Short Stories – Page 12 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Short Blitz #6: A Hill On Which To Die

Title: A Hill On Which To Die
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Word Count: Word Count: 15,000
Writing Time: About a month

IT IS FINISHED.

Ugh, this story took forever. What started as a short story soon turned into a novelette, and then that novelette got longer and longer … and then life got crazy busy, and I suddenly had a lot less time to write. And then all these weird writerly anxieties started taking over, and I found myself procrastinating during what little writing time I had …

In any case, it is finished now. IT IS FINISHED! And even though it needs a revision, and a couple of scenes need to be changed or rewritten entirely, I can take care of all that tomorrow.

Anyways, this story is about a band of orcs that leaves their clan to start a new one. The main character is an old veteran war chief who has lived beyond his prime and fully expects to die. There’s blood, carnage, rape, and all sorts of violence. There’s also courage, loyalty, hope, sacrifice, and devotion to a higher cause. It’s a bit like Watership Down, except with orcs instead of rabbits.

In spite of all the trouble this story gave me, I had a lot of fun with it. I’d like to self-publish it, but first I suppose I should send it off to the relevant markets. According to my spreadsheet, there are only five pro-markets that take stories over 15,000 words:

Writers of the Future
Asimov’s
Fantasy & Science Fiction
Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show
Tor.com

Leading Edge is a semi-pro market that takes stories up to 15,000 words, but I know for a fact that the content in this one is not BYU appropriate. It’s a lot darker than I usually write, with some sexual violence that almost certainly needs a trigger warning if/when I self-publish.

But even though it depicts a lot of violence, I don’t think it crosses the line into glorifying it. Certainly not the sexual violence, which even the main character admits is wrong. And it’s not like the women are in there just to get raped, either–there’s actually a band of female orc warriors who beat the male orcs at their own game.

In any case, with only five markets that I know of that accept stories of this kind, I figure it won’t be too long before this story returns to me and I can self-publish it for you all to read. If any of you know of any other markets to send this place, let me know!

Yay for short stories!

So for the past three weeks while waiting for my first readers to get back to me with their comments on Strangers in Flight, I’ve been working on short stories. It’s a great way to stay busy and productive between projects, and feels really gratifying too because it only takes a week or two to finish things.

The really gratifying thing for me, though, is sending off my stories to the magazines and having half a dozen or more on submission at any time. I love self-publishing, but for short stories, it makes a lot more sense to shoot for publication in one of the traditional markets first. They don’t buy exclusive rights, so you’re free to self-publish later, and they put your writing in front of a new audience, giving you some great exposure–all while paying you!

So far, the only market I’ve cracked has been Leading Edge. But the more I write, the sooner that will change! And since I still have the option to self-publish, the rejections don’t feel quite so discouraging. Instead, it’s almost like a friendly competition with myself to see how many rejections I can rack up, and how many stories I can have on submission at one time.

Lately, I’ve been working on a Sword & Sorcery story titled “A Hill On Which To Die.” It started off as a short story, but then it morphed into a novelette–not quite as long as Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I), but long enough that most of the markets won’t take it. It’s also long enough that it will probably need a revision once it’s done, and I may run it past a reader or two. It’s definitely turned out to be more work than I’d bargained for.

There’s another story I’m working on about a naturally occurring time portal in rural Pennsylvania, and how the Amish are so isolated from modern society because they’re the ones guarding it. Then I’d like to rewrite “The Infiltrator,” to cut out most of the stuff at the beginning and dive straight into the action. That should take only a day or two. And then, there’s that story about the uplifted Deinonychus that my girlfriend really wanted to read …

Gah! So many ideas to play with! I cannot possibly write fast enough to keep up with them. It’s the most frustrating thing in the world!

I suppose for most of my readers, this talk of short stories is kind of frustrating too, since they probably won’t be available for you to read for a while. But one way or another, they will come out eventually! And it’s definitely better to write something while in that weird space between projects. At least I’m finishing stuff.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately. I’ll probably finish “A Hill On Which To Die” in a day or two, then work on “That Which Is About is” until it’s finished. It’s an Amish sci-fi romance–I can barely wait to get it all down on the page!c And after that, I’ll probably move on to Strangers in Flight, making the revisions and getting it ready to publish in August.

