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3.9.2010

The Submission Trap

Last year, I wrote Drones, a SciFi zombie story. At about 2,400 words, it had a visceral feel, and after a few drafts, my test readers were quite happy with it (as was I). So I submitted it. And seven times it was rejected. No big deal, seven isn't a particularly high number of rejections, and I have no grudges against the markets or editors. What bothered me, however, was how long all this took, and more importantly, what the process was doing to my other writing. Over the course of the ten months that the story was meandering its way through the submission process, I got very little writing done.

By February 2010 it was clear that something had to give. As much as I loved Drones, it is not so important that I was willing to put every other story on an indefinite hold. So I posted it on this site, and did a few minutes of guerilla advertising. The story did not become a smash hit that would propel me to fame and fortune, unfortunately, but I was under no delusion that it would. It did go over well, though, with a reasonable number of upvotes and no downvotes. Most importantly, I could write again. That week I managed to finish a rough draft of a short story that I had been struggling with for more than two years.

The whole experience prompted me to do some thinking about the whole process. First of all, let me state that I believe that we are going to see a resurgence of short fiction due to a combination of technological (digital delivery to cell phones) and social (increased public transportation due to fuel costs) factors, although that is a topic for another post. At the moment, I have no expectation of being able to make a living off of short fiction, but nonetheless it is what I plan on writing. So how do magazines fit into this picture?

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