Short Stories – Check-In

Let’s check in on my short stories.

Last week, I said I was going to dabble in something short for a bit to give my brain a rest from Boiling Seas 3 before I get cracking on finishing the first draft. I started doing that. And then the next day I found out about a submission window for a medieval horror anthology. I learned about it on Monday. The deadline was on Saturday.

With such a short deadline, I would normally not even try – rushed writing makes for bad writing, after all. But it was history, and it was horror (something in which I like to dabble from time to time), and I happened to have an outline for a historical horror story just lying around. So I wrote 6000 words in less than a week. (And they were actually good ones – I made a lot more time than I’d normally have and knuckled down to tweak and improve things.) And, after that surprisingly productive week, I submitted it. Yay me.

This added another brick to the teetering pile on the Desktop Submission Tracker, which we should probably take a look at, as it’s been a while. (In fact I don’t think I’ve ever shown it on the site before, so here you go.)

Feat. Bootleg Green Iron Man, who is a) surprisingly good quality for a fake Lego figure from a Spanish market, and b) holds my laptop charger cable for me.

You will note that the yellow – ‘Submitted’ – column is now so tall that you can’t actually see the yellow brick on top anymore, because I’ve both written a few new things and dug out some older pieces, polished them and thrown them out into the wilderness. This does include a bit of micro-fiction, in fairness… but also two novellas, so it all balances out. One thing left in the red ‘Not Currently Doing Anything’ column: a story I really, really like but which hasn’t had much success, so I’m evaluating what to do with it. Which may include actually starting the full novel I’ve had bits of rattling around my head for many years now.

And then, excitingly, a couple of new things on the right. One I mentioned back in March as having been picked up, which was and continues to be exciting, but as of this Friday I’ve had another piece picked up for an anthology! Drinks all around, etcetera. I didn’t so much ‘write’ this story as ‘ruthlessly distil it from the first chunk of an unfinished novel manuscript’ – more cutting things away and then stitching the useful bits back together. But it’s a good story (I mean, it got accepted, at least), and I’m proud of it.

This little tracker was a good idea. I’d recommend something similar to anyone else with this sort of thing to keep track of. (Purely practically, Lego is a great building material for this sort of thing; I’ve got a little set of bookends too, which you can see on the left of the photo, which are very easy to expand when necessary.) Of course I’ve got digital lists all over the place – with more information as well, such as ‘where did I submit this one again’ and ‘how many months ago was it’ – but having a little physical widget just feels good. It’s very satisfying to literally stack the stories higher and watch the right-hand column slowly get taller. And even when I’m levering bricks out of ‘Submitted’ and back into ‘Doing Nothing’, it doesn’t feel so bad. I just have to grit my teeth, maybe make some edits, and find a reason to move them back again.

And it’s Lego. Can’t stay sad at Lego.