Daikaijuzine has been gracious enough to publish Joanie Appleseed in their most current issue. Give it a read! This particular publication instance is special for two reasons. One, when I was submitting short stories the first time, around 2010-2014, Daikaijuzine was one of those “blue ribbon” magazines for me. A goal, like Uncanny Magazine is now. Second, I wrote “Joanie Appleseed” around the time I gave up on short stories. I thought it was a good story, wholesome and quirky. But submitting all these stories and getting rejected was getting frustrated. I was dumping more money on my short story tracker than I was getting with publications. So I trunked…
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Short Stories: One Quarter Later
So now that I’m one quarter year past The Great Short Story Experiment, I’ve had enough time to observe any aftereffects. And there have been some. Not as far as any of these getting published or buffing my resume, that’s a ways off still. But it did something to me. Not sure what, but it did something. Something that improved my writing (IMO, for all I know I’m going the other way). I don’t know what it is, but it’s like it did something to my brain. Now when I revise the drafts of my novels that have been sitting for the past year, I can see a way to…
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The Year of Short Stories: Final Edition
The great experiment is done. I spent all of 2024 not working on novels, but short stories. Some revising, but mostly composing. My goal was to produce one per week–52 new short stories to send to publications and editors to augment my CV. Did I do it? Yes I did. I made 52 new short stories… if you put your thumb on the scale, or smudge the bottom line, sure, it’s 52, it’s a 52-like number. Fifty-two-ish. My plan is to take the top half, the ones I think have the best chance of being sold, and submit them for critiques. Then revisions and submissions. I’m optimistic that this will…
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The Year of Short Stories: The Last Quarterly Check-In
Well, the work has continued. The study lingers. I still feel like a novice, but a practiced novice. Is that an intermediate? An amateur? An apprentice? I feel like I understand seventy-five percent of what a short story looks like in today’s world and how to make one. My skill is improving, but I’m still looking forward to getting this done and getting back to novels. There have been some… interesting stuff spewing out of the factory lately, but I feel like there has been quality improvement, especially if I look back at when I started this gig. But here’s the question I keep bumping into. I don’t think I’m…
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Short Stories: How It’s Going So Far (Halfway Point Check-In)
So here we are halfway through the year. And yes, I’ve written 26 stories. Well, I fudged it a bit–I have 26 never-been-published short stories in my trunk. Most are in first draft format. Some aren’t really stories–they don’t have a beginning, middle, and ending. Some are just weird kinda fictional essays. Some I’m not sure what the point is–they’re more of an idea. But given the kinds of things I’ve read, this seems to be okay. I’m still not fond of writing them. It’s still a struggle to get my ass in the chair and churn out copy, but it’s happening. It’s a trickle, but the bucket is filling.…
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The Quality of Short Stories (is impressive)
Men want a lady in the streets but a vixen in the sheets. Readers want a poet in the short stories but trash in the novels. Case in point: In my research and experience on short stories, it feels like you can get away with “bad writing” in novels. Case in point: E.L. James, Twilight, and this from Colleen Hoover. But for short stories, you need to curlicue and detail every sentence until it shines like an insane piece of art made by an autistic person. I guess people who write short stories (or maybe those who edit them) demand higher quality. This is what they mean when these agents…
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Two Short Stories Sold
Well, I must be doing something right because in the past two weeks I’ve sold two short stories to themed anthologies. One was Fairyland, which will be going into an anthology of fairy stories. Fairyland is an old story I wrote way back before I wrote my first novel. (or maybe during?) It was part of my effort to follow Stephen King’s advice for getting published — get a few short stories under your belt, fill out your resume, then submit to agents so they can see you’ve got some publications to back you up. Personally, I really liked its concept but I was an amateur writer so it got…
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Short Stories: How It’s Going So Far (Quarterly Check-In)
Well, I’m still having some trouble making myself write. And when I start a story, it’s a slow ramp-up–like a heavy truck accelerating. Some sessions, all I get down is the first line. Next time, maybe the first paragraph or two. Next time, half a page. Then I can cruise and get five to six hundred words out, which is my standard half-hour session (I’m using the other half for walking to lose weight before a trip to England.) Last month, I drafted, revised, and submitted two fresh short stories to various contests. I found this website that posts opportunities for magazine or contest submissions, and I thought it would…
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Short Fiction Banes
I just started writing these short stories and they’re already kicking my ass. The blank page has never been scarier. I feel like I’m not a real writer when I write these and when I do fulfill it, it feels like crap. Well, not crap per se, but unpublishable stuff. Who’s going to read a dwarf detective story? Every day I come to the blank page and do everything I can to avoid writing. And now I’ve got to come to the blank page once a week. I realize I’ve got no plot for any of these concepts. No story. Nothing that’s going to get published anywhere. I don’t know…
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2024: The Year of Short Stories
I can’t remember who said it, but a writer once said “Try writing a short story a week for a year. You can’t write 52 short stories and have them all be bad.” I think I can prove them wrong. After nine novels and no bites (by “bite” I mean requests for a partial manuscript) I need to re-evaluate what I’m doing. I’m not sure what’s going wrong. (See previous entry about unhelpful rejection letters). But they say only a fool keeps doing the same thing expecting different results. So I need to do something different. I need to get back to basics. Figure out the fundamentals. So this year…
