June 2017 Goals roundup

So June was pretty great!

My short story "Daddy's Girl" was published in Syntax & Salt and a lot of people have shared it across Twitter and said very nice things about it, which I really appreciate and which thrills me to no end. I try to share short stories when I've really liked them, and follow the authors on Twitter, and in this instance that story is mine and that author is me and it's a lovely feeling. Additionally, the Syntax & Salt folks were very nice and easy to work with, and I'd like the stories they'd run previously, which is why I submitted mine.

Oh, so have you tried out Inspirobot? You should. It's an AI built to generate inspirational phrases, and slaps them onto images. It's....interesting. Sometimes perfect, sometimes hilarious. Sometimes both! I may inflict some of them on my writing group as writing prompts. We'll see.

Interestingly, so far, every story I have had accepted was either 1. accepted its first time submitted or 2. the first time I'd submitted a piece to that particular market. Obviously, this trend has to break at some point, as I have more stories and am constantly sending them out. Though I guess I need to take a break on that pretty soon, if I'm going to be doing October Madness again this year. Though the point of October Madness is to get myself submitting stories, without having lapses, and clearly that is no longer a problem for me. So we'll see.

There are any number of short stories I have (still, forever and always) that I have started and that need to be finished. Some which have been rejected enough that they've received large overhauls and rewrites, some slated to receive such a treatment. I've got one story that was not originally speculative but is now and (I think) works pretty well that way. We'll see what the rejection letters (or acceptance letters?) have to say about that.

In June I indeed wrote a new short story, a cyberpunk-ish sort of thing concerning biotech and limb/body part replacement and personal security. It was also a romance, very technically, and written to a prompt from my friend Tori (the author of Eelgrass), who was trying to prevent me from jumping the gun and submitting May's short story too early. Because I don't really write romance, it was an interesting challenge, and she gave me these stipulations: "1 kiss, one loving description of a butt, flowers exchanged, and a meet cure. I also want one witty banter, a shooting range, and an assassination attempt."  It is to my credit that I did not in fact just cheat and write a Shadowrun story using one of my characters. I did also write a couple of Shadowrun stories, a pair of which were very fun indeed because they were the same scene/situation from two perspectives.

I have decided for July's Camp NaNoWriMo that I'll be rewriting/revising The Last Song. I've made a new and improved playlist, I have the most current draft printed out, I've been circling the characters in my head and looking at Detroit things again. I've also had the thought that maybe I shouldn't write it from the perspective of my rock star Orpheus, but I think writing it from my modern day Eurydice's point of view isn't actually the best plan. It's possible, certainly, and though she needs to be represented far more strongly than my current text does, I don't think that's the correct frame. So we'll see what happens.

I finished October Madness early. No, I don't care that early is "cheating".

I don't know what it was this year, all those stories on submission made me super frenetic about how I had all those stories on submission. So I loaded up the submission queue super quick and then crouched over my email like



via GIPHY

But, I soldiered on and got it done!

31 submissions for the 31 days of October! Of those 31 submissions, I have received 11 rejections. I'm not going to give you the form/personal breakdown, but I will tell you....one of those rejections was a one hour rejection,which was a first. I mean, don't get me wrong, the agony of Schrodinger's Submission is real, but one hour? Ouch.



via GIPHY

I also know that submissions are very subjective. There could be a specific issue an editor is building, and an editor's taste and vision is always a factor as well. It isn't necessarily a value judgement. Etc. Etc. It's hard to keep that emotional balance on a day when you get 4 or 5 rejections, though.

But, the fact that I still have 20 submissions from just October is staggering. And 5 more from prior to that, with a grand total of 25 submissions, 24 of them unique submissions (I simultaneously submitted that one story which had its submission birthday. What've I got to lose, right?) That's an awful lot of short stories I think are ready enough to be out there, just waiting for the right editor and market to say yes, and that's something I'm pretty proud of.

August 2016 goals roundup

I finished my August Story early this month, so I blog early this month.

I really should blog more than once a month. You think? I think. Here's my best Elka picture to make up for it

 

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!

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?

Lazy Link Roundup™ October 20 2014

So I haven't had any rejections in a few days. It's kind of weird. I've submitted to Spacesuits and Sixguns, Betwix, Tin House, and Asimov's Science Fiction since last I reported. A couple of days I've subbed two in one day, but overall I have 26 submissions planned just now, even if they don't match properly to the days. This week's Chuck Wending flash prompt is only 500 words instead of 1000, so I may dash that out to bring the current total to 27. Another couple stories are almost done, but I know better than to try too hard with shorts.