Short Blitz #5: The Gettysburg Paradox

Title: The Gettysburg Paradox
Genre: Science Fiction
Word Count: 3,650
Writing Time: about 1 week

Ever since I read The Killer Angels, I’ve been something of a Civil War geek. For July 4th this year, I rewatched Gettysburg and read Gods and Generals. I’m also reading Gone with the Wind right now, and plan to read The Last Full Measure after that. Needless to say, the Civil War has been on my mind.

The basic premise of this story is that a time tourist at the Battle of Gettysburg discovers that most of the combatants are time travelers–that the battle is actually a clash of competing timelines and futures. Appalled, he runs out onto the field in the midst of Pickett’s Charge shouting “We’re all time travelers!” but no one pays him any heed. They don’t find it disturbing at all that the battle–indeed, the entire war–may be a fabrication from time travelers desperate to change their future.

This was a fun one. The idea came to me a few months ago, though I didn’t associate it with Gettysburg until just a few weeks ago. Originally, I thought I’d have someone from the far future come back to a battle in the near future, since that would be easier to write. But I’m glad I decided to go with a real historical battle, because that makes it a lot more interesting.

Here’s a passage that I’m particularly proud of:

It was madness–sheer madness. Soldiers from the future fighting a battle in the past. And did Gettysburg even belong to the nineteenth century anymore? Had it ever? States’ rights and the Union, secession and the constitution, slavery and equality, freedom and independence, the clash of American civilizations and the baptism by fire of democracy and the modern world. Never before and perhaps never since would so much of the future hang on so brief a moment in history. And so, here they were, men of the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries disguised as natives of the nineteenth to give their lives for the future they had never had. How much of it was even real anymore? How much of it was meddling from so many broken timelines? And what if the war itself was merely a fabrication to bring about this great and terrible day?

I wrote this story in three days over the course of about a week. At first, it seemed daunting, considering all the historical details that I wanted to get right. Fortunate, Gettysburg is right up my alley, and I had a lot less trouble with it than I’d thought I would. The rough draft came in at about 4,000 words, so I gave it a quick revision and cut 10% to make it closer to 3,600.

It feels good to write a short story for a change. I’m particularly satisfied with this one and would love to see it in a magazine. The plan for now is to keep it on submission until it finds a home. Then, when it does, I’ll self-publish.

On to the next one!

Short stories and switching to Fantasy

Sorry to drop off the face of the Earth for the past couple of weeks. My parents were in town, and between spending time with them, introducing my girlfriend, celebrating my sister’s birthday, and a whole bunch of other family-related things, my blogging has kind of fallen by the wayside.

But don’t worry–I’m still writing! I finished the first draft of Strangers in Flight (Sons of the Starfarers: Book III) in the first week of July and sent it out to my first readers. With luck, I’ll be hearing back from them in time to make any necessary revisions and publish that book in August. The first series omnibus (books I-III) will be out six weeks later in September, and book IV will be out … well, it will be out after I’ve written it.

In the meantime, I’ve started a couple of short stories and been making some good progress on those. The first one should be finished in the next day or so: it’s titled “The Gettysburg Paradox” and involves a time tourist at Gettysburg realizing in horror that most of the combatants on both sides are actually time travelers.

The other one is an orc story partially inspired by my friend Sarah’s orc story. This one, though, is less of a love story and more a brutally violent tale of orcs being orcs. It’s probably going to go long, perhaps up to novelette length, though not any further–I’ll trim it fairly aggressively if it does.

Besides short stories, I’ve picked up work on The Sword Keeper again. This is the epic fantasy novel with the enchanted swords, which I started while I was living in Georgia. I haven’t worked on it much since coming back to the States, but last month I basically told my girlfriend the whole story arc of the trilogy, and she really got into it. So that’s my current WIP now, and I hope to finish it before the end of the summer (famous last words, right?).

There are other things I’d like to blog about, but I’ll save those for later. Here are some of my ideas for blog posts:

Gods and Generals by Jeff Shaara
Why I quit Facebook
Thoughts on character development and likability
Thoughts after watching Divergent
Dating someone on the autism spectrum (I’ll have to run that one by my girlfriend first!)
Y Mountain hike
Random poetry
Places I like to write

Goodnight!

H is for Hybrid Author

Is it worth seeking traditional publication if you’re an indie writer? Are there advantages to going with a legacy publisher after you’ve published yourself?

A lot of writer throw around the word “hybrid” as if that’s their ultimate goal–the thing that’s going to make their career. A hybrid author is an author with their feet in both sides of the publishing world: the legacy world, with corporate publishers or small but reputable houses, and the indie world with their self-published books.

