I sold a short story

It's true!

I've sold a story, "Fidelity," to Daily Science Fiction, a professional market for science fiction and fantasy stories (mostly flash fiction, or short short stories). They publish a lot of great stuff by a lot of great authors, both well-known and unknown. I'm really excited to have a story in DSF, especially since it's my first publication.

I don't know when my story will appear, but I'll keep the blog updated with information as I learn it.

In the mean time: woah! I sold a story! To a good market whose stories I read almost every day!

Writing update, November

A pretty slow month for me, submissions wise, because I haven't finished any new stories this month. I dedicated my writerly energies in the last four weeks toward a much longer short story than I usually write (about 6,000 words, versus a typical length of 1,000-2,500 words). Usually, I'll compose three or four new stories in a month, but this one has really slowed me down.

I have three stories currently submitted to various markets. There are at least two other stories I need to re-submit, but haven't yet. I'm not quite sure whether I'll rewrite them before I do that, or whether I'll be lazy and re-submit them as they are.

In a previous post, I wrote:

Here are my submission statistics by month:

May: 3 submissions, 1 rejection (1 form)

June: 4 submissions, 3 rejections (2 form, 1 personal)

July: 4 submissions, 5 rejections (3 form, 2 personal)

August: 6 submissions, 3 rejections (1 form, 2 personal)

September: 5 submissions, 7 rejections (4 form, 3 personal)

October: 6 submissions, 4 rejections (3 form, 1 personal)

November: 3 submissions, 3 rejections (2 form, 1 personal).

I don't know if the story I'm finishing now is great, but it's a big step forward for me. Most of my stories are concerned with characters going through some period of emotional upheaval. But this one combines that emotional upheaval with a narrative arc in which stuff actually happens in the world of the story. In other words, it has a real plot.

George Orwell dispenses valuable advice, craps on politicians

Don't use the passive voice, dummy

From George Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language":

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

He gives six rules for avoiding bad writing:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

This is good advice, but Orwell's essay is really about politics and language (as the title states). He writes:

Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

This suggests that bad political writing is a deliberate act of malice rather than mere incompetence. Orwell wrote the essay in 1946 about British politics, but this point remains relevant for Americans in 2012. How much has been written about the "epistemic closure" of the republican party in the run up to the recent election? How much of that phenomenon was based on near-meaningless talk and writing from pundits and politicians?

For Orwell, clear writing is political activism.

Duotrope is a tool for hope

Readers of this blog may not be familiar with Duotrope, the online catalog of thousands of markets for fiction and non-fiction of all sizes and sorts. It has a great search function for people who know, say, that they want to sell a short story to a market that takes science fiction and pays a particular rate. The site is free, even though it is incredibly valuable.

Perhaps the best thing Duotrope does, though, is accumulate statistics on its users' submissions. It allows users to record when pieces are submitted to a market, and when and what response the market sends later. Then it displays these statistics. For instance:

When I consider submitting to a market I know how long the process will take and how likely I am to get published. This is very useful information. And, in some sense, the numbers don't matter, because Duotrope is really a tool for hope. Without it I would be sending stories blind, with no clear idea of how long I should expect to hear back. I'd rack up rejection after rejection without a sense that publication was even possible through the slush pile. But, with Duotrope, even if I know publication of one of my stories at a given market is extremely unlikely, at least I know that someone, sometime, got published following the same instructions I am.

Submissions update

If my calculations are correct, I've received 23 rejections, and currently have 6 stories noodling through the ether of the submissions process. One of those has been out for a very long time to a market that has become unresponsive, so I'll chalk that one up as a non-response rejection: that makes 24 rejections, and 5 stories currently submitted. 

Here are my submission statistics by month:

May: 3 submissions, 1 rejection (1 form)

June: 4 submissions, 3 rejections (2 form, 1 personal)

July: 4 submissions, 5 rejections (3 form, 2 personal)

August: 6 submissions, 3 rejections (1 form, 2 personal)

September: 5 submissions, 7 rejections (4 form, 3 personal)

October: 6 submissions, 4 rejections (3 form, 1 personal)

These numbers are difficult to understand. But I can say that none of the stories I submitted in May, June or July are stories I submitted in August, September, or October; I've retired my early stories and am now submitting only more recent ones. 

