Aeryn Rudel's Blog, page 49
March 12, 2018
Story Acceptance Prep Kit
Hey, you got an acceptance letter. Awesome. Now what? Well, the editor is likely going to ask you for a few things, and I think it’s a great idea to have these items ready to go and at your fingertips. So consider the following like a story acceptance prep kit and get busy.
1) Short Author Bio. Most markets will ask you for a short bio of around 50 words to run alongside your story. Here’s my current bio to give you an idea of what’s usually expected.
Aeryn Rudel is a freelance writer from Se...
March 1, 2018
Submission Statement: February 2018
February is in the rearview, and despite a significant drop in the number of submissions sent, it was a pretty good month. I broke the longest rejections streak of my career at 27, so that alone makes February a-okay in my book.
February 2018 Report Card
Submissions Sent: 5 Rejections: 7 Acceptances: 1 Publications: 0I sent only a quarter of the submissions I sent in January, but I’m still on pace to hit 100 submissions for the year, with an average of 12.5 per month for the first two mont...
February 26, 2018
One-Hour Flash: Kite Flyers
Hey, all, here’s another installment of one-hour flash. I’ve got a weird one for you this time. With these one-hour flash challenges, you get a prompt, usually a photo, and then you have sixty minutes to write something resembling a coherent story. Sometimes that prompt resonates, and you come up with something pretty workable. Sometimes it doesn’t and you struggle to come up with anything, and when you do, it’s, well, bizarre. This story is the latter. The prompt for this one, if I remember...
February 22, 2018
It Came From My Hard Drive! Part 5: Tough Charity
Time for another installment of It Came From My Hard Drive. These are short, high-fantasy vignettes I wrote for Goodman Games around ten years ago. They were used to introduce chapters in various RPG supplements I was working on at the time. This one comes from a book called Hero’s Handbook: Tieflings. If you haven’t been playing Dungeons & Dragons for most of your adult life, you’re likely wondering what the hell a tiefling is. Short answer: tieflings are folks who have a demon or a devil so...
February 14, 2018
Ranks of the Rejected: Andrew Bourelle
This time on Ranks of the Rejected I spoke with an author who directly inspired me to get off my ass and start submitting stories on a regular basis. I met Andrew Bourelle through his brother Ed Bourelle, a friend and colleague, and we started trading stories about six years ago. Not only did Andrew give me great feedback on my work, his dogged persistence in the face of rejection is part of what inspired me to start this blog. In fact, whenever I tell a story about a “writer friend” to demon...
February 12, 2018
Evolution of a Short Author Bio
About two years ago, I wrote a blog post outlining how to write a 50-word author bio, or at least how I write one. I mentioned in that post that an author bio is a living thing and should change and grow as you change and grow as a writer. Well, let’s take a look at that bio-building process and see how my 50-word bio has transformed in the last two years (and how it might change again in the future).
Like last time, my short author bio will include the following elements:
Basic details Acco...February 8, 2018
Swings & Misses II: The Rejection Streak
If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you know rejections don’t generally bother me. I accept them as just part and parcel with the whole writing gig, a necessary aspect of improving at the craft. One writer friend even described my apparent immunity to the rejection blues as my writerly super power. (Why can’t it be some kind of spidey sense about which markets will accept my stories?) Well, damn it if I didn’t go and find my kryptonite. It’s not any one rejection or any speci...
February 2, 2018
Submission Statement: January 2018
January has come and gone, and here’s my first submission statement for 2018. A very productive month, and since this level of production will likely be the norm this year (I hope), I’m changing the format of these posts so you don’t have read the same rejections over and over again. 
January 29, 2018
Reprint Submissions: Old Stories, New Markets
Looking to expand the ol’ publications list and get some of your best work to a wider audience? A reprint submission may be the way to go. If the term reprint is unfamiliar to you, it’s simply a story you’ve already published. (It’s also a story where certain rights have reverted back to you. More on that in a sec.) When you send that story to another market who accepts previously published works, it’s a reprint submission.
I’ve sent a fair amount of reprint submissions over the last couple o...
January 24, 2018
One-Hour Flash – For Abby
Time for another installment of One-Hour Flash and another opportunity to exorcise a demon from my hard drive. All these stories were written in one hour for a writing exercise/contest, and for one (good) reason or another, I haven’t done much with them. So instead of letting them pile up rejections like the the good lord intended, I’m sharing them here. Like all the stories in this series, this is more or less what I ended up with after an hour of writing.
This one is called “For Abby,” and...
