The Sad Fate of Ten Little Stories

I’ve been busy with the novel. Really busy. I had hoped to finish it before my writing time vanished but I’m still three chapters shy of completing the rough draft.

Since I’ve been so busy I’ve been neglecting maintaining my submissions. What I mean by this, is that when stories are rejected, I need to hunt out new homes for them and whatnot. I haven’t been doing this. In the mad plunge to finish the novel, several stories were politely declined and returned to me (and two novels).

I took a look at the list today. In the past I’ve had a fairly large list of “things submitted”. This is largely because over the past few years I wrote a lot of stories. At times I’ve had over thirty stories submitted at any time.

I just can’t do that anymore.

I’ve already backed off from writing stories (to focus on novels)… and I’ve only written one this year. So, I took a serious look at the stories that had come back. I already did a purge of stories earlier in the year — “retiring” those that I’ve never received any positive feedback on. This latest crop was different. Some of these stories had made it into the final round of reading, or been accepted (only to have a market fold) or had otherwise garnered some praise that made me want to keep submitting them.

Ten of those stories are now retired. I also retired the two novels — there’s no remaining, suitable markets for me to submit them to (without an agent).

I need to focus on new material (especially given the time constraints on my writing) and I’m wasting too much time on submitting work that’s not strong enough to sell. I now have a dozen or so stories remaining out there and submitted, about five more stories that I’m just waiting for various markets to reopen before I can submit them. I also have three novels out for consideration (of these, two of them I think I’ll pull shortly because it has been a long time since I’ve received an update from the publishers).

Anyways, that’s the state of writing things.

And yes, I missed the game design update on Thursday. that’s because I did no work on the prototype last week. I’ve done a bit this week (kind of). I’ll talk about that on Thursday, barring any distractions.

Finally, if you have the chance, there’s still two kickstarters you might be interested in, from former BioWare colleagues:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1936639747/road-kill-ultimate-car-combat-tabletop-strategy-ga (Only a few hours remain to contribute here)

and

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hinterlandgames/the-long-dark-a-first-person-post-disaster-surviva?ref=live (A few days remain)

Do support them, if you can!