15 posts tagged “shorts”

Monthly
Stories written in January = 1.5
Submissions in January = 12
Rejections in January = 6 + 1 try later in the year.
Sales in January= 0

Totals

Sold =  1
Unsold =  24
Workshopped = 5
Unsold in Submission = 14
Total Submissions to Date = 150

Not a bad month despite editing and typing lots. The key figure for me now is Unsold in Submission I need to increase this every month, by getting last years stories done and dusted.

I've finished typing up all of my stories bar two (one is rubbish, the other one I've just finished and is a bit rubbish).

So, I'm into editing them. Did one yesterday, one today, but they were easy polishes that had been through my critique group. Still, that's two more into submission.

Keeping up the editing is going to be hard.

There are rejections, and rejections. The best ones are where the editor gives you some personal feedback on the story. I just got a rejection from Clarkesworld Magazine with some very nice feedback. They didn't want it...

"...with just one slot per month to fill, lighter pieces aren't usually a good fit for us..."

...but said...

"...there are enough other satisfying little details to make it vivid, so the story succeeds, and it did  a get a few real laughs."

Well, that's made me feel happy. Next market!

I have now written 54 stories this year. Some of them are flash (<1000) words, some of them are micro flash (<200), but all of them are stories.

So that proves I can generate the ideas.

Most of these stories are still at first draft however, and haven't been typed up. Only a handful are in submission so far. That's the next target, get them all out there into submission.

Tricia Sullivan has a wonderful post where she dissects her writing progress and summarises

I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE F*** I’M DOING.

And then in the comments Charles Stross replies

Me neither

And Ian McDonald adds some thoughts too.

For the novels I've written...

• Novel #1 : Written in half an hour, few hundred word bursts, with no idea where I was going. The result is quite pleasing but needs a complete rewrite.
• Novel #2 : Detailed outline. Easy to write, but spent ages fiddling with the plot. Not sure if it feels contrived.
• Novel #3 : First 10,000 words speed written in two weeks, the rest of the year struggling to find story. It still has some holes but I think it's okay.

For all the short stories I have written this year (getting on for 50), most of the time I had no idea where the story was going when I started. Only one had an outline but that was because it was 5 plots intertwined.

My story What's In A Memory? is online now in November's issue of AtomJack.

"Martin didn’t remember Sevet even though they’d lived together for a year. After she’d had an affair with a Spanish waiter he’d wiped any archived memories and left the rest on scratch to be recorded over with tomorrow's sunset."

This is my first published short fiction, go and check it out!

In the comments of a post by Jay Lake, JeffV (Vandemeer?) replies:

"One of the biggest problems I find when I teach beginning writers is that they can't slow down to save their lives. They literally are unwilling to put in the necessary thought and work it might take to turn a decent or good story into something great.

I think more and more it's not that they're writing too little but that they're writing too much and not thinking about what it is they're writing."

Interesting. I've reached a point this year, after writing 40+ stories that I'm ready to slow down. It has been an exercise, an experiment, to see whether I could write a story every week if I pushed myself . And I can. However I'm now gagging to spend more time on those first drafts and to turn them into great stories. I think it might be writing burnout, except that I still get the urge to write.

I think that I'll still try and write a story each week for the rest of the year and then spend the start of next year trying to get as many of those stories into a finished state as possible.

The other day I finished typing up one of the stories that I wrote in the first half of the year, and I was pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed it. Just need to polish it then send it out for some people to read.

Also wrote about 1800 words today, which was nice. I'm writing a story about religion, which might be, er, ambitious. So far it's okay though.

The Slush God says that 75% of his slush pile for F&SF is Post-Apocalyptic SF. Oh. Probably half of the stories I've written this year are the same! Must be the state of the world or something. Perhaps I'll try and write something else next?

I got a couple of rejections today.

Futurismic rejected me with a "The writing is well done and it's not bad at all" (Christopher East always gives nice personal rejections) and Flashquake with some comments about the story being preachy and not getting it.

Oh well.