This might be a bit controversial, but I’m going to throw down the gauntlet and argue that most of the praise of the hybrid path is either hype or wishful thinking. From what I’ve seen, most hybrid authors fall into one of three camps:

Veteran authors who are disillusioned with the legacy industry and are doing everything they can to self-publish everything. They still have contracts that they can’t get out of, though, so technically they are considered ‘hybrid,’ even though many would rather not be.
Indie authors who haven’t been disillusioned about traditional publishing yet and believe that a legacy publisher would carry some of the burden for things like marketing and promotion. In other words, indies who believe that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.
Unpublished writers who have been submitting to traditional publishers for years, and have deer-in-the-headlights syndrome with all the new publishing options available to writers. They’ll dabble with self-publishing, but their heart is still set in the old world.

So would I ever consider signing with a traditional publisher? I’ve thought about it quite a bit over the last few years, and I’ve come up with four conditions that have to be met before I’d do so. Please keep in mind, though, that I am not a contract lawyer, and that the following is my opinion and not legal advice.

Three of them are deal breakers on my side. They are:

1. Non-compete clauses

This is absolutely non-negotiable. In fact, if I see any sort of non-compete clause in a contract sent to me, I’ll pull out of negotiations altogether since it shows to me that the publisher is negotiating in bad faith.

A non-compete clause is a contract clause that says something like “the author shall not publish or cause to be published anything that may compete with the work.” Basically, it’s a publisher’s way of clamping down on you and saying you can’t publish anything without their approval. There is no f****** way I would ever tie myself up like that–not only would it kill the self-publishing side of my career, but it would also be unfair to my readers who have come to expect regular releases from me.

Let’s flip this on its head and say that I put in a non-compete clause for my publisher. For example, suppose I signed a contract with Tor Books that said “the publisher (Tor Books) shall not publish or cause to be published anything that may compete with the author’s work.” Can you see how ridiculous that is? How insanely one-sided it makes the contract out to be?

A publisher would never sign one, and neither will I.

2. Rights reversion clauses

If I’m going to sign a contract with a traditional publisher, I want to know when that contract is going to end. Life of copyright is life of the author plus 70 years, and that is far too long for me. But a lot of traditional publishing contracts contain loopholes that keep the rights from ever reverting back.

There are reasons why a publisher would want to hold onto your rights without actually publishing your book. Copyright is an intellectual property, and shows up on a corporate publisher’s ledger as an asset. Just by sitting on your rights, they’re able to show an accounting gain. So if they can hold onto your rights, they probably will.

I won’t sign a contract unless it includes an explicit date when the rights will revert to me. The length of the term and the options for renewal are open to negotiation, but having an explicit date is not.

3. Any payment terms based on net

Right now, the industry standard for ebooks is 25% of net. What does that mean? It means “we’ll pay you 25% of the revenue from your ebooks, after costs.” What costs, you may ask? There’s the rub–they aren’t specified.

“Net” is how Hollywood screws people over. It’s how a rockstar can go on a multi-million dollar tour and end up owing the record label money. It’s a dirty trick of creative accounting that the large corporate publishers are now starting to employ. In the old days, they used to base royalty payments off of the list price of the book. Now, though, New York is becoming more like Hollywood and less and less author friendly.

The fourth condition is a deal breaker for most publishers, on which I don’t see myself giving any ground. It is:

4. Ebook rights

Ebooks are where the money is. Legacy publishers understand this, and they’re doubling down on them. Hugh Howie, who signed a print-only deal with Simon & Schuster, has since said that the publishers are not open to considering that sort of deal now–not even for a massive bestseller like him.

The thing is, what value does a legacy publisher bring to epublishing? In less than an hour, I can craft an ebook that’s formatted better than most of the ebooks coming out of New York. As an indie, I have access to all the same online bookstores and distribution channels as the big publishers. And by self-publishing, I have control over the critically important metadata–a ball that legacy publishers often drop by relegating it to the lowest employees on the corporate ladder.

When it comes to ebooks, I do not see a single item of value that legacy publishers can bring to the table. Rather, I see a host of liabilities, and for what? With self-publishing, I can earn up to 70%-80% for every ebook I sell. With a publisher, I’d be lucky to get 15%–and that’s if they’re being generous.

