Posts Tagged ‘short story’

Getting The 2012 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market This Year?

July 31, 2011 by · Comments Off
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After I got serious about being a fiction writer five years ago, I always bought a copy of “The Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market” (Writers Digest Books) to find new markets for my short story fiction. Every six weeks I would spend a weekend browsing through the current N&SSWM, finding markets that fit my [...]

Keeping A Secret Writing Identity In Silicon Valley

April 28, 2011 by · Comments Off
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When I became serious about writing five years ago, I did Google search on my name before I started submitting my short stories. Lo and behold, there was another person with my name who claimed to be a writer; he hadn’t published much—if anything at all—from what I can tell. I decided to combine the [...]

Eight Is Enough Q&A Interview

March 11, 2011 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Ebooks, General, Writing 
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My Eight is Enough Q&A interview is up on Sarah-Jane Lehoux’s blog, where I answer eight questions about writing and what ebooks I got coming out in the near future. Please take a moment to read and leave a comment. The last question was fun: “This is the most important question you ever answer. Your life [...]

Does Borders Closing 200 Stores Mean The End of Writing?

February 17, 2011 by · Comments Off
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After Borders made the announcement that they were filing for bankruptcy and closing 200 stores, my father asked me if I was going to give up writing. This was a rare conversation. I come from a non-reading family where the daily newspaper and the occasional New York Times bestseller was considered to be too much [...]

The Fiction Reprint Market Is Dead!

February 10, 2011 by · 1 Comment
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The most frustrating thing about being a short story writer is that the fiction reprint market is dead. A non-fiction writer can write an article for one magazine, change the focus of the article for other magazines, and have a back catalog of articles that can be sold over and over again as reprints with [...]

A NaNoWriMo Flash Short Story Collection

November 3, 2010 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Fiction, Writing 
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Last year I had planned on taking up the 2010 National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) competition by completing the remaining 50,000 words for my second novel (1/3 done at 25,000 words) this month. I also expected revising my first novel to be done by now, which didn’t happen since editing a novel-length manuscript is really, really [...]

Letting Short Stories Lie Fallow

September 1, 2010 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Editing, Fiction, Submissions 
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This summer I took a break from the boring admin tasks of keeping 35+ short stories in circulation by letting them lay fallow after coming back with rejection slips to focus my time on revising my first novel. My tracking spreadsheet turned red over the last three months. Only a few recent short stories that [...]

Ye Olde Short Story Collection

July 21, 2010 by · Comments Off
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Last week I got notification that my short story collection wasn’t a winner in the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize Series. A disappointment but not the end of the world. I knew it was a long shot. The winner was “Destroy All Monsters” by Greg Hrbek, who has an impressive literary resume that makes me [...]

Write, Revise, Submit, Repeat

July 15, 2010 by · 6 Comments
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Note: This is a special blog post for the “My Best Advice to New Writers” blogfest organized by Peevish Penman. If you want to be a prolific short story writer (Ray Bradbury wrote 400+ short stories during his career), you need to write, revise, and submit your short story. Then write the next short story [...]

The Non-Universal RTF File Format

June 30, 2010 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Submissions, Technology 
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Over the past year or so, I have switched from submitting my short stories via snail mail to email. That decision was driven by both economics and practicality. Being without a full time non-writing job for 16 months had forced me to reduce expenses everywhere to be able to live on my unemployment benefits. Fewer [...]

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