Some markets habitually respond with a form letter, or respond with a personal note. So far I've only had one personal response from a market that is a habitual form responder (my one close call with publication). But the personal responses I've received recently have been of a higher quality, and have all included a note encouraging me to submit more. I call that progress!

One final note. I feel good about all the stories I currently have out. None of them are poorly written, all of them have interesting ideas, and at least a few of them have compelling stories with strong characters. I like my chances with them. And even if none of them get published, it only means I need to write more and better stories, which I believe I'm capable of. Onward!

Rejection and Encouragement

I received a different sort of rejection letter last week. A typical response is a canned, impersonal email that doesn't provide the reasons my story didn't make the cut. This rejection was a personal response from a market that rarely provides personal responses. It informed me that my story had made the final round of consideration for publication and provided me with comments from the editors, both positive and negative (mostly negative).

So the result of this rejection was the same as all others: I didn't get published. But the quality of the rejection suggests that, not only did they like my story enough to talk seriously about it, but they liked my prospects for future stories enough that they threw me a bone. They thought that by sending a personal response with some encouragement in it they might compel me to submit again. It worked! I've already submitted another story to that market.

This is a little bit of a brag post, but also a marker. Until now the only people reading my stories seriously have been friends and family. This rejection suggests that other people I've never met (editors for a professional publication, no less) took my writing seriously enough to read it carefully. That feels pretty good.

What I like about fiction and history

The same things draw me to history as draw me to literature. A well written history is a great story in the same way, say, Moby Dick is. To be more specific, I think good history and good literature are exercises in empathy. Both provide windows into characters and worlds that are often difficult for me to understand or even conceive of. After reading Lincoln by David Donald or The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Leguin, I felt like I understood the minds of people who lived in different universes and had much different values than me.

There's a tendency towards presentism in reading history--that is, a tendency to evaluate the past in the context of the present--and there's a tendency to write literary characters without regard to their different settings. That is, it's much easier to write a character who thinks essentially like a modern person from a familiar location and culture than write a character from a strange time, place, and culture. Writing characters true to their time and place; evaluating historical characters in their native context: these are strains of the same problem.

When I read Alexander Stephen's Cornerstone Speech, I wonder: how could someone think that? And then I try to understand. It's easy to write off slaveholders or confederates as evil, but the challenge of history is to understand them in context. Similarly, it's easy to write off soldiers of Nazi Germany as basically evil (Saving Private Ryan does this, even though it is a great movie), but the history is obviously a lot more complex.

It's often said that science fiction is at its best when it uses its central idea to interrogate some aspect of modern culture. I believe that this is true in general for all literature, and for history as well. Eric Foner's Reconstruction describes in detail the hope and eventual betrayal of reconstruction. By the end I felt frustrated and horrified. But the book is also a warning. It suggests that the compelling central issue of reconstruction (how should the United States change to include African Americans?) is still relevant, still urgent.

Works of literature and of history represent acts of imagination by an author. These works are full of characters who have motivations and desires that are often outside my realm of experience. Each story is a ticket to another universe and other minds, and I like that.

I have a secret power: a positive attitude

I've been submitting stories for about four months, and the number of stories I consider submission-worthy has gone down over time, not up, even though I've written about three stories per month since april. This is because the stories I wrote at the beginning are almost all bad. When I wrote them I thought they were good, but, really, they're bad.

There's a positive to this. It means I've spent enough time wrestling with the mechanics of fiction writing to at least know if what I've written is bad. It means that my ability to detect my own clunky writing and poorly drawn characters is developing.

Of course, since I'm still figuring out how to write, it's likely that in another four months I'll look back at what I'm writing now and think it's bad, too. Until then, I'm predisposed to think that my new stories, which incorporate the knowledge I've gained from trying and failing with earlier stories, are good. I am not interested in wallowing in self-pity or crying over rejections, because my secret power is to have an extremely positive attitude. It's not the flashiest super power, but it's a valuable one. I want to keep writing because I'm convinced I can improve.

So far I've collected sixteen rejections, and written (roughly) ten bad stories. But I've also written five stories that read differently from the bad ones. Those better stories, even if they aren't good enough to sell, make me feel like I'm on the right track. That feels exciting.