Just chucking it out there

 My struggle with short story submissions is about to take another turn.  It’s been about a month since I  submitted something, and the last rejection came back a couple of weeks ago.

I find the whole process of submitting my work extremely tedious.  First, there’s the selection of stories to go out.  Here’s where Imposter Syndrome regularly raises its ugly head,  There are many occasions where it whispers to me, “Not that story.  It isn’t interesting enough.  It has nothing to say.”

I tried to deal with that a few months back by going through my whole catalogue of stories.  I read through each one, and I edited some yet again.  I moved out some stories that I genuinely thought didn’t have any thing useful to say. That left me with a stack of 80 stories which had just had a fresh edit.  So now when the Imposter comes calling, whispering to me that the story isn’t good enough, I have the knowledge, the certainty gained through my recent edit, to know that it is.

That’s hurdle number one out of the way,  Hurdle number two is matching up those recently-edited stories with potential markets.  That sound easy, but it’s actually very tedious.

First I look at what a magazine wants, and I find what I think is the perfect story for them.  Then I turn to my file of previous submissions for that story.  In many cases, I find that I’ve already submitted that perfect story to that market two years ago, so the search has to start again.

Sometimes I’ll find the perfect story and find that the word count is wrong.  The magazine wants 1,000 words and the perfect fit for the magazine is a story 7,000 words long,  That’s a particular problem for me with short shorts.  I write very few of those, and the ones that are okay have already done the round of the short-short markets.

So maybe I’ve found a story of the right length and subject for a magazine.  Then I have to check the file format.  Can it go as a docx file, or does it need saving as an rtf or some other format?  There are even mags who specify one full stop after sentences instead of two.  Some magazines have such finicky formatting requirements for stories that I can’t be bothered to put in the work to alter my file in a way which I’ll never use again.

So yes, submitting is fraught,  The next step is working out whether the submission needs to go via email or an online form,  So my list of stories to be submitted is annotated with strange letters.  ‘O’ for online submission, ‘E’ for email gets added next to the entry.  Then there’s ‘T’ , to remind me that many magazines only open for submissions on certain days,

Having spent the time explaining this, I think I can now understand why submitting feels so bloody tedious.