Aeryn Rudel's Blog, page 46

The Final Round Form Rejection

It’s been a while since I posted about a new type of rejection letter, mostly because I’ve already written about every type of rejection under the sun. Well, as it turns out, not quite. The rejection letter I want to talk about today is a subspecies of higher-tier form rejection that gives you a little more information about where your story ended up in the publisher’s decision process. Let’s call it the final round form rejection.

Example #1

Very sorry for the delay in getting back to you, b...

A Week of Writing: 5/28/18 to 6/3/18

New month, new week, more writing and whatnot.

The Novel

I’m about 20,000 words into my first read-through of my horror novel, Late Risers. I let it sit for almost three weeks before I jumped in, and, as expected, my reactions range from “this is pretty good” to “this is objectively terrible.” That’s about par for the course, I think. It should be noted that what I’m doing in this read-through is fixing the problems that are so obvious they can be seen from space. The more nuanced issues, whi...

Submission Statement: May 2018

Well, May was certainly an active month, though not as successful as March and April. Here’s how I did.

May 2018 Report Card

Submissions Sent: 14 Rejections: 12 Acceptances: 1 Publications: 0 Other: 1

Fourteen submissions in May. That’s solid, and I’ve got sixty for the year. The acceptance gives me six total for 2018, which puts me at an even ten percent acceptance rate. Not bad, but I’d like to get somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen percent by the end of the year. I’ve got a few sto...

A Week of Writing: 5/21/18 to 5/27/18

Running a little behind this week with the holiday weekend and whatnot, but I’m back on track again.

Here’s what I accomplished for the week.

The Novel

So, I had hoped to be neck-deep in my first round of revisions by this point, but another project with a looming deadline pulled me away. Plus, I think I might benefit from a little more distance from the first draft. I’ll start going through the book this week or early next. I did decide one major plot point needed to change, and while that’s...

New Author Starter Kit – Acceptance Prep

Last week, I listed six things you need before you send out those first submissions in New Author Starter Kit – Submission Prep. Today, I’ve put together a few things you’ll need when one of those submissions is accepted for publication. From (much) experience I know rejections are a lot more common, but, hey, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be prepared for an acceptance. Here are four things you might need for the blessed event.

1) PayPal account. When you sell a story, one of the best parts...

A Week of Writing: 5/14/18 to 5/20/18

Another week of writing gone by. Lots of business as usual and one fairly momentous accomplishment.

Here are the details.

The Novel

The first draft is done. The novel is an actual thing that exists somewhere other than my head. There’s still a lot of work to do before it’s fit to be read by other humans, but it’s damn nice to have the first draft in the can. Instead of telling you how much I wrote for the week, I’ll give you the final stats for the first draft:

Total Word Count: 92,684 Chapt...

New Author Starter Kit – Submission Prep

If you’re a new author and you want to submit your work to magazines, literary journals, anthologies, contests, and the like, it can seem a daunting process. I mean, where do you submit? How do you submit? A lot of us simply learned by doing, and, of course, experience is often the best teacher. That said, there’s no reason to go into the wilds of submission land completely unprepared.

So, based on my experience, here’s a list of six things you need before you throw your precious word baby on...

A Week of Writing: 5/7/18 to 5/13/18

And the second week of May is in the books. Less progress than I would have liked, but, in all, positive yardage.

Here’s how I did.

The Novel

The novel I’m currently working on is the fourth I’ve written in the last three years. This one is by far the most challenging, but it’s similar to the others in a lot ways. One of those ways goes like this:

Starting a novel – Pretty easy Writing to the halfway point in a novel – Challenging but not too bad Finishing a novel, especially the last 10,000...

Submission Protocol: The Unsolicited Rewrite

Here’s a scenario for you. You receive a very encouraging personal rejection from a publisher, where the editor says something like, “Hey, good story. We’re going to pass, but we think you might consider improving the story by changing X and revising Y.” If you’re new to the submission grind, you might think if you addressed X and Y and sent the story back to the publisher, you’d have a good chance of an acceptance. Unfortunately, that’s called an unsolicited rewrite, and the majority of publ...

A Week of Writing: 4/30/18 to 5/6/18

Another week of writing come to a close. Got some novel writin’ done, some short stories spruced up, a bunch of submission sent, a pile of rejections received, and even a publication to crow about.

Have a look.

The Novel

Well, I was hoping to have a complete first draft by this point, but instead I decided to stray from my outline for the climax of the third act, which meant I had to rework a bunch of things. That slowed me down considerably. The changes will make for a better book (I hope),...