A Week of Writing: 6/15/20 to 6/21/20

Hey, all, here’s my weekly writing report card.

Words to Write By

This week’s quote is from Julie Andrews.

“Perseverance is failing 19 times and succeeding the 20th.”

—Julie Andrews

Julie Andrews may not have been talking about writing, but the sentiment certainly applies. Writing, especially publishing, is a long string of failures broken by occasional successes. I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. I’m generally upbeat about the trials and tribulations involved with writing, but the fact remains if you want to write (and publish), you need get well acquainted with failure and more importantly, perseverance. I’ve had stories rejected fifteen times and then published on the sixteenth. I have completed one trunk novel, and for all I know I may be working on another. The point is that if it takes me twenty tries to publish a story or two trunk novels before I sell the third one, I’ll keep going. Because, yeah, you might fail the first nineteen times, but if you’re doing it right, each of those nineteen tries taught you something that improves your chances of succeeding on the twentieth.

The Novel

I made good progress, writing just under 8,200 words and pushing the manuscript up to over 63,000 words. I think I may have done some of the best writing in the book last week. I had three really good days, where the words flowed, and I was happy with what I ended up with. It was all emotionally charged character stuff, and I think the pain, regret, and loss I was trying to convey came through loud and clear. I’m heading into the middle of the third act, and things are likely going to develop quickly. I’m still targeting 90,000 words total, and as I get closer to the end of the story that feels less like an arbitrary number and more like the book’s natural length.

Short Story Submissions

Not a stellar week for submissions but certainly better than the week before.

• Submissions Sent: 2
• Rejections: 0
• Acceptances: 0
• Publications: 0
• Shortlist: 0

Just two submissions last week, which gives me forty-six for the year. I want to hit fifty by the end of the month. Other than the two submissions, things were pretty quiet. No rejections, no acceptances, no publications. I expect news on some of my pending submissions soon. Some of those will certainly be rejections, and the silver lining there is it’ll give me more stories to submit. 🙂

Market Spotlight

This week, I want to talk about a new pro sci-fi market called Dark Matter Magazine. Sure, I’m a little biased since they recently accepted one of my stories, but they really are an exciting new addition to the industry, and everything I’ve seen thus far says they’re gonna be around for the long haul.

Here are some of the highlights from their submission guidelines. They are currently open to submissions, by the way.

• Science fiction only, but they accept a wide range of sub-genres.
• Stories between 1,000 and 5,000 words.
• Simultaneous submissions okay.
• No reprints.
• Payment is .08/word.

Having received and signed the contract for my story, I can say Dark Matter’s contract is exactly what you want to see as an author, and it conforms to accepted industry standards as outlined in places like the SFWA model magazine contract. I’m also a big fan of the way they’ve been marketing on their social media platforms. It’s the kind of thing that’s immensely helpful to author and publisher.

Goals

Here are my writing goals for this week.

• Write another 8,000 to 10,000 words on the novel.
• Send at least two short story submissions.
• Finish a new story I started last week.

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That was my week. How was yours?