Greetings on this final Tuesday of August!
It’s easy to forget I’m as much a creature of habit as my daughter. Yesterday, while she was enjoying her first day of school, I walked around the house a little stunned at all my free time. I was so overwhelmed by the leisure, paradoxically, that I couldn’t bring myself to do much more than the weekly grocery shopping. Even today, as I work through my to-do list, I feel foggy. So, I’m gonna keep this post short–just a couple of quick updates about my writing only because I don’t have enough working brain cells to do more than that.
Snow globe story–I’m still enjoying this one, but it’s sitting at 12.6 K (max word count is 10K), and I haven’t even finished the rough draft yet. I’m close–I think I can finish it by Thursday, but that will only leave me two days to condense and edit the piece for submission. With so little time to revise, I don’t see how the story will be good enough by the 8/31 deadline, so it’s looking like I will not submit it for consideration to this particular anthology.
That’s a bummer, especially because I like the premise, and the beginning is strong. There’s a kernel of a great story there. But, I’m telling myself it’s not good in the long run to submit something just for the sake of submission and just because it’s technically done. That seems like a bad habit to fall into. Anything I submit anywhere ought to be decent, and it needs to stand a chance.
I think there’s a tendency among newer writers like me to rush to publication because we feel it’s validating, or we like the currency it gives us on social media, etc. But that’s an urge to be wary of, given that ultimately we want quality out there in the world, not necessarily quantity (and not more rejections than we’ll inevitably get). The publishing world is small, I keep hearing, and all the pieces we submit bear our names. We want our names associated with our stronger work.
If I don’t submit this story, I can finish it more leisurely and set it aside to revise later, and the effort will still be worth it in terms of practice. Giving this piece time and distance will only make it better, and who knows what publication opportunities might arise down the road?
Ghost story-– Remember how I mentioned a while back that I planned to submit a ghost story to a spooky anthology? This was the same story that got critiqued during my virtual writing camp. Well, I received an exciting email on Saturday, August 17 from Amaranth Publications announcing they’d accepted it! I was thrilled when I read the first line, then realized they were suggesting revisions. They wanted me to make it more horrifying–“really lean into the fear and violence”–which was fair given it’s for a Halloween collection.
In the original version, the protagonist–a drinker with a temper and terrible self-esteem– has a scary run-in with a ghost in an old bed and breakfast, and he leaves the place resolved to get help. I thought of the story as Scared Straight: Haunted House Edition. The editor, however, wanted me to make the guy (who is a piece of shit) irredeemable and have him meet a tougher end.
At first, I was a little taken aback, even miffed. Then I considered, hey, they like something about this enough to consider publishing it, so if they tell me to jump, at this point I’m gonna ask, how high? I’m no Joyce Carol Oates or Chuck Wendig, so I trusted their suggestions would make the piece better.
Digging into my edits that first evening was tough (it probably didn’t help that I’d had two beers prior to opening my laptop; apparently, I’m not Hemingway either). But, after a couple days working to incorporate these changes in a natural, cohesive manner, I realized I loved the new version of my story–the editors were spot-on. My parents (who never read the original version) were both awesome enough to read it and give me some feedback on the confusing parts, too, so I had a healthy measure of confidence before resubmitting it. Now, I’m just waiting to hear back from Amaranth. The publication date for this anthology is September 1st, which is fast approaching, so hopefully everything will go as planned.
That’s all I’ve got! I hope you’re handling all the seasonal transitions in your life more smoothly than I am. As always, feel free to share tips or suggestions!
‘Til next week!
XOXO,
Jenn
Jennifer Shaw 