Do you consider yourself a professional writer? If writing is your real career (regardless of your day job), this is a good time to consider your path. One of the best ways to get your author name out there is by having your work published in magazines and anthologies.
A new year has begun, and open calls for spring and summer contests and anthologies will start appearing in various forums that I frequent. Finding places to submit your work can be challenging, but here are links to two groups on Facebook where publishers post open calls for short stories.
Open Submission Calls for Short Story Writers (All genres, including poetry)
Open Call: Science Fiction, Fantasy & Pulp Market (speculative fiction only)
- You must apply to be accepted into these groups and answer specific questions to prove you are legitimately seeking places to submit your work.
- Once approved, the rules of good conduct must be followed for a happy coexistence. Troublemakers and trolls are unceremoniously ejected.
Some will be open calls for anthologies that are not paid, and others will pay royalties. Be wary and carefully research the unpaid ones to ensure that the publisher is reputable and that there is a good reason why you are being asked to donate your work for no compensation.
Don’t get sucked into submitting to “charity” anthology mills, no matter how fancy their website is. These publishers give legitimate charity anthologies a bad reputation. The only cause these vanity mills support is the publisher’s pocketbook, so they are thinly disguised vanity presses.
Despite their claims, many charity anthology mills are for profit, with less than 10% of any royalties going to the specified charity and the rest remaining as the publisher’s source of income. The only volumes they sell are the ones the individual authors can pressure their friends and families to purchase.
For those authors new to the mean streets of publishing, vanity anthology mills seem good because they’re guaranteed to be published by these predators. The publishers do little to no editing. So, you must ask yourself this: do you want your author name listed on the cover and forever associated with that pile of awfulness?
We must do a little research and only submit our work to publications that respect both the work they publish and their authors.
And on that note, be sure any contracts you sign limit the use of your story to that volume only, and you retain all other rights.
- You should retain the right to republish that story after a finite amount of time has passed, usually 90 days after the anthology publication date.
SFWA has a list of predatory publishers you should avoid doing business with. They also have useful information on things that might be found in predatory contracts. You don’t need to be a member to access these. https://www.sfwa.org/
But there are legitimate calls for extremely short fiction by highly reputable publishers.
These publishers pay for the work they publish and offer reasonable contracts. The compensation will be small as the work they are buying isn’t long, but it is payment. Sometimes reputable publishers have open calls for charity anthologies and those are worth submitting to, with one or two well-known authors donating a short story and the rest will be work by up-and-coming writers.
You could be one of those up-and-coming authors–but you need to have written something that you can submit.
Writers gain proficiency in all aspects of writing fiction by writing short stories and essays. We increase our ability to tell a story with minimal exposition and learn ways to use intentional prose.
For practice, try picking a theme and thinking creatively. Think a little wide of the obvious tropes (genre-specific, commonly used plot devices and archetypes). Look for an original angle that will play well to that theme, and then go for it.
My problem is this: all my stories want to grow longer than 1,000 words. It requires weeks of effort to get my work to fit within that parameter. So, I often write practice stories, limiting myself to telling the whole story in 1000 words or less. These practice shorts serve several purposes:
- I have a finite amount of time to tell what happened, so only the most crucial information will fit within that space.
- Space is limited, so the number of characters is restricted to just the important ones.
- There is no room for anything that does not advance the plot or influence the outcome.
- The fewer the words, the more important the theme becomes. One learns how to use a theme to their advantage.
Best of all, writing a new short story each week builds a reserve, a “bank” to draw on when I need a good piece to submit to a contest. If you select a different theme for each tale, and you may have just the right story in your files to submit to a themed anthology.
When you choose to submit to an open call for themed work, your work must demonstrate your understanding of what is meant by the word “theme.” This is as important as skill as your ability to write clean and compelling prose.
When you submit your work to various places, you need to keep a record of it. Most publishers won’t accept simultaneous submissions. To avoid that, you should list:
- what was submitted,
- links or email addresses of where it was sent to,
- when submissions close,
- what date the contest ends,
To that end, I suggest you create a database for your work. I use an Excel spreadsheet that lists the title, word count, completion date, where and when I submitted the work, how much I earned for it, etc.
Below is a screenshot of what my list of submitted work looks like. I started this file in 2015 and am still using this spreadsheet to track my submissions.
I also suggest you track your productivity by keeping a daily log of your writing sessions, a writing journal. Each time you sit down to write, make a little note to yourself of how long your writing session was and your word count at the end of the session. Make a note of the time of day you were writing as well.
It’s fun to look back and see the ebb and flow of your productivity. It’s also an excellent way to determine what time of day is your most creative.
Writing is my job. I see this little productivity diary as my way of clocking in to work. It inspires me to develop a writing routine and encourages me to write at least 100 new words every day.
In extremely short fiction such as drabbles and other flash fiction, you must include only the most essential elements of a story.
As a poet, I find it far easier to tell a story in 100 words than in 1,000. That 100-word story is called a drabble and is an art form in itself.
You can find publications with open calls at Submittable. Unfortunately, that site is not as useful regarding speculative fiction as it was several years ago. However, I have seen anthology calls for spec fic there. Still, poetry collections, literary anthologies, and contests use Submittable, so that is an option. https://www.submittable.com/
Some more suggestions you could implement during the forthcoming year that fall under the heading of the business of writing are:
- Find time for education—I attend writing conferences and seminars.
- Find time for reading—I read for two hours every evening, often longer.
- Follow editors on Facebook, Instagram, and also their Twitter feeds if you are still using that platform. Consider following the magazines you submit to (or would like to send work to) on each social media platform you use.
This is something a fellow author suggested: keep a networking notebook. It should include the names of people in the industry you have spoken to, who they work for (if an agent or editor), their emails and/or business cards, etc., as you never know when that contact will come in handy.