In novel prep news, a couple of links I've perused lately. Not all of these are novel prep, but some are. It's almost always justifiable.

My October Subs so far

So far so good for the October Submission Game (title pending)!

On October 1 I submitted a story to Strange Horizons. They're following me on Twitter now, and I can only assume it's because I have, in my Twitter history, shared stories from their site, retweeted some things, and mentioned how I always love their stories which is why I sub to them. But it's hard not to read into, y'know? I tried to tell myself I wasn't that kind of writer. But we all are, if even a little. Ugh.

On October 2 I submitted a story to the Apex magazine Stealing the Spotlight microfiction contest (you have 'til the 15 to submit, in fact). 250 words or less, on five beasties they don't feel get enough spotlight. Super cool! I wrote a hellhound story. I feel like they fit into my Urban Fantasy "mythos" pretty well, and I can revisit the notions.

On October 3 (today!) I submitted a story to One Story magazine. I've gotten personalized rejections from them in the past, so maybe this one's the one! (heh, get it? The one? One story? I'll just let myself out....)


I also still have two pending submissions from prior to the game's start. I daresay if I get an acceptance (!) on one of them, I'll give myself a day of grace. Time to get some more pieces ready to submit, as right now it looks like I've got thirteen or fourteen or fifteen I'm "sure" of (sure is an iffy state of mind), and obviously that's just about half. I could write four more stories for the Apex thing (you can enter up to five, one for each beastie) and that could be fun.

Something to aspire to

So Janet Reid, from whom much literary wisdom flows, posted about Michael Seese. He's a writer who just spent all of October submitting a story or poem or something each day. Which is awesome.

See, if you want to get published, it isn't enough just to write. This is a grave disappointment that each of us reaches at some point in our, er, "development". As I commented on Ms. Reid's post, nobody's going to do this for me. It isn't like Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery where her Uncle Jimsy finds her trunked manuscript, thinks it's good, and sends it off to a publisher who accepts it right off and BAM Emily is successfully published. She's one of my favorite L.M. Montgomery characters and, unlike the Anne books, the Emily books are only a trilogy.

So. We write but it isn't enough. We much write and spit shine and sand edges and shellack and polish. Then, we must write the Dreaded Query Letter™, which must be hooky and snappy and explanatory and not clichè unless it's just the right kind, and which must be a distilled 250 word form of mind control to make somebody want to read your pages. And request your full. Then talk contract. Then sign. Then send it around to publishers. The Dreaded Synopsis™ is in there somewhere too (and I need to write one for Learn to Howl come December, if I'm going to make the Angry Robot Books open submissions deadline).

So it's important to get your work out there. Get eyes on it (or ears on it, as I did last week with the help of my friend Jacob Burgess). Write, write, edit, write, and submit. Since I just received a rejection from Glimmer Train, I looked the story over again, edited it a bit more, and sent it off to Agni. I sent another one to Lakeside Circus, which is published by Dagan Books (I actually almost sent this one to Strange Horizons, then realized I'd already received that particular rejection from them. It pays to keep a spreadsheet for your submissions and rejections, kiddies!).

I don't have 31 spit-shined works of fiction to sub so I can do 1 a day for a month, but I've been poking around in my "Writing" folders, looking at what I thought was finished, what I know isn't finished, and all of those irritating files I have which are only a couple of sentences and were clearly meant to go in a direction at one time. I have stuff I can work with, and stuff I need to "bring up to code", as it were (removing 'that' whenever possible, that kind of thing). It's funny how organic a process writing is, how things change shape even as you're doing them.

My first "publication": on Dogster.com

I have my first publication!

Well, kind of. On Dogster.com, they accept reader confessionals for a section called Dogster confessionals. I'd emailed awhile back (November?) to see the kind of thing they looked for in that spot, and then mulled it over for awhile. I was surprised to receive a follow up email (or two!) asking if I had anything for them. Okay, surprised and flattered. Really flattered.

So, I came up with a little number that they entitled (because I didn't really have a title) "I'm Not Hearing Voices: My Dog Talks To Me".  It was fun to write, as writing about Elka mostly is. I'm not a great photographer, but having a striking dog makes up for that fact, so I did have some good ones that I was able to include. There's even a video they embedded from The Elka Almanac Youtube channel, of her playing in the snow (don't get too excited; she is very cute, but if I'm a bad photographer, I'm not all that great a videographer either. If that's even a word. Blogger doesn't think it is, but also has trouble with things like "isn't" at times.)

So, if you read it, hope you enjoy! I'm fairly chuffed to have the coverage, anyway.

 

(This is Elka's "Did you just see that?!" and/or "Wasn't that great?!" face)

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.