As I
started this process of submitting a story a day, it came to a
question of which stories. I have written just under 200 short
stories since 2009. I have, maybe, another 100 that I wrote before
2009. When I say I have 300 short stories, I think this may be a very
conservative number. Please don’t think I’m a braggart, just because
I’ve written 300 short stories, doesn’t mean they’re any good. And of
the good ones, it doesn’t mean that they’re publishable.
How
does one figure out the stories to choose for submission? Well, it’s
not nearly as hard as you might think. I decided to forgo anything
written before 2009. Of the two hundred that remained, I decided not
to use any that had a word count over 4,200 words. Who the fuck wants
to read that many words? Not me. Then, I cut out the ones that I knew
for sure were not in good shape. Then I chose what I thought was a
good representation of what I write and who I am.
Who Was I?
What I
discovered, and alarmingly so, is that writers really do write what
they know. So many of my short stories are about chain smoking, heavy
drinking and fucking on the floor. These are things that I don’t do
any more. But I did. And now, I realize that it’s cliché. It’s all
so very cliché.
So, if
I remove all the stories about being a drunken buffoon, there wasn’t
many left over. I picked 13 stories, all between 900 words and 4,200
words. And away I went.
By the
end of the second week, I had held true to the submission a day. I
used newpages.com to research my markets. I’ve already received a few
rejections.