During my down time on vacation, I have fully jumped into writing short stories and exploring how to find places to submit my stories. It’s funny, I’ve always liked fantasy and all thinks creepy and spooky. I thought that as I learned to paint and draw that I would be able to indulge in that side of my creativity, but my artwork has mostly been representational and fairly straightforward. I suppose that is because I am still learning the “grammar” and foundations of art, and so I’m not yet comfortable enough to break the rules and explore and express my imagination fully through art.
With writing though, I have been reading and editing for more than 20 years. I fully grasp grammar and how to communicate clearly. Now, I am learning how to tell an engaging story, how to find that hook and how to have the appropriate motivation and reason for being for my characters. I am also learning the basics of submission. What does simultaneous submission mean, for example? Well, it means submitting a single work to multiple publishing outlets. Some publications don’t mind simultaneous submission, but many others absolutely don’t want you to submit to more than one place. I definitely understand the latter perspective, but it’s quite annoying when review times for each publication can sometimes take months. I’ve read some bloggers that say that they ignore that dictate (how would they know what places you’ve submitted to), but then you can of course get into a sticky situation if you get accepted by multiple places -- which would be quite the luxury.
I’m a rule follower, so I will just bide my time (I’ve now submitted two different stories to two different places) and get started on another story.
The other thing that I have learned about the submission process for short stories is that many publications will want you to submit your manuscript in a standard format. I have followed the modern Shunn formatting guidance, which outlines the font, font size, paragraph formatting, line spacing, etc., that you should use. Of course, read the submission guidelines -- some may request a different format, some may request that you paste the text directly in the email, some may require a standard attachment format, and still others have their own specific submission system requiring that you fill out a specific form. These are the absolute basics of submission. If you ignore these guidelines, your submission will often be automatically rejected.
Finally, but most importantly, make sure that you understand the outlets that you are submitting to. I have submitted two pieces to horror podcasts. These podcasts are looking for horror, of course, and they are looking for stories that can be easily produced in an audio format. One of the sites (Creepypod) wants stories that have one narrator. The NoSleep podcast prefers stories that are told from the first-person point of view. Other magazines and sites will outline their hard sells (those topics that they’ve seen enough of and even though your version is the very best example of that overdone topic, no, really, you’re going to have an uphill slog to gain acceptance). Make sure you’re submitting your stories on a particular topic or of a specific genre to the correct outlets.
This whole learning process about submitting short stories has been quite fun, and it has inspired me to keep writing and creating more short stories for submission.
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