I took a break from The Lost Colony tonight to edit two of my short stories, The Clearest Vision and Decision LZ150207. I want to send both of those out to contests in the near future, so I want to polish them up and send them out. I’m really optimistic about it.
Last year Decision LZ150207 won second place in the Mayhew contest, and I got a nice sum of money for it! Hopefully, The Clearest Vision will do the same thing this year. And I think I can still sell first publishing rights for Decision LZ150207, so I’m going to submit that to Writers of the Future and see if it goes anywhere. I really do need to shop it around and get it published; I have a bad habit of writing things and then not sending them anywhere.
I actually enjoy editing. I should qualify that, though: I like editing on the second rewrite. When it gets to the third and forth rewrite, the story seems to get really repetitious to me, and it’s not quite as interesting. Even then, it’s not like I can’t stand it, and every rewrite gets a little bit better (at least I hope it does).
I’ll workshop the second half of The Clearest Vision in the Quark writing group (I owe it to them, since a lot of them felt that the first half ended without any resolution at all). As for Decision LZ150207, I think I’ll run it by a couple of new readers, get their reactions, and judging from their reactions, either do another rewrite or send it off to Writers of the Future before the end of the quarter.
Here’s a question though: if I’m sending a short story to Writers of the Future, should I simultaneously submit it elsewhere? Usually with short stories you can get away with that, but with WoTF I don’t know…it’s pretty big.
Other than that, I’ll blog Sunday on Sanderson’s class lastThursday, when I have some free time away from homework and other such craziness. And this Monday I’m going up to Sundance with my friend Steve, so don’t worry Drek! This blog will soon get a little bit more interesting. And this time, I know how to upload photos!
I wouldn’t submit the story to two places at the same time, since if it gets accepted elsewhere, then you’re going to have an interesting time trying to let WoTF know about that. I don’t think they’d care if you weren’t going to win in the first place, but if they called you up with an offer, they’re not going to be pleased if you say the story has already been sold.
You actually really shouldn’t be sending things simultaneously in the first place, even with short stories, unless the places you’re sending to say it’s okay. The publishing world is small and you can easily develop black marks by doing that and ruin any chance at getting published.
Yeah…I guess that’s right. I definitely wouldn’t want to be in that kind of a position with WoTF. In the submission guidelines for short stories, do the publishers usually indicate whether or not they mind you sending it out to multiple places? I’ve heard that it’s ok to do that, but I’ll have to figure out exactly what’s going on.
I’d actually say go ahead with sending things to WoTF and elsewhere. On the rules of the contest, it says that the author keeps all rights. They probably just want to make sure they can get the right to publish it in their anthology. It may not be the first printing, but I don’t think they’d care too much about it.
Why not query them and find out?
And yeah, look for the words “accepts/doesn’t accept simultaneous submissions” in the submission guidelines. That’ll tell you whether or not they care if you send it to multiple places.