For novels and other book-length works, it simply does not make sense to me to sign with a traditional publisher. Not in today’s industry, at least. And with the way legacy publishers are clamping down and making rights grabs, I don’t see it ever making sense in the foreseeable future either.

HOWEVER …

For short stories, the situation for authors is much more favorable. The magazines have no inclination to tie you up with non-compete clauses, the rights to the story revert back to you soon after publication, the payment is usually based on word count and specified in the contract, and the ebook rights stay with you (the magazine might purchase non-exclusive digital rights, but that won’t prevent you from republishing it as an ebook on your own).

I can see myself going hybrid by publishing short stories through the traditional markets. In fact, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. Besides the chance to refine my craft by working on my short game, I figure that getting picked up by the major magazines will help to draw new readers to my other books. I have no idea how much it will help, but I figure it’s worth trying out. Besides, science fiction is a genre where reputation can make a big difference to your career, and you can build a reputation a lot more effectively through traditional short story markets than through self-publishing.

At the same time, though, that’s more of a side project than anything. My bread and butter is self-publishing, and that’s where my feet are firmly planted. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Operation SB #4: The Curse of the Lifewalker

Title: The Curse of the Lifewalker
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic
Word Count: 4,340
Time: 1 day (sort of)

So after “L’enfer, c’est la solitude,” I was kind of in a short story mood for a couple of days and decided to bang out another one. This one is actually an adaptation from my novel Lifewalker, a post-apocalyptic tale where a global pandemic kills everyone older than 25. The story takes place several hundred years after the apocalypse, where a society of children and teenage adults has evolved to fill the void left over by the collapse. It’s told from the point of view of a “lifewalker,” someone who is naturally immune and lives out a normal lifespan. Normal to us, at least–not to anyone else in the new society.

It actually wasn’t that hard to adapt the first chapter to a short story. It very much has its own narrative structure, with a beginning, middle and end. Obviously, it finishes on a rather open-ended note, but I think I was able to turn it around and focus on the premise: “when all the world is afflicted by the plague, sometimes the greater curse is to be whole.” Touched up the first couple of pages quite a bit, setting the stage for a short story and not a full novel, then went over the rest of it with a light pass and wrote a summation paragraph at the end to wrap things up.

Obviously, it took me more than one day to write the bulk of the chapter–in fact, I think it’s been through a couple of drafts now. But the adaptation to short story form went fairly well, and I’m quite pleased with the result.

Since I’ve already got stories at the top three markets (Writers of the Future, Asimov’s, Analog) and Clarkesworld is on cool-down, I sent the story to the next magazine on the list, Fantasy & Science Fiction. They only take snail mail, though, so I had to print out the story, print out a cover letter, take it to the post office, buy a letter envelope, stamp, manila envelope, fill out the SASE, etc etc. It was like a blast from the 00s or something.

Anyway, as I was walking over to the post office, I had this AWESOME epiphany in which the end of the novel came to me. It’s SO MUCH BETTER than what I’d originally had in mind, and actually got me excited to work on Lifewalker again. I probably won’t pick it up until I’ve finished the first three Sons of the Starfarers books, but now I have an awesome, amazing ending to work toward.

All I have to do is write it. 😛

Operation SB #3: L’enfer, c’est la solitude

Title: L’enfer, c’est la solitude
Genre: Science Fiction
Word Count: 6,962
Time: about 40 days

I can’t stand people who humbrag, so I’m just going to come out and say that this story is awesome. Seriously. Kickass freaking awesome. It may be the best short story I’ve written to date. Six months from now, I may come to hate it (like I’ve come to hate some of my other stories), but I seriously doubt that will be the case with this one. This represents some of my best work, and I’m extremely proud of it.

Now that that’s out of the way, I guess I should explain a little what this story is about. The title (which I didn’t figure out until after I’d written the story) is a play on the Sartre quote: “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (“hell is other people”). The story basically takes the exact opposite point of view, by showing how two people from opposing planets stranded on an isolated post basically go through hell because of their isolation, and the way it both brings them together and pits them against each other.

The idea for the story came to me years ago, when I was studying political science and modern philosophy. I imagined a situation where two worlds in a cold war type standoff both claimed an isolated, unpopulated planet somewhere, where each maintained a tiny outpost with only one person in order to stake the claim. Even though they’re enemies, the two opposing soldiers would, in many ways, be closer to each other than to their other comrades. Or would they?

