Your Short Fiction: Keep Your Chin Up!

We've had a productive week, haven't we?

You polished up your short fiction, found a market to fit the piece, sent it off with an awesome query letter and have logged all the info in your submissions tracking database. Now there's just one thing left to do...

Wait.

Yeah, it's one of the hardest parts of the job. Your creations have flown the coop and are being reviewed by editors... so now you have to be patient and wait to hear back from the markets you've contacted. Usually it's a matter of weeks... but it can be months before you hear back. And I'll be honest... often, you don't hear back with good news.

But if you keep trying, if you believe in yourself and your talent, if you refuse to give up... you'll get there, eventually.

Remind yourself, when you receive a rejection, that this is a huge numbers game. The more rejections you get, the closer you are to getting published. After all, they can't all say no. Take the criticisms and suggestions offered and review them carefully. Remember, if they took the time to give you the pointers, that means your story impressed them in some way. Don't give up, try again.

And then one day, you'll open that email that says "we really liked this story, and we want to publish it in our upcoming issue". What a party there will be! I better be invited!

In the meantime... You can do this. I believe in you!

If you'd like to discuss more about getting short fiction published, feel free to comment. Have a fantastic weekend, my friend!

The Proverbial Horse

I received a rejection letter from The Pedestal Magazine for my story "Knights of the Road" today.

All right. Let's go ahead and get this out of the way: I know rejections are only a numbers game. I know the more rejections I get the closer I come to having another short published. I know my personal writing hero, Stephen King, had a nail above his desk that he put hundreds of rejection slips on, so many that it made the spike fall off the wall at one point from the weight. I know it's something we all have to deal with. I even wrote a blog entry a few weeks ago, about riding the rejection train.

But knowing all these things doesn't make that rejection letter any easier to read. "We don't want your stuff", regardless of how you phrase it, is never fun to hear. When I saw the email in my inbox this afternoon from The Pedestal Magazine, I had that little rush of excitement flutter through my midsection. I summoned positive thoughts. I visualized success. And then I clicked on the email, and read what it had to say.

Clunk. Another "no thanks" to add to my pile.

So now, as I did back at the beginning of February, I'm using the rejection to bolster my confidence as best I can. I went back over the story, polished it and changed it again. I tightened the action, took out vagueness, and made it a lot punchier (at least, in my opinion). When I was done with it, I was a lot happier with the end result. I then, before I lost my courage, sent it to Weird Tales, one of the last holy grails of dark fiction and fantasy publication.

I'm starting to wonder if short stories are just not my forte. Now that I've been writing my novel for several months, I've realized that I'm a long-distance writer... I'm much better in extended formats, that allow me to develop characters and plot and tension in my own time. Short stories can be limiting, because you have to show only small portions of those things... and I've never been one for small portions. Looking over my rejection list (which keeps growing longer and longer), I can't help but feel a little discouraged. I know my shorts are good... so why can't I move them in a market?

But I won't give up. I have to get back on the horse, no matter how many times it throws me. Sooner or later I will have that bitch tamed. You can count on it.

Riding the Rejection Train

Friday.

It's raining here in South Carolina, and it's cold. Wet, raw and gray. Which pretty much matches my feelings when I get a rejection letter in my inbox.

Rejections are never easy. Every story I send out goes with hope, well wishes, and fantastic daydreams. The act of pushing it out the door is a leap of faith. "It's good," I'll say to myself, "really good. I could get paid for this!" I insist, tightening my tentative grasp on new-found confidence. I scour the internet looking for markets to submit to, and use sites like duotrope.com to find a publication that may be a good fit for my piece. Once I find a hopeful-looking market, I go back over my fiction and make sure it's as clean as it can be, and meets the submission guidelines (some markets are very particular about spacing, font, line indents, etc). I compose a carefully worded cover letter, read over it to make sure it says what I really mean (and for Christ's sake, addressed to the right place), and then I sit there for a moment, index finger hovering over the mouse button.

Click.

Sometimes I hear back in a matter of hours - Necrotic Tissue rejected me in less than a day. More often it's a waiting game: most small markets will get back to you in 3-6 weeks. Larger publications, like Weird Tales and the time immemorial Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction have thousands of submissions a month, so it may take much longer to hear back from them. Patience is important; I've mastered the art of forgetting about pieces I've sent. It does no good to obsess about them. Switch that part of your brain off as well as you can, fellow writers.

And then, more often than not, the answer is no. No, it's just not a good fit. No, we appreciate the submission, but it doesn't have what we're looking for. We enjoyed reading this, but we're going to pass. And so on. The trick is to look for the encouraging words, buried in the rejection email like tiny nuggets of gold: It has some great moments. This is well written, and you had me hooked. You have a wonderful grasp of imagery. And then there's the coveted phrase, please consider submitting to our market again. YES!! I immediately turn around and send them something else when I hear that - as I did this morning, when my story "Yellow Bus Tuesday" was rejected by Pedestal Magazine. Five minutes after receiving their pleasantly-worded rejection, I had my story "Knights of the Road" headed their way.

Riding the rejection train isn't easy by any stretch of the imagination, but I find if I keep in mind how many rejections it takes to get an acceptance, I can handle it with a positive attitude. In 2009, I submitted 19 times and was accepted once. Once. Because of those kind of statistics, I remind myself every time I get a "no" in my inbox that it's a numbers game. The story is good, so someone will take it sooner or later, right? I always hope it's sooner, but that's not always the case. There's a long journey ahead of me, and I'll be traveling a lot of it via one long, black train... more often than not through cold, gray weather like what's visiting South Carolina today.