Aeryn Rudel's Blog, page 27

A Week of Writing: 8/24/20 to 8/30/20

Okay, gonna try and get back on track with these updates. Here’s last week’s writerly endeavors.

Words to Write By

This week’s quote comes from one of my favorite books about the craft, Stephen King’s On Writing.

“In the spring of my senior year at Lisbon High—1966, this would have been—I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: “Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. F...

One-Hour Flash: What’s It Good For?

If you follow my blog, you’ve probably heard me talk about writing one-hour flash fiction. It’s something I do every other week in a group writing exercise and friendly competition, and, I shit you not, it’s one of the “secrets” to my publishing success. The exercise is simple. Someone in the group posts a writing prompt, usually a photo, but it can be a phrase or even a short piece of music, and then everyone, at the same time, has one hour to write a story of no more than 1,000 words. Then, we...

Rejections from The Rejectomancy Review

Let’s have a little fun and pretend I’m the editor of a new genre magazine. We’ll call this imaginary publication The Rejectomancy Review. If I were to run this hypothetical publication, what kind of rejections letter would I send? What would they look like? What would I want them to convey to the author? Let’s talk about that.

Before we get started, I should state that I have worked as a magazine editor in the past, and I’m occasionally tempted to try running a small genre zine on my own. Then ...

Novel Work: Round One Revisions

A little over a month ago, I finished the first draft of a new novel tentatively titled Hell to Play. I let it sit for a while to rest, refocus, and work on other projects, but now I’ve started doing the initial read-through and revision. I thought I’d talk a bit about what I’m trying to accomplish in this initial revision and why. As always, this post, like most posts on my blog, is how I do things. It’s not the only way or even the right way. It’s just my way.

Submission Statement: July 2020

Little late with this one, but here’re my July submission endeavors.

July 2020 Report Card

Submissions Sent: 4
Rejections: 5
Acceptances: 1
Publications: 1

More rejections than submissions is indicative of a not-so-stellar month. The four submission in July puts me behind the eight-ball to hit my goal of one-hundred subs for the year (I’m currently sitting at 51). I did manage an acceptance, which continues my streak of at least one acceptance per month in 2020. I better get some submissions o...

Rejection Reflection: Is This Market for Me?

One of the toughest questions writers sometimes ask themselves is if a particular publisher is a good market for their work. When the form rejections pile up, you begin to wonder if maybe they just aren’t into your style, voice, tone, etc. That’s entirely possible, but make sure you’re not jumping the gun. To illustrate what I’m talking about, let’s take a look at a couple of markets I’ve sent a bunch of stories to without a single acceptance. Let’s see if it’s a case of “it’s not you, it’s me” ...

Flash Fiction or Short Stories: Which Is Rejected More?

A little over a month ago, I published a post called How Long Does It Take to Sell a Story? In that post I charted out how long it took me in days to sell some of my published flash fiction and short stories. The results were interesting, and I want to revisit that topic today. Instead of looking at the number of days before acceptance, though, I want to look at the number of rejections before acceptance. Like that first article, I’ll split my findings into flash fiction and short stories.

We’ll...

Weeks of Writing: 7/6/20 to 7/26/20

Way, way behind on these, but here are my writing endeavors for the past three weeks.

Words to Write By

This week’s quote is from Stephen King. I’ve used this one before, but it’s one of my favorites, so I’m using it again.

Submission Journal: The Bad Year

I’ve been submitting short stories pretty regularly for the last seven years, and my acceptance percentage is usually between fifteen and twenty percent, except for one strange, terrible year. In 2017 I managed only a measly 7% acceptance rate. But why? Well, first some context. Let’s take a look at my overall submission numbers for 2016, 2017, and 2018.

Year
Subs
Reject
Withdrawn
Accept
Acc %


2016
53
43
2
10
20%


2017
73
64
4
5
7%


2018
120
100
4
19
16%

Okay, as you can see, 2016 was ...

Hard Drive Deep Dive

The subject of unearthing forgotten stories from your hard drive came up on Twitter yesterday (Thanks, Marcus!), and it prompted me to go to my hard drive (and an external one I use as backup) and see what might be lurking there. Well, in addition to discovering a few forgotten tales, I started wondering just  how many stories, either finished or unfinished, I’ve written over the years and what became of them. So I started cataloguing and spreadsheeting, and here are the results.

Finished
Un...