The balance of power changes when one soldier’s station goes down in a meteoroid collision and he’s forced to go over to the other soldier’s station in order to survive. On the way, though, he gets a transmission from his superiors that their two worlds are now at war, and he has orders to kill the enemy soldier who has just saved his life. Can he carry them out? Is it right for him to do so? Or did the other soldier receive the same order, and is he now planning to kill him?

The idea for this story bounced around in my head for a long, long time, but I never sat down to write it because I didn’t know how to resolve it. Then, a little over a month ago, I got a crazy awesome idea for how to do it. All the other details came together, and I knew exactly what was supposed to happen.

I wish I could say that the story practically wrote itself from there, but unfortunately that was not the case. I started it back in early February, but kept putting it off because the story in my mind was so awesome, I didn’t know if I could do it justice on the page. That fear was absolutely crippling, and it’s the main reason I didn’t write any short stories at all for the month of February. It wasn’t that what I had written was bad–in fact, the beginning was pretty good. It was the fear that my skills just weren’t yet up to writing this one.

Well, those fears were pretty unfounded. While talking about the story with some friends this last Tuesday, I realized that the whole thing was silly and I should just sit down and write it. Two days later, the story was finished–and it was actually pretty good.

I know as a part of this short story challenge, I’m supposed to keep Heinlein’s rules, including rule 3 which states “you must refrain from revising, except to editorial order.” I mostly kept to that rule for this one, but not entirely. I did a lot of cycling–reading through and tweaking previous sections before putting new words on the page–as well as some significant cutting. The original draft clocked in at about 7,700 words, and Analog puts a cap at 7,000, so I went through and cut about 10%. Hopefully, though, that will just make it stronger.

I really, really like this story. It’s in first person, and the voice is quite a bit darker than some of my other stuff, but I really connected with the viewpoint character and I think it shows. Besides that, the buildup and suspense was just a ton of fun. I really hope this story gets picked up soon, because I think you’re really going to enjoy it!

This brings the number of short stories on submission now to three. I’ve garnered two rejections for “The Infiltrator,” but that’s it so far. I’m honestly not sure whether to just trunk that one, but I’ll keep it on submission for a while just in case. As Kris Rusch said in a recent blog post, you should let the editor decide what goes in her magazine without pre-editing for her.

That’s just about it. One short down for March–seventeen days to write the second one. Let’s do it!

Operation SB #2: The Open Source Time Machine

Title: The Open Source Time Machine
Genre: Science Fiction
Word Count: 3,247
Time: About 10 days

I felt really good after finishing this short story. The last line in particular surprised me, which is always a good sign. I think this story is going to go places.

The idea for this one actually came about 4 months ago. I imagined an inventor trying to convince a bunch of investors to fund his time travel development project by calling on his future self to appear to them. He fails–his future self never shows up–but after the meeting has ended in failure, he goes home and finds his future self waiting for him there. Why wouldn’t he go back in time to help himself get the funding to develop his project? That was the core idea that became this story.

I wrote out a couple of pages of that one before getting frustrated and trunking it. Then, about ten days ago, I broke my operating system (Ubuntu) and had to upgrade/reinstall it three times before it would work again. For Linux users, that’s kind of like a rite of passage. It was frustrating, but also kind of awesome because of all the stuff I learned from it. Open source technology is really, really cool.

Around the same time, I read Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff. Fascinating book, especially if you’ve got a job/lifestyle where you spend +50% of your waking life in front of a screen. Rushkoff is a technology theorist, and this book is about all the subtle ways in which computers, social media, the internet, and other modern technologies can be used to manipulate us if we aren’t careful. His ideas are brilliant and his perspective is fascinating, so his book definitely got me thinking about things.

With both of these things on my mind, I went for a long walk while taking a break from my writing. Short stories were also on the mind, since I was wondering what I should write about for the month of January. The old time travel idea popped up, and everything just sort of melded together until I had the story.

I wrote the first half of it the next day … and then sat on it for a little over a week. I’m not sure why I did that–maybe I was just nervous about screwing it up or something. By far, the hardest part about writing is getting out of your own damned way. Yesterday, I finally buckled down and forced myself to finish the thing, and it actually turned out pretty well. Took the whole day to finish it, but it’s finished and that’s what’s important.

So after touching it up this morning, running a spell check and tweaking a couple of relatively minor things, I put it out on submission. That’s two stories I have on submission now: “The Infiltrator” got rejected from Clarkesworld, but it’s out at Analog now so we’ll see how that goes.

