I’ve been waiting to update submissions until I had a response from Writers of the Future and Flash Fiction Online. Writers of the Future decision is going to be a few more weeks, apparently, but I got a form rejection from Flash Fiction Online this week, followed a few days later by an answer to my query about it. It seems they’re very backlogged right now. My story made it out of slush, but not to the final winnowing. Disappointing, but that’s the writing life. On to the next market.
The good news is that my acceptance rate is now 17%. Mitigating the improvement somewhat is the fact I’ve been placing a lot of twitter fiction in the last couple months. I’m now one of the more prolific twits at Thaumotrope and trapeze magazine and have one coming up in Quinc and possibly a few other places. It’s ironic since twitter fiction was the area in which I had the most difficulty in my flash fiction boot camp. Well, if rejection is the bread of a writer’s life, irony is probably the butter.
To continue the metaphor in my typically laborious fashion: Acceptance is water and I’m getting darned thirsty. I did at least whet my whistle since last update, though.
A Conversation With Mother has appeared in Flash Me Magazine (which is going on hiatus now — I wonder what part of the meal that represents?)
On the Other Hand, Abomination has appeared at Short-story.Me.
What’s in a Name will appear in Daily Flash 2011.
Monster Freshly Minted has appeared in Everyday Weirdness.
The E.T. in Aisle Three has appeared at Abandoned Towers.
Beauty and the Butler has appeared in Every Day Fiction (to mediocre reviews, alas).
It Takes a Town is now available at Anthology Builder.
Appearances has appeared at Sillymess.
Implications of a Grand Unified Theory: A Love Story has been published by The Fifth Di.. in their September issue.
I’ve also had twitter fiction at Thaumatrope and trapeze magazine. In fact I’m going to be the featured twitter fiction writer for trapeze in October. Three pieces and an interview at the end of the month. That makes me happy 
However, I’m disappointed that I’ve not been able to place my more ambitious fictions to more prestigious markets. It’s nice to find a home for “Implications…”, but there’s a lot more where that came from. Truth is, though, that my real fault lies in not writing more new fiction. I’ve been concentrating on quick-fix micro and flash, when I should be working harder on longer pieces too.
The story at Writers of the Future is 11,000 words. It helps to know I can carry off that length. In my quest to become versatile, I want to become proficient at every length.
Well, off to do some more waiting. I have stories overdue at Aberrant Dreams, Weird Tales (but who doesn’t?), Echo Ink Review, Tin House, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and Nanoism. Hopefully one or two of those will come through and up my happy dose.
You are now free to move about the cabin.
“Never give up, never surrender!” (Galaxy Quest)
Good to see your list of credits and that I haven’t missed too many. And glad to hear you’ve got “overdue” stories at Aberrant Dreams and Andromeda Spaceways — same here. As for Flash Fiction Online, they’ve been on my naughty list ever since they held “Captain Quasar” for six months, told me they’d misplaced it, but found it just in time to reject it. I guess they’re inundated with subs, being an SFWA qualifying market, but c’mon.
Thanks Milo.
I surrendered once, but not again. I may starve, but it will be with my hands on the keyboard.
Hi Steve – I love seeing what other writers are up to and what their MO’s are. How long, or how many submissions has it taken you to get to this 17% acceptance rate? And what’s your approach to markets — top down?
Hi D.M.
Well, I’ve been writing for about 25 years, but took a good ten years off from seriously marketing anything. I don’t have good records for my early subs, but I’ve been tracking things through Duotrope since I started marketing aggressively in December 09. 144 submissions since then to a variety of markets. For these subs I’m running at around 17%.
Until this year, I would write a story, submit it to a workshop, edit it, submit it to another workshop, edit it, polish it, maybe send it out to WOTF or Asimovs’, then pile it in a drawer for some future fix that never seemed to come. I only sent out stories I considered my very best, and only tried them at the top markets. My secret plan was to place at WOTF before I had too many pro credits, but there came a time when I never seemed to get around to submitting to WOTF either. I quit trying to market my work — which was never good enough — though I never entirely stopped writing or workshopping.
In 2001 my wife and I were driving home from North Carolina and we started speculating about global warming and whether we should collaborate on stories set in a globally warmed world. I had this weird idea about an Indiana town getting together to launch a rocket to Mars. Sue prodded me to write it, which I did. Only this time when I piled it in my drawer, she pulled it out and told me to write the missing scenes. So I tried, with her guidance. At one point she wrote a scene for me and told me to “fix it”. “It Takes a Town” emerged. I saw that story as my homage to Ray Bradbury and sent it off in my usual manner. Asimov’s said “No”, F&SF said “Alas”, and there I was staring once again into the black depths of that drawer. Fortunately, there was this emerging new market that was getting some buzz, a place called Strange Horizons that paid pro rates. So I said, “what the heck” and gave it a try there. They bought it quickly and published it in Nov 2002. That gave me a warm feeling, but I was still having problems finishing anything new. I went back into day-job hibernation.
