Submission Blitz – Day 10

I had to dig a little harder to find a venue today, and I ended up submitting “The Godmother’s Curse” to a pro-rate venue as a result. That never ends well – but this isn’t a “submit-only-to-venues-likely-to-accept-you” blitz, so I’m going to have to dive into those far reaches a couple of times this month. I got another receipt confirmation today too. I’m thinking I may see another rejection or two to allow for resubmissions by month’s end, but that’s only if my submissions from the summer and fall of 2012 weren’t sucked up into some submission black hole. That has happened to me before, where presses have folded, my submissions were ignored during the reading period I sent them in and not read into the following one many months later, or just not deemed important enough for anybody’s attention until they bothered to send out a form rejection letter more than a year after the short story had been submitted (a pro-rate venue at that.)

In the meantime, I hit 3,200 words today on “Sanae’s Garden” and realized there’s no way I can finish it in the 3,500 word maximum required for the original venue I had planned – not without completely deconstructing the story. I won’t do that. It’s a story I get lost in while I write and changing the story excessively would ruin it. I *know* the ending and I’m just trying to get there as concisely as possible. I’m expecting it will run between 5,000 and 6,000 words when I’m done and I found another venue I can submit it to that will welcome that word count. I’ll just have to write a new story for the anthology I was going to submit it to. The way I see it, all this Japanese-themed content is good practice for “A Bed of Bones”, the Japanese mythology based novel I have in planning for the 2013 NaNoWriMo in November.

Anyway, we’ll see if I can finish up “Sanae’s Garden” by tomorrow. Then I start work on the next couple of flash pieces I hope to put out there.