Holy holiday craziness! I love this time of year but it sure gets busy. I’ve been slacking on my blogging duties a little (nothing new) but I do have a few announcements for you.
The Good
I love The Onion. You know The Onion, right? The satirical news…um…paper.
Can we call things “newspapers” anymore? They hardly exist. Newspapers are kind
of relics, like speak-and-spells or centrist republicans.
Anyway, I’ve always loved The Onion and recently I had several ideas
for fake news stories that I thought would be perfect for them. One problem
though, they don’t take submissions! They have staff writers that come up with
all of their content. That’s both impressive (the same people come up with such
original humor day after day) and depressing (because I’m not one of them).
Rather than setting my ideas aside I looked around and found a few
Onion-like satirical online news sources that do accept submissions. Over the
last week I’ve had 3 stories published on Glossy News.
P.S. - If you’ve never written satire you should give it a try. It’s a
ton of fun. I try to keep my stories funny but inoffensive. That having been said, as you can tell from
the comments on the Palin story, if you touch on politics or religion, chances
are pretty good that you’re going to offend someone. I just try not to be mean
about it (note: the caption and picture on the Palin story are a little mean
but those were contributed by the editor, not me).
The Bad
Rejection letters aren’t good. No matter how much we butter them up as
learning experiences or chances to grow, rejection letters suck. That’s why
this bit of news is under the “Bad” category. However, some rejection letters
are better than others and some are freaking amazing. I recently had a short story
rejected by the online science fiction magazine Bewildering Stories. The
wonderful folks at BS (nice abbreviation) not only take the time and effort to
have a team of reviewers look at every story that comes in, they go above and
beyond to actually tell you what they think! Instead of a form “this story isn’t
right for us” you get a whole personalized email telling you exactly why your
story was rejected and what they think might improve it. Submit your stuff to
them. They’re awesome.
The Ugly
While getting a rejection letter is bad, getting no response is worse. I realize that some agents and publishers don't respond to most queries/submittals but they usually warn authors on their website. I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about a market that promises a response but don't come through. For example, I submitted a science fiction short story (probably the best thing I've ever written) to the fledgling online magazine Specutopia in mid October.
Like I do with every submission, I played the waiting game. I tried not to think too much about how many days it had been in review. I got excited when the story wasn't rejected in the average response time. I got worried when the response time went past the average, then double, but I waited to contact the editor until the minimum 60 days specified on the website. In the meantime their website stopped working altogether. At 60 days I queried and after a week without a response I withdrew the story.
I'm sure Sepcutopia wasn't planning on going out of business or falling into a black hole or whatever happened to them. I'm not mad at them for that. What butters my bread is the lack of communication. A one sentence email or a brief announcement on their website would have saved me weeks of stress and allowed me to sent that story, my favorite story, somewhere else. So screw you Specutopia. I'm glad you're dead.
The Good - Part 2
I almost forgot. I’m scheduled to have my science fiction short story “Lightning
Flashed” (which is the same story that was rejected by Bewildering Stories) in the 4th issue of Dark Edifice in early February! Those of you that have been
following my antics for a while may have already read this story when it was
published on OnFictionWriting. It may not be a new story but it’s still cool to get it
out there for new readers. I’ll let everyone know when it’s out.
Happy New Year!
