![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
How To Lob A Turnip
Aug. 17th, 2006 09:57 amWriters lead lives of unparalleled glamour.
--Caitlín R. Kiernan
I've got to deal with my short story subs today, and I thought--going along with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala's plan of maximum transparency, minimum mystique--I'd show y'all the process. (My cunning ulterior motive is that this may actually motivate me to do rather than merely whinge about.)
So. I've been submitting short stories seriously since 2000. (Dilettante forays in the '90s do not count.) In that time, I've sold 22 pieces (counting flash, short stories, novelettes, novellas, and one poem) and racked up more rejections than I want to think about--but I just counted, and it's 184. The most rejections on a story that's still making the rounds is 15. Thet oldest unsold story has been getting doors slammed in its face since October 2000.
I currently have 7 stories out, and 6 stories moping around the house eating ice-cream straight out of the carton and whining about how they can't get work.
The first thing about submitting short stories is that the more you have out, the less emotional wear and tear you suffer. When you only have one short story, it's like a Fabergé egg: you agonize over sending it; you haunt the mailbox waiting for the editor's reply, becoming more and more fraught as the weeks pass; you weep wretched buckets of tears when it's rejected. And each rejection is a separate wrenching horror.
When you have lots of stories out ("lots" here being anywhere from, say, five, up to infinity), the process loses a lot of its drama. You have other things to think about. You learn to roll with the punches; you learn not to take each rejection quite so personally. It gets easier, in other words, to get back on the horse.
The idea here is not to write five mediocre stories instead of one good one, but not to wait until you sell the first story to write the second one. If I'd done that, I'd still only have one short story to my name, unsold.
The second thing about submitting short stories is that it helps to have a system. My system is index cards, with the name of the story and the word count at the top, and then notations that look like:
My index cards let me know both where a story has been submitted to and, for the stories that are out, how long it's been with a particular editor. My index cards are also why I can tell you how many rejections I've gotten in the past six years.
( here's my process )
--Caitlín R. Kiernan
I've got to deal with my short story subs today, and I thought--going along with
matociquala's plan of maximum transparency, minimum mystique--I'd show y'all the process. (My cunning ulterior motive is that this may actually motivate me to do rather than merely whinge about.)So. I've been submitting short stories seriously since 2000. (Dilettante forays in the '90s do not count.) In that time, I've sold 22 pieces (counting flash, short stories, novelettes, novellas, and one poem) and racked up more rejections than I want to think about--but I just counted, and it's 184. The most rejections on a story that's still making the rounds is 15. Thet oldest unsold story has been getting doors slammed in its face since October 2000.
I currently have 7 stories out, and 6 stories moping around the house eating ice-cream straight out of the carton and whining about how they can't get work.
The first thing about submitting short stories is that the more you have out, the less emotional wear and tear you suffer. When you only have one short story, it's like a Fabergé egg: you agonize over sending it; you haunt the mailbox waiting for the editor's reply, becoming more and more fraught as the weeks pass; you weep wretched buckets of tears when it's rejected. And each rejection is a separate wrenching horror.
When you have lots of stories out ("lots" here being anywhere from, say, five, up to infinity), the process loses a lot of its drama. You have other things to think about. You learn to roll with the punches; you learn not to take each rejection quite so personally. It gets easier, in other words, to get back on the horse.
The idea here is not to write five mediocre stories instead of one good one, but not to wait until you sell the first story to write the second one. If I'd done that, I'd still only have one short story to my name, unsold.
The second thing about submitting short stories is that it helps to have a system. My system is index cards, with the name of the story and the word count at the top, and then notations that look like:
out: 06/27/06 back: 08/11/06
Strange Horizons
My index cards let me know both where a story has been submitted to and, for the stories that are out, how long it's been with a particular editor. My index cards are also why I can tell you how many rejections I've gotten in the past six years.
( here's my process )