I think my short form is getting better, though there’s still a lot of room for improvement. I’m going to start running these stories through Kindal’s writing group, even though I’ll put them out on submission as soon as they’re finished. The feedback will be useful in writing the next one.

No idea what the next short story is going to be about. Maybe I’ll go through some of my old story idea notebooks and see what comes together. Or maybe a story will just come to me, and I need to position myself so that I’m ready to capture it on paper when it comes.

We’ll see. In the meantime, I’m very pleased with this one.

Operation SB #1: The Infiltrator

Title: The Infiltrator
Genre: Science Fiction
Word Count: 3,945
Time: 2 days

For my first story for Operation Short Blitz, I took a story idea that’s been bouncing around in my head for some time: that one of the best way for aliens to spy on us without being detected would be to send an infiltrator disguised as a homeless person.

I tried to do something with this idea before, but like many of my short story attempts, it turned into something longer. For that one, I tried to tell the story from the point of view of a normal twenty-something single guy living in an apartment close to where the alien infiltrator had his base. But then it started turning into a story about the guy, leaving the alien as the impact character, and the story became about something else. I eventually lost interest and trunked it.

For this one, I kept it simple, telling it straight from the point of view of the alien. I resisted the urge to put in extra subplots and instead focused on the core idea itself, making sure that everything in the story was directly connected to it. That definitely helped to keep it short and focused.

I think it turned out pretty well. It was hard not to self-edit as I wrote it, which was part of the reason it took two days to write instead of one. I started it on Saturday, tried to finish it but went for a two-hour midnight walk instead. Picked it up on Monday and finished it up then.

So now, after doing a quick proofread to fix typos and grammer, I’m going to put it on submission, sending it to Writers of the Future first and working my way down. I don’t expect it to place, but maybe it will get honorable mention, which would be cool. And who knows? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Operation Short Blitz

Primary Objective: To master the art and craft of short-form storytelling.

Secondary Objective: To achieve name recognition in the speculative fiction field through publication in the major short story magazines.

For some time, I’ve wanted to branch out and learn how to write well in short form. I’ve written several novels, and I feel I have a pretty good understanding of that form, but short stories have always eluded me. I want to turn that around and really gain a degree of proficiency with short fiction, so that it’s not a big blind spot for me and that I can really master that aspect of storytelling.

My purpose in doing this isn’t to make money, though I certainly hope to make something (I write for a living, after all). Rather, it’s to expand my storytelling capabilities and build a name for myself. Most working SF writers have a short story component to their careers, so I figure it’s time to work on my own.

Since prestige is more important than money, I’m going to focus on getting published in the major magazines, and won’t self-publish unless either the story fails to sell anywhere (at which point I may just trunk it) or the first publication rights have already been exercised. I do expect to self-publish my stories eventually, but not until I’ve gotten as much mileage out of them as I can.

Strategic Outline:

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) keeps a list of qualifying markets for membership, which is useful for picking out the best magazines to submit to. If I can get my stories published in these magazines, which pay the highest rates and have the widest circulation within the field, I figure that Operation Short Blitz can definitely be considered a success.

In addition to the SFWA qualifying markets, there are a number of semi-professional markets that would be good to submit to as well. I’ve heard that Ralan.com is a good site for finding those, as well as Duotrope (though the site now requires a subscription). I won’t submit to the semi-pros until I’ve exhausted the professional markets first, though.

Even if I seriously doubt that a story is good enough to get picked up by the best markets in the field, I’ll still start at the top and work my way down. I remember hearing that the editor of Analog (or was it Asimov’s?) once got really mad at a writer who told him that he didn’t have a story that was good enough for his magazine, since that writer was basically trying to do his job for him, and writing his own rejections instead of giving his stories a chance. That isn’t going to be me.

(Although, there are some markets like Tor.com that have ridiculously long response times. For those, I suppose it’s better to wait until I’ve really got a zinger of a story to send them, since I can only send one submission to a place at a time.)

I fully expect to get rejected by everybody, multiple times for multiple stories. That’s okay–it’s all part of the process. I’ll probably get a sidebar widget or something to track my progress, with total rejections as a prominent stat. Maybe when I hit 500 or 1,000 or something, I’ll do something special. It’s a milestone of progress, or at least of effort, so I definitely plan to own it as such.

