Writing & Subbing & Editing
Here’s a bit of a follow-up to my last post, where I talked about reaching writing goals for the year, hopefully with some important lessons learned.
At this moment, I’m still waiting on responses for three of my stories. Suspense has a story called ‘Disappeared,’ while new publication Cheap Imitation has a version of ‘Negative Tilt’ that’s been cut from 7,500 to 5,500 words due to their posted limit. The Sun (not the British tabloid) has ‘Love Seat.’ If even one of those three stories is picked up, I’ll be ecstatic.
I also placed a story called ‘The Big Gamble’ with Bristol Noir, a British crime fiction zine run by John Bowie, author of Untethered.
That’s my fourth short story published this year, and I want to talk a little bit about how John handled this story (and me). He wrote back, saying that he liked the story, but that he felt it wasn’t quite right for Bristol Noir … I said I’d be happy to make changes if he had ideas.
And he did. There was a long section in the middle of the story where I was trying to layer in some information that the reader could infer. John felt that it was too heavy-handed (though he was polite enough to not say it that way), and suggested that I cut a long passage in the middle of the piece down to just a few well-chosen sentences.
It took me a couple of days, but I made those changes, and looking at it now, I absolutely think John was right. I cut 1,000 words from the piece, and the resulting story is stronger, moves quicker, and hits harder. It’s also, I believe, going to be included in a future anthology for BN.
One reason I was able to make those changes and create a story that was acceptable to the market is that I’d already had some experience doing just that.
I’d been flogging a story called ‘Every Night I Tell Him’ around, getting responses that ranged from ‘No thanks,” to “Entertaining, but not for us.” I read some of the stories in YELLOW MAMA, a very good crime e-zine edited by Cindy Rosmus, and decided that ‘Every Night’ could be a good fit.
Cindy rejected the story. But she also gave me great, detailed feedback on why she was rejecting it, and she was the first editor to give that kind of feedback. She liked my writing, liked the story, but (and this will sound familiar), it fell off in the middle until picking back up over the last three pages or so. She also said she’d be happy to take another look if I wanted to do a re-write.
I took that as a ‘revise-and-resubmit,’ and made significant cuts, eliminating extraneous scenes and creating a clearer vision of the story’s end. Cindy accepted the rewritten version of ‘Every Night I Tell Him’ with enthusiasm, and it will be published in April 2021, right around my birthday.
Cindy didn’t have to take that kind of time with ‘Every Night.’ She didn’t know me; she could have read my story and rejected it. God knows there are enough writers trying to get into YM — it’s extremely well-respected. Instead, she saw some potential there and guided me through to a polished, salable piece. To say I’m grateful is a vast understatement.
My next offering was to flash fiction powerhouse Shotgun Honey. Now, I’d never written flash fiction before, and SH’s word counts are strict. I never write for a specific market, but I did this time, and I tried to take the lessons Cindy and John taught me and apply them to ‘Two in the Street.’
It seems to have worked. The story will appear in SH on January 7, 2021.
2020 seems to have been pretty successful overall. My hope was to have 3 acceptances/published stories this year. Instead, my year so far looks like this:
Seven acceptances, with four stories published this year. A completed novel on submission with a well-regarded independent publisher. Another novel partially completed. Inclusion in All Due Respect 2020, a print/ebook anthology to be published Nov. 6. (That’s right! Click that link to pre-order!)
So my lessons: I tend to over-write (if you’ve made it this far, you know that already); a good editor is worth their weight in gold; and I have to keep pushing, keep subbing. Taking a decade off from submitting seems to have done me some good. If nothing else, it’s humbled me and made me able to listen, learn, and EDIT.
I’m excited to see what 2021 brings, as far as writing goes.