Finally, you must invest in your career, and that does require a little money. You must develop the habit of saving for future expenses, so I suggest you set aside two dollars for every day you write. That isn’t much, but it adds up and can help pay for a seminar or a conference, or any number of expenses that will come up.
That way, you won’t be left wondering how to attend a conference and still cover your household bills.
This list of suggestions is meant for authors who intend to write professionally. It’s a business, so these little bookkeeping habits help keep me focused and on track.
In my next post, I will explore the various forms of short fiction publishers are looking for and how the market drives what they will buy.
Credits and attributions:
Coins, courtesy of Microsoft content creators, accessed December 31, 2022. Non-commercial use.
The publishing world is a rough playground. Editors for traditional publishing companies and small presses have a landslide of work to pick from and are chronically short-staffed. They can’t accept unprofessional work regardless of how good the story is.
Before you hire an editor, check their qualifications and references. 
If you’re a member of a writers’ group, you have a resource of people who will beta read for you at no cost. As a critique group member, you will read for them too.
Clearly and consistently label each chapter. Ensure the chapter numbers are in the proper sequence, and don’t skip a number. I would label my individual chapter files this way:
If you are writing in the US, you might consider investing in 
I have talked about this novella many times, as I think it is one of the most enduring stories in Western literature. The opening act of this tale is a masterclass in how to structure a story.
“Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.”
As I mentioned before, this book is only a novella. It was comprised of 66 handwritten pages. Some people think they aren’t “a real author” if they don’t write a 900-page doorstop, but Dickens says differently.
For me, revisions begin with the second draft and sometimes involve radical changes to the storyline or character arcs. I may take a manuscript through many drafts before finally getting the story right.
NEVER DELETE months of work. Don’t trash what could be the seeds of another novel. Save it in an outtakes file and use it later. I give the subfile a name like HA_outtakes_20Dec2022. That file name tells me the cut chapters were last changed on December 20, 2022.
Then, I give the second draft a new file name: Heavens_Altar_version_2, which becomes the version I work on out of the main file folder.
Either way, the characters will be profoundly changed from who they thought they were on page one, becoming who they are when the final sentence is written. The character arc is formed by their experiences.
True inspiration is not an everlasting firehose of ideas. Sometimes there are dry spells. If you take another look at the work you have cut and saved in an outtakes file, you might see it with fresh eyes. You might see the seeds of a different story, and the fire for writing will be reignited.
I understand that slight incompatibility has been resolved. In my opinion, both programs are good, and both have pros and cons.
Most word processing programs have some form of spellcheck and some minor editing assists. Spellcheck is notorious for both helping and hindering you.
You might disagree with the program’s suggestions. You, the author, have control and can disregard suggested changes if they make no sense. I regularly reject weird suggestions.
I am wary of relying on Grammarly or ProWriting Aid for anything other than alerting you to possible problems. If you blindly obey every suggestion made by editing programs, you will turn your manuscript into a mess.
Also, it never hurts to have a book of synonyms on hand. We all tend to inadvertently repeat ourselves, and the Read Aloud function will shed light on those crutch words. A dictionary of synonyms and antonyms can help us find good alternatives.
Our universe is a mysterious, stunning place. One puzzle that has occupied scientists for decades is the observable fact that our universe has more matter and energy than it should.
Since mainstream science still pooh-poohs its existence, telepathy and empathic abilities are whatever we who write books decide they are. I choose to see telepathy as an extension of the dark energy that scientists admit is all around us. Some people can tap into it, but others can’t.
If a real person had the kind of power that our fictional empaths wield, we would hope they were noble, compassionate, and above all, respectful of other people’s wish for privacy. We would want them to be principled, a person who would never rummage in people’s minds uninvited.
How will you describe it when they are healing on a cellular level? Some authors describe the act of healing as evil-looking lights changing to a healthier color. Others describe healing as angry-looking threads that must be untangled. Still other authors describe it as a feeling of evil that must be smoothed away.
As a younger reader, I gravitated to fantasy books that feature telepathy, healing, and magic. Two series with well-designed magic and empathic systems are:
Superpowers are both science and something that may seem like magic, but they are not. Think Spiderman. His abilities are conferred on him by a scientific experiment that goes wrong.
Fortunately, Irene is editing the final draft of a book I finished during lockdown. She sends me one or two chapters with notes for final revisions each evening. That makes me happy—it’s been a while since I published a book.
Agency is an integral aspect of the craft of writing. It means allowing your characters to make decisions that don’t necessarily follow the original plot outline. This gives them a chance to become real, the way 
Sometimes we can visualize a complex theme but can’t explain it. If we can’t explain it, how do we show it? For me, that is the real struggle. Grief is a common theme that can play out against any backdrop, sci-fi or reality-based, where humans interact emotionally. But it is a complex theme, and people all react differently to it.
Highlighting a strong theme is challenging, even when I begin with a plan. But once I have identified these personal themes, I’ll be able to write their stories. I’ll use actions, symbolic settings/places, 
We often see memes and quotes about writing that resonate with us. Quotes often become memes because they are true and memorable and sometimes poke fun at us.
However, obscure and pretentious prose (such as I enjoyed laying down in the preceding sentence) annoys the majority of readers. I want my work to please a reader, so I don’t indulge in ostentatious phrasing except in poetry.
Now that I have most of the foundation built for my novel (the ending is not written), I find myself going back and looking at places where I inserted notes to myself, using red fonts. These are messages like: Build tension between the factions here. Show how it affects the group’s mood. Or another note: Need an atmosphere of fear.
I know how I want the story to affect a reader’s emotions—it’s perfectly shaped in my head. The trick is making that vision come true in writing. It may take a year or more to get the mood and atmosphere to feel the way I envision it.
