around and make this fresh and better than I could have made it 13 years ago" (holy shit did I graduate college 13 years ago?). Arguably, 7500 words is a lot to abandon. But, considering I intend to rewrite my very very first NaNoWriMo novel as a short story (maybe novella? novelette?), in the face of that it's just a warmup act. Stretches.

And speaking of NaNoWriMo, July will again be Camp NaNoWriMo. Theoretically, I should devote at least some of June to thinking about what I'll do. Book 3 of the werewolf trilogy? Revising and rewriting The Last Song? Something entirely new? We shall see.

June 2016 goals roundup

First off, if interested, you can read the story I mentioned in my May roundup in the summer issue of The Sockdolager! My story is entitled "Sugar and Spice" which, by the way, is a title I'm happy with for once. The rest of the issue is good too, so I do invite you to peruse. It was a pleasure working with the Sockdolager folks, and it's a pleasure to be in that issue. If reading online isn't your thing, you can purchase a physical copy of the issue here for $7.

In May, I got no story acceptances, but did receive several helpful rejections. I discovered that the New Yorker's form rejection is very nice and mild (or I got the nice and mild one). I have 11 stories on submission right now; it should be 12, just have to send that other one off somewhere. It's funny, for me, the "odd stories out" are the ones with no speculative elements. They still have their oddness, though, which I think makes them difficult to place.

In May, I didn't write a new short story from scratch. See, Tor.com briefly opened a submission window for novellas, so I edited and revised an older novella I'd written. And, because the minimum required word count was 20,000 and I was at 17,000, I added about 3,000 words to the story. That's about short story length, and I feel it strengthened and updated the overall work, so I'm going to count it, for the purposes of my "write a story every month" goal. I did a bunch of writing that I'm happy with . Good enough! Really, this novella is something I've consistently been happy with and, as always, I very much hope the answer is yes.

Though that's kind of my approach to submissions in general. I always hope the answer is yes. I submit to markets I'd be happy to see my stories in. I aim high for my submissions, and I keep trying.

Keep trying!

April 2016 Goals Roundup

Mosaics 2 has launched! Technically, today (May 1) is the Kindle release date (smarturl.it/Mosaics2), but the Paperback became available on April 23.

 

Also, for right now (until Monday, May 2?) volume 1 of Mosaics is on Kindle sale for 99 cents (smarturl.it/Mosaics1 ). All proceeds from both Mosaics and Mosaics 2 will go to the Pixel project to end violence against women. 

There's even a promo trailer!

There are already 5 reviews on Amazon, and one of them specifically mentions my story (and some others), "The Lion and the Dragonslayer", as a "be sure not to miss!" and says "all names worth keeping an eye out for the future!" I know there's some rule about not reading the reviews or whatever, but apparently I can't not. I will not REPLY to reviews; that's the golden rule.

and finally, here is the art for my particular story! That's right, each piece has art!

 There is a Facebook Launch Party today, but we have a bbq thing and then Dungeons and Dragons, so I will not be hosting, just  (I hope) occasionally popping in to comment.

Who are you people and why are you in my house?

Okay, we've slid past October's halfway point. Where am I? Where are you?

Keep writing stories, and keep sending them out

I learned today that Tor.com has two different form rejections, one a little less form than the other, and that's the one I got today.

Along with the regrets that the short story they read wasn't quite what they were looking for, and luck sending it elsewhere, it includes the line "Please send us more of your work in the future."

I read an interesting article not long ago about the gender split of story submission behavior. It claimed that men, when they receive an encouragement like that, try to follow up as soon as possible (some markets want a gap between your submissions, as a for instance, a week, a month, etc.) and women will sometimes wait up to 6 months, if they submit to that market again at all.

I'm not sure how true it is. I'm not saying it isn't true either. I honestly don't know.

There are a lot of women writers getting published out there. The women who are successful, or becoming successful, could not possibly have been such shrinking violets when it came to submitting their stories. They had to have kept trying, kept sending them out (or been so goddamn brilliant they got published the first time out. I'm sure that happens to some people as well).

And then there's this blog post on The Missouri Review about perseverance (Okay, "stubborn" might get bandied about a bit). I feel like writers who are successful even a little, they persevere. They get the rejection and go "Okay, where can I send this next". Or, "What changes do I need to make so that this becomes a better story?"  I try to do both of these. I've been submitting stories for ten years or so by now and have had one acceptance. It isn't like I'm going to stop writing, so I need to keep being stubborn.

Onwards and upwards, my friends.

October Submissions: the final report

You remember my October Submissions. Submitting a story every day in October, blah blah. I finally got my last response, so can finally give the full picture on how things turned out for me. I know you're excited.

October Madness update, 10/10

Well, I'm slowly starting to run out of stories. I think I only have 6 left which are "done" and/or "ready". Have to spit-shine the others, which at one time I thought were ready. Funny how opinions change.

Let's see, on October 8, I sent a story to Apex. October 8 is also the day I received my first rejection of the month, from Fantastic Stories of the Imagination. That story will go out again before the end of the month.

On October 9, I sent a story to Urban Fantasy Magazine, and then jumped the gun (went to bed before midnight) to send a story to Buzzy Mag.

We've got people visiting this weekend, so I've already sent Saturday's sub to Shock Totem.

Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)

I threw away my rejection letters.

It was a rather satisfying, if not cathartic, experience, which I of course promptly Facebooked, as one does. There's more to that end of the story, which I'll tell you one day.  But today we're going to talk story submissions, and rejections.