{"id":15844,"date":"2022-09-16T00:31:30","date_gmt":"2022-09-16T06:31:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=15844"},"modified":"2022-09-16T00:31:30","modified_gmt":"2022-09-16T06:31:30","slug":"bowing-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/bowing-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Bowing Out"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Back at the end of August, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/new-short-story-writing-challenge\/\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"15670\">I blogged about<\/a> how I was going to do a writing challenge in September to produce more short stories to fill out my publishing queue. At the time, I had a couple of stories that looked like they were going to be picked up by one of the major magazines: the editor had expressed interest in buying them, and we were going back and forth with an editorial discussion about the series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, to make a long story short, all of that fell through, and it looks like I&#8217;ll be self-publishing those stories after all. I&#8217;m not really sure what changed, but to give you an idea of what kind of a short story market this is, it&#8217;s been around for decades and regularly gets written up in <em>Locus Magazine&#8217;s<\/em> year-in-review. The editor said that things had gotten crazy on his end, then didn&#8217;t respond for about a month, and when I sent a polite followup email asking for an update on the status, he gave me the standard &#8220;I&#8217;m going to pass on this one, but send me your next story.&#8221; Which strikes me as kind of weird, given how our previous correspondence led me to believe that the contract was just a formality and he&#8217;d be sending one over soon, but whatever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So now that these stories are back in the publishing queue, I no longer need to write a bunch more to fill it out. In fact, I&#8217;ve actually got enough stories to publish one a month through next April, and after I finish the third Christopher Columbus story, I&#8217;ll have enough to get through June (one of my older stories comes out of exclusivity in May 2023). Here is the schedule as of right now:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>OCT 2022: &#8220;Blight of Empire&#8221;<\/li><li>NOV 2022: &#8220;Christopher Columbus, Wildcatter&#8221;<\/li><li>DEC 2022: &#8220;The Freedom of Second Chances&#8221;<\/li><li>JAN 2023: &#8220;The Body Tax&#8221; (needs to be revised, but it&#8217;s already been workshopped)<\/li><li>FEB 2023: &#8220;Christopher Columbus, Treasure Hunter&#8221;<\/li><li>MAR 2023: &#8220;The Library of Fate&#8221;<\/li><li>APR 2023: &#8220;Hunter, Lover, Cyborg, Slave&#8221; (needs to be workshopped and revised)<\/li><li>MAY 2023: &#8220;Christopher Columbus, Wormhole Mechanic&#8221; (partially written, needs to be finished)<\/li><li>JUN 2023: &#8220;In the Beginning&#8221; (still under exclusivity, though I got a special exception to publish it in my third short story collection, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/books\/the-stars-our-destination\/\" data-type=\"mbt_book\" data-id=\"14031\">The Stars Our Destination.<\/a><\/em>)<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Given that I have enough stories to fill out the next nine months, I&#8217;m going to bow out of the September Shorts challenge. This is really good for two reasons: first, it allows me to focus more attention on my current novel WIP, the sequel to <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/books\/star-wanderers\/\" data-type=\"mbt_book\" data-id=\"12902\">Star Wanderers;<\/a><\/em> and second, because I&#8217;ve fallen really behind on the Zedekiah Wight stories for my J.M. Wight pen name, and this should give me some space to work on the next few of those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So that&#8217;s the plan: refocus on <em>Children of the Starry Sea<\/em> and work on Zedekiah Wight stuff on the side.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back at the end of August, I blogged about how I was going to do a writing challenge in September to produce more short stories to fill out my publishing queue. At the time, I had a couple of stories that looked like they were going to be picked up by one of the major&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/bowing-out\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Bowing Out<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[803,1605,1541,170,857],"tags":[42,46,1293,1613,186,670],"class_list":["post-15844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sw-css","category-christopher-columbus-interstellar-explorer","category-outworld-trilogy","category-short-stories","category-sw","tag-frustrations","tag-goals-and-plans","tag-locus-magazine","tag-september-shorts-2022","tag-submitting","tag-traditional-publishing","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-47y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15844"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15844\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15845,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15844\/revisions\/15845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}