Aeryn Rudel's Blog, page 11
August 1, 2022
Submission Statement: July 2022
July was another good month. The third quarter is definitely looking better than the first two.
July 2022 Report Card
Submissions Sent: 5
Rejections: 6
No Response: 0
Acceptances: 2
Publications: 1
Further Consideration/Shortlist: 0
Slightly better than last month, but five submissions in thirty-one days is not gonna cut it if I want to hit one hundred subs for the year. Right now, I’m at an even fifty, which means I need fifty more in five months. That’s ten a month, and doable, but...
July 26, 2022
Charting Rejection Progression II
A few years ago, I posted the rejections I’d received from a pro market I’d been trying to crack from some time. The point of that post was to illustrate that rejections often indicate if you’re making progress with an editor/publisher and getting closer to an acceptance. This formula, in my experience, works best with the bigger pro markets, who tend to have tiers of rejection letters. Anyway, I recently received a rejection from another pro market that I believe shows I’m getting closer. To de...
July 20, 2022
Vampires and Zombies and Werewolves, Oh My!
I’ve touched on this before, but recent good news has me thinking about it again. There’s a sense in the genre-writing community that it’s exceedingly difficult to sell stories that feature classic monsters. I’m talking mostly about the big three: vampires, zombies, and werewolves. I’d have to say that in my experience this is largely true, and it’s not uncommon to find markets that expressly forbid submissions that feature these well-worn horrors or actively discourage it in their guidelines. N...
July 15, 2022
Should You Read One-Star Reviews?
A common topic in writerly circles is whether or not authors should read bad reviews of their work on Amazon, Goodreads, and elsewhere. Just for clarification, when I say bad review, I mean a one- or -two-star review, though I know some might consider three stars to be “bad” as well. I’ve seen compelling arguments for both sides of the debate, and I have my own opinions (a subject for another time). In this post, however, I want to focus not just on bad reviews but REALLY bad reviews. The one-st...
July 8, 2022
Submission Statement: June 2022
June has come and gone, and it was one of the better months of the year for short stories.
June 2022 Report Card
Submissions Sent: 4
Rejections: 1
No Response: 0
Acceptances: 2
Publications: 0
Further Consideration/Shortlist: 1
Like May, June was not a productive month in terms of submissions sent but very productive with acceptance and other good things. One of those acceptances was from Grinning Skull Press for my baseball horror novella Effectively Wild, and that’s a big one. One ...
July 1, 2022
Effectively Wild – A Horror/Baseball Novella
Way back in August of last year, I was joking with my wife about writing a baseball monster story featuring a certain type of monster. I offered the title Effectively Wild as a haha-isn’t-that-funny and got the appropriate eyeroll. Well, friends, that slightly silly idea began to take shape in the ol’ brain meats, and it wasn’t long before I had outlined a novella. Now, I love baseball, and I love monsters, so once I got started on this thing, I enjoyed the hell out of it. It wasn’t even the fir...
June 22, 2022
Further Considering Acceptance Rates
I recently received a further consideration/hold letter from an excellent pro market. This is my third story to make it through a first reader and be recommended to one of the editors for further review. Now, it can be hard to quantify exactly what it means when you get over that first hurdle. There a lot of questions you might ask. How many total submissions does the publication receive? How many stories make through the first round? And, finally, of those stories, how many end up accepted? Usu...
June 10, 2022
Swings & Misses IV: Revenge of the Rejection Streak
Submitting short stories to genre and lit magazines is a process that can be, uh, well, let’s just say discouraging. Why? Because rejections are inevitable, multiple rejections for the same story are expected, and even two or three rejections in the same day are not out of the ordinary. Most writers have a thick enough skin to withstand the fusillade of NOs, but what about when the rejections pile up and there’s not an acceptance in sight? Well, friends, I’m here to tell you that the dreaded rej...
June 1, 2022
Submission Statement: May 2022
May is in the books, and here’s how I did.
May 2022 Report Card
Submissions Sent: 5
Rejections: 7
No Response: 1
Acceptances: 0
Publications: 1
Further Consideration/Shortlist: 0
Well, as you can see, I was not particularly productive in May on the shot story front. I spent more time working on my current novel and doing freelance work. That might be because the seven rejections in May give me twenty-two in a row. I’ve hit these streaks in the past, and this one, though long, is sti...
May 20, 2022
First Draft Finish Line: What’s Your Speed?
How long should it take you to write the first draft of a novel? There’s no right answer, really, but as both a writer of novels and a former editor of authors who write novels, I’ve identified three categories that most writers fall into (more or less). This is all ballpark math, but it might be helpful to folks thinking about tackling that first novel.
Before I get into the details, let’s talk ground rules. I’ll be using daily word count (DWC) goals to measure writing speed in conjunction with...
