Sci-fi, fantasy, and everything in-between
Submissions
Posts about submissions and the submission process.
Defeating submission inertia
02 years ago
In this day and age, submitting a story isn’t that hard. Many markets accept electronic submissions, and for those that don’t, the most time-consuming part of the process is printing the manuscript.
Yet more often than not, I find myself procrastinating about actually pulling up a list of markets (say, from ralan.com or duotrope.com) and putting stories out there.
It’s not fear anymore. It used to be, but after your 87th rejection letter, you find your terror of editorial rebuke quite faded.
No, it’s pure inertia. Authors at rest tend to stay at rest. Nobody ever told me that as a neo-pro, I might fall into this trap and have to slog out of it (by way of fun self-challenges like the one that led to six stories in the mail as of this afternoon).
Fortunately, I can report that authors in motion tend to stay in motion. There’s something invigorating about finally getting moving that’s self-perpetuating.
On that note, tonight’s goal: Edit an almost-ready story and make it tomorrow’s first submission.
First story submitted
02 years ago
by Damon Kaswell
in Submissions
I just got my first story in a couple months out the door. There’s so much more to do, but it’s a start. I’ve got a lot of finished stories that have been languishing, and a lot of stories that are so close to finished it’s criminal how long I’ve let them sit. My unofficial goal for this month will be clearing the backlog. I’d like to end the month with around 25 stories in the mail.
And I can do it, too, if I focus my writing energy on those almost-done stories and do just one submission a day.
Edit: And then there were two…
Back to business
02 years ago
One of my goals for this month (I have several I’ll discuss later) involves getting plugged back into the business end of writing. The actual writing part of writing is and has been going well. Well enough that I have a backlog of stories that ought to be in the mail. The fact that they aren’t — and haven’t been for six months or more — is frankly embarrassing.
So for the next week or so, I’ll be focused on:
- Getting my tracking system updated with several missing submissions, the rejection letters of which currently reside in The Filing Cabinet Drawer of Doom.
- Market research.
- Putting actual stories in actual envelopes and actually mailing them.
To guarantee I don’t cop out on that last one, I’m going to post how many stories I’ve gotten in the mail every day this week. We’ll see how this goes. I’m open to self-punishment suggestions should that number ever be 0.