Even though my goals aren’t financial, I probably won’t submit to markets that only pay in contributor copies (or don’t pay at all, for that matter). Those publications aren’t really going to help me make a name for myself, and if I wanted to write for exposure, I could just as easily publish my stories myself. There’s no sense in writing for exposure unless you’re the one who has the control.

Of course, I’m going to have to write a lot in order to have a lot to submit. My goal for now is to write at least two short stories per month, preferably one every week. I figure that’s a good balance to strike between this and my other writing projects. My novels and novellas still take priority, but I’ll make time for Operation Short Blitz as well. Besides, sometimes it helps to take a break and work on something that you can start and finish quickly.

For fun, I’ll post a quick summary of each story I write, with the word count, genre, how long it took me to write, and what my thoughts are on it. If you guys can keep me honest and make sure I don’t slack too much, that would be awesome. I won’t be posting them, though, or really any excerpts either, since I need to keep the first publication rights in order to sell them (almost no-one takes reprints, unfortunately).

Logistical Considerations:

In order to do this as efficiently as possible, I’ve put together a spreadsheet of all of the magazines I hope to submit to, ranking them in order of preference and listing all of the relevant information about them. This information includes:

Name of the publication.
Word count requirements.
Genre qualifications.
Payment rates.
Expected response time.
Name(s) of the editor(s).
Link to their guidelines.
Link to their submission system.
Whether they accept reprints.
Whether they accept multiple/simultaneous submissions.
Whether they’re a SFWA qualifying market.
The length of any exclusivity period in their contracts.

In addition to everything listed above, I’ll also keep a column for each story I’ve written, to indicate which markets I’ve sent them to and any result. I’ll keep things color coded for convenience: red = standard form rejection, yellow = personalized rejection, green = currently on submission, blue = published, white = haven’t submitted yet, and gray = doesn’t qualify for submission.

Basically, it looks something like this:

Whenever I write a new story, I’ll list it in a new column on the spreadsheet, gray out any markets that I don’t plan to send it to, and immediately send it out on submission, starting with the market at the top and working my way down. If it goes through all the markets and doesn’t get picked up by any of them, then I’ll either trunk it or self-publish, but not until I’ve gone through all the markets first.

I’ve got to admit, one of the big motivations for me is this spreadsheet. There’s something about having all of my stories organized and color coded in a place where I can see them all that makes me want to write more of them. What can I say? I’m a nerd.

Tactics:

For the duration of this operation, I’m going to adhere strictly to Heinlein’s rules, which are:

You must write.
You must finish what you write.
You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
You must put what you write on the market.
You must keep it on the market until it has been sold.

No matter how great the temptation, I will not revise a story after it’s finished. If it’s broken, I’ll just trunk it and write something else, or rewrite it from scratch. If I workshop it, I’ll do it the way Dean Wesley Smith advises, which is to workshop it after you’ve sent it out, in order to learn how you can improve on the next one.

The reasons for this are twofold. First, a lot of writers I whom respect (especially short story writers) swear by Heinlein’s rules, so I plan to try them out and see just how well they work for me. Second, I don’t want to become a master reviser or editor, I want to become a master writer. I wrote almost all of my college essays the night before they were due, and could easily pound out an A+ essay on a first draft by the end of my college career. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if short stories are similar.

Since I have a lot of other writing projects to deal with, I’ll probably limit myself to two or three days at most for each story. I average around 2,500 words a day when I’m on project, so if it takes me a week to write a 5,000 word short story, I’m probably doing something wrong.

Like I said above, my goal is to write at least two stories per month, preferably one per week. I usually take Sundays off, so I figure that Friday/Saturday would be a good time to work on a short story. It’s at the end of the week, so it won’t interrupt my normal work flow too much, and gives me a chance for a nice break. If I don’t finish it in one weekend, I can put it off until the next one. I’ll try that out and see how it goes.

Of course, the only way to get great at writing short stories is to read a lot of them too. I already subscribe to Escape Pod and the Clarkesworld podcast, and just signed up for Daily Science Fiction as well. If any of you guys have good recommendations for short stories or magazines, let me know–I’m definitely interested in reading as much great stuff as I can. And of course, I’ll still keep working at the slushpile for Leading Edge.

That just about does it, I think. This is definitely uncharted territory for me, so I expect I’ll be learning a lot of great stuff along the way. For now, though, this is how I plan to go about doing it. It will probably take a couple of years before Operation Short Blitz really comes to fruition, but I plan to stick with it until it does.

Wish me luck! And if you want to join me by doing something similar, let me know how it goes!