New year, new resolve

 It’s traditional at New Year to set goals for the coming year, and I usually spend New Year’s Eve doing that.  I’ve never been a party animal, and these days I enjoy spending the evening in quiet contemplation, reviewing what I’ve achieved over the past year, and making plans for the next.

One of the things I will be doing next year will be strengthening my resolve to submit more.  As I mentioned last week,  I’ve been going through every short story in my files.  The aim is to end up with files full of stories which I know have been edited to within an inch of their lives, and are publication-ready.  I’m aiming to make submissions into more of a mechanical conveyer-belt process this year.  In the past I’ve let the toxic combination of rejections and the Imposter Syndrome put a halt to my submissions far too often.

What’s changed is that last year social media allowed me some glimpses behind the doors of Fortress Publishing.  Following  editors and agents on Twitter, it’s become clear from their tweets just how subjective the publishing business is.  And how much of success is achieved by pure luck.

So there are a lot of things which I have no control over.  I can’t second-guess what types of story subjects editors will like, even when I’ve read the magazines.  It always amuses me when editors tell writers to study the stories a magazine publishes to get some idea of what they want.  Such an exercise leaves me with nothing useful.

First or third person?  Both.  Past or present tense?  Both.  Is there any discernible thread of themes between the published stories?  No, there’s no connection at all.  Is there a particular voice the magazine wants?  No.  Some published stories are lyrical, others sketched out in very spare prose.

So my New Year’s Resolution is not to worry about such stuff any more.  What I’ve resolved to do is get my stock of stories as good as they can be, then just send them out. And out.  And out...

This is how it should be done, but I’ve always let rejections upset me, and often they stop me submitting for a while,  Which is where the conveyer belt idea comes in.  Once my stories are edited and placed in those files I know they are submission-ready.  So the process will become: identify open markets, find suitable story, submit story.  If it comes back rejected, cross that entry out, find another place to submit it, send it out.

The more mechanical I can make this process the more likely I am to stick to my resolve of submitting as many of those publication-ready stories as I can during this new year.