May 20, 2020 admin

Well, I promised you I was going to Caithy Weaver this post, and show you each step of sending out the next two queries. Here’s how that went: Monday, May 18th 6:29 – With only 30 minutes of writing time left before I have to grab breakfast and take out the trash, I decide to go to the simple route. Just find the simplest template for a short story cover letter, and create the simplest draft possible for each of the publishers. I’ll be changing them 20 times, anyway. 6:36 – Basic templates created! 6:39 – Start reading the submission…

April 13, 2020 admin

I’m feeling pretty confident right now! I know where I’m sending my work, when I’m sending my work, and I’ve got detailed instructions on how to get the manuscript from Point A to Point B. Now all I have to do is figure out what I’m going to say to each publisher when I query my short story. Wait… what am I going to say to those publishers? Is querying for short fiction more difficult than querying for novels? Or agents? I know how things used to work back in the day, but have they changed in 2020? Well, after…

April 6, 2020 admin

When you’re querying your short fiction you’re going to get rejected. A lot. Stephen King once famously mounted a railroad spike on his childhood bedroom wall when he started submitting short stories as a teen. Each rejection letter King received got impaled on the spike. After a while, the weight of the paper was so heavy it started to warp the railroad-grade iron. You’re going to have to assume that no one is going to immediately declare your work a masterpiece, and buy it off of you for one million dollars. Which means, even from the start, you’ll need to…

March 27, 2020 admin

It’s one thing to get a list of excellent publications that are accepting stories with your theme and word count. It’s another thing altogether to find a publication that might actually like your submission. In order to determine which magazines on my list fall into that second category, there’s only one thing to do: actually read the stories they publish. I’m going to read the latest editions of each magazine, then ask myself three questions: What type of fiction do they normally publish?  Do they publish authors who write like me? Is there any reason why they might not publish…