What gnaws at me these days is a sense that I haven’t got enough of my stories out to markets. I have four stories coming out in major places, probably most of them this year, but you know, there’s always next year’s publications to get started on.
It’s amazing how, when you develop the habit, even a slight lull in submitting work begins to nag at you. You start checking your tracker stats, counting up how much stuff you’ve got out at markets, and asking yourself why you haven’t sent out more.
Or, at least I do. Still, this is better than the habit one develops prior to the commencement of serious submissions. That habit is ceaselessly tinkering with stories, finding excuses not to send them out. Promising oneself to do it soon.
Actually, as I described that, I realized that what bugs one so much about discovering one has a pile of stories to send out is that it feels so much like a relapse… as if one has fallen off the wagon and gone back to putting off submitting stories.
So I’m going to send out whatever I have that’s in the print & send box. I’m going to do it this week. And that’s that.
I’m dropping the statistical breakdown into the extended section of this post, because I know lots of people aren’t interested in the details, and because I want to track them anyway for my own purposes.
I just checked on duotrope, and currently my numbers are like this (including two things I sent out electronically just today, which are dutifully marked with asterisks):
- one short story at Escape Pod.
- six poems at Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
- one novelette at Nemonymous: Cone Zero.
- one flash story at Postcards From… (*)
- one flash story at Pseudopod. (*)
But in my “Print and Send” folder, I have:
- one flash piece (for kids, about “Space Cooties”)
- three short stories (“Alone With Gandhari”, “Solvjaynghi’s Christmas Wish”, and “Cai and her Ten Thousand Husbands”)
- one novelette (“The Broken Pathway”)
All of which, my nervousness nonwithstanding, are ready to be sent out. The hard part, for me, is deciding where to send things, since, unusually for me, half of this stuff is not SF but instead magical, fantastical stuff.
Oh, and then there’s that political essay… but that’s another story altogether!