A few years later, while at Indiana University, I took a creative writing class and started letting myself go a bit. I found that I liked to combine literary technique with genre idea. I also found that unreasonable deadlines tended to help me get words onto the page. The instructor loved my first piece, a quirky literary flash fiction about gossip. I went on to write a number of short pieces for assignment deadlines.
They were pretty good, I thought. I went back and read through my drawer. Most of that was pretty good too. Maybe the problem wasn’t that I didn’t possess the “magic”. Maybe the marketplace was simply as difficult to penetrate as people said. Could persistence really be THAT important?
I saw a listing for Triangulation: Taking Flight. It was nearly their deadline, but I had “It Takes a Town” and they did say they’d look at reprints. So I sent it to Pete Butler and he bought it within a few days. Emboldened, I sent it to PodCastle, and Rachel Swirisky bought it within a month. It didn’t get great reaction there, but it did generate some conversation about what constitutes Fantasy vs SF. I mean, there were all these readers looking for elves on unicorns and I’m uploading a story about a bake sale funding a rocket ship. I think she took some flak for that, but I admired her for sticking to her guns.
Reviews came in for Triangulation: Taking Flight and my story seemed to be getting as much press as any, though it often came in the form of “This is the kind of story Sarah Palin would enjoy” or “frustratingly endearing”. From this, I garnered that I can write effective prose, but maybe, just maybe I wasn’t writing WOTF, Asimov’s, F&SF material. Could it be that there are editors out there who would appreciate these stories in my drawer?
I found Duotrope and started looking carefully for markets that matched my stories. Within that criteria, I did start at higher paying venues and work down, but I was really much more concerned with how the guidelines suggested a particular story might fit or not fit. Where possible, I would read a few stories from their offerings as well. I also took time to polish each story before I sent it off. If it was rejected and the editor offered a reason, I would polish again with that in mind. (This process definitely helped my sale of “On the Other Hand, Abomination” to short-story.me).
Rejections followed. The first story that was actually accepted was one I had written for the Creative Writing class, entitled “She Thinks of the Moon”. All of a sudden I wasn’t a one-hit wonder anymore. Then “The Last Liverbeast” sold to A Fly in Amber and was even featured in the issue. That was a story I’d written after a workshop I took with Kij Johnson and Chris McKitterick (James Gunn’s Intensive Workshop at KU). The story was my homage to Hemingway, another intentional experiment in style wrapped around a basic genre idea.
I took a Flash Fiction Bootcamp course from Flash Me Magazine. Again, I was forced to write much faster than was comfortable. Amazingly, three of the four stories I wrote worked well. So I started marketing flash fiction and twitter fiction, and am getting some reasonable success there.
On Duotrope, I saw that the Writers of the Future contest quarter was coming up fast. I hadn’t submitted to them in years, and I really should be doing that. What would they like? I read up on that topic, and discovered they’re looking primarily for fresh takes on genre ideas and deep world building. They “slightly” prefer SF. What about that short story I wrote a couple years back? It had tons of world building behind it, and I liked the POV character a great deal. I had workshopped it once, and the main comment had been to play out the romantic element more fully. At the time that comment had sent the story rushing back to the drawer, of course, but now I took it out again. Good stuff. Missing a couple scenes, a few tweaks, a stronger resolution to the romantic element. Could I do it? I had a week.
I was still polishing at 4pm on deadline day. To my joy, it was selected as one of the final eight in the most competitive WOTF quarter yet (according to KD Wentworth). Even if I don’t win, that was a motivating moment. I can do this. I just have to work harder, finish what I start, and market it wisely.
I guess the short answer is that I pursue a “selective top-down” strategy. Having read slush for Triangulation, I can tell you first hand how frustrating it is that a good quarter of stories submitted are clearly not appropriate for the market. Had the authors read our guidelines or a prior issue of the anthology, that would have been clear. I don’t see the point of bombarding editors with clearly inappropriate stories, but it does make sense to send stories to the highest-paying appropriate markets first.
What a journey. Glad you’ve stuck with it. I hope WOTF comes through for you, too.
I’ve got an award waiting for you at my blog. You’re definitely “going places” sir!