Committing to submitting

I've been keeping up my submission commitment this week, with five new submissions.  I'm not sure whether it's good to get rejections swiftly, or after a month's wait.  I've had some of both types this week.  At least the quick ones allow you to move on fast and get the story turned around and sent out again.  Those that take a month to return somehow seem like I've wasted time getting the answer.

It helps to keep an eye on social media when you're submitting stories.  Following publishers can alert you to their open reading periods, and I came across one of these this week.  Tor.com closed submissions some months ago, and have just re-opened.  But when I was following up their submission requirements for short stories I happened to notice they were open for submissions of novellas again.  For a whole month.  But I just happen to have a novella looking for a home, so I submitted that too.

I've been spending some time recently looking at the openings of stories that have been published.  Even for subscription magazines, you can usually read the first three or four paragraphs of published stories for free.  As these are the very paragraphs that persuade an editor whether or not to buy the story, that's handy research.  

I've also been trying to take a long, hard look at my stories to work out why they don't sell.  Ànd I've detected a tendency in me to start the story too slowly, or just a shade too early.  I'm still writing myself into the tale.  Once I've got to page two or three the story's rattling along, but it needs to do that on page one as well.  So the novella, and the stories that got submitted this week, got a page one re-write to eliminate the excess story establishment before they went off. 

I'm committed to submitting my work now, and to selling it.  So if I need to keep on changing my stories I'll do it.  But it's knowing what to change that matters too, and I sense I've reached a higher level of awareness on that in the last few weeks.  I'm learning to pull back far enough to look at my stories as a stranger, to develop the lack of investment in my work that allows me to see it as an outsider who knows nothing about me, or the story.  Time will tell if it pays off.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com