Aeryn Rudel's Blog, page 3

Submission Statement: February 2025

February has come and gone, and it was a pretty solid month for submissions. I’m still on pace to hit all my goals for the year, from the number of submissions sent to the number of new stories written. Let’s dive in and take a closer look at the numbers.

February 2025 Short Story StatsSubmissions Sent: 11Rejections: 8No Response: 0Acceptances: 0Further Consideration/Shortlist: 1Withdrawals: 0Pending: 20New Stories: 7

I sent eleven submissions last month,...

Submission Statement: January 2025

The first month of 2025 is in the books, and here’s my first submission statement for the new year. These updates will be a little different this year because my goals for 2025 are fairly ambitious. I’m also tracking them in a fun new way (more on that at the end of the post). For this first post, let me go ahead and quickly list my goals for 2025.

Write one new story per week.
Send 150 submissions.
Receive 24 acceptances.
Make 12 pro sales.
Receive 100 rejections.

With the goals out o...

Pro or Not Pro, That Is the Question

Recently, I outlined my writing goals for 2025, which you can see here. One of those goals is to make at least 12 pro sales, but that leads me to the following question. What exactly IS a pro sale? It’s not as cut and dry as you might think, so, in this post, I’m going to go over some of the ways folks determine if a sale is pro or not. I’m also going to cover some of the gray areas, and then give you my thoughts on how I’m personally going to determine pro or not pro for my own story sales.

Fir...

2025 Writing Goals Bingo

This post is a little late in the month, but I thought I’d share my writing goals for the coming year, which are admittedly ambitious, and then show you a fun way to track writing goals in general. The main thrust of those goals is putting a greater emphasis on both writing and submitting short stories. This doesn’t mean I’ll stop working on or querying long-form fiction, but in the last couple of years, that’s been almost my entire focus (along with a lot of freelance work), and I want to get b...

Submission Statement: November 2024

And that’s a wrap on November. Let’s see how I fared in the story submission trenches.


November 2024 Short Story Submissions


Submissions Sent: 7

Rejections: 3

No Response: 0

Acceptances: 1

Further Consideration/Shortlist: 0

Withdrawals: 0

Pending: 8



I sent seven submission in November, three off my goal of ten, but I’m not unhappy with that total. It gives me 62 for the year, which, again, is a bit off my usual goal, but with everything I’ve had g...

Micromanagement: 7 Reasons You Should Write Microfiction

I’ve been writing microfiction almost daily for the past five years under the prompted #vss365 hashtag on all the social media sites I currently inhabit, and I’ve blogged about the benefits of tiny tales before, but it’s been a while, and, well, the social media landscape and some of my thoughts on the subject have changed (drastically in some cases). Anyway, I’ve gathered up these old ideas, updated them a tad, and stuck them in a new blog post. So, here are seven reasons I think writers should...

Three Things I Learned as a Staff Writer/Editor

Working as a freelance writer certainly has it’s challenges, but what’s made me an expert at hitting deadlines and producing work to order was the years I worked as an in-house staff writer and editor for a couple of gaming companies. My first gig in that arena was with Goodman Games in 2008, and I worked on tons of RPG material compatible with 4E D&D and got my first taste of editing a magazine, the short-lived but still awesome Level Up. After that, in 2010, I took a job as the editor-in-chief...

Climbing the Impostor Syndrome Ladder

Hey, follow writers, let’s talk about impostor syndrome. You know, that particularly pernicious brain weasel that constantly reminds you you’re not good enough, chewing your confidence and discipline down to the nub until you can barely string a sentence together. It’s a real son-of-a-bitch, and like all of you, I struggle with impostor syndrome on a daily, hell, an hourly basis. But what can you do about it? Sure, can keep writing and try to tune out impostor syndrome as best you can, but I cam...

Three Things I Learned from 500 Rejections

Back in 2023, I received my 500th rejection since I started tracking submissions through Duotrope. I’m closing in on 700 now, but that first five hundred was an important milestone. Despite the mountain of no’s, it felt like a real achievement, a rite of passage almost. You see, I wholeheartedly believe that rejections are an unavoidable and even necessary part of the process that make you a better writer and, maybe just as important, toughen you up, so the slings and arrows of this brutal indus...

Rejection Whys: Not Ready For Primetime

The reasons for a rejection are myriad and seemingly endless, but the more rejections you get, the better you become at reading the literary tea leaves and divining why the “not for us’s” and “we’re gonna pass’s” are clogging your inbox. In this series, I’ll go over some of the most common reasons, using my own work and rejections as examples, and maybe, just maybe, we can figure out why these editors aren’t blown away by my generational brilliance. Of course, all of this will be conjecture. Yo...