Fear and the Art of Submitting Short Fiction

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Back when I taught short story writing, people would often ask the trick for getting past the inevitable flow or rejections. My answer was always simple: it comes down to volume.

When you have a single short story that you’re sending out, every rejection feels like you’ve been thwarted. When you’re sending out a dozen stories, with more projects in the hopper, a rejection usually means oh, thank the gods, that’s where X goes next.

The sting of rejection really boils down to fear—and often the social fear of something secret and hidden about yourself being revealed and found wanting—and that fear magnifies in relation to the perceived importance. If you’ve spent your life hungry to be a writer, immersed in a cultural narrative that says successful writers are either geniuses or hacks, then that first work holds a lot of weight and expectations.

It’s the point where you prove you’ve got what it takes to be the kind of writer you want to be, and those first rejections sting harder because you’ve mustered up your courage to defy society’s messaging that creating art is not for you in order to get the submission out there, and now you’re forced to wonder if everybody was right.

So, your first story or novel feels important, while your fiftieth (if you’re lucky) feels like another day at the office. Even if you still get that flutter of fear that someone will turn and say how dare you call yourself a writer, there’s a backlog of work and effort you can point to and say, I dare because of all that.

The fear never goes away. Writing often feels like a career where you can’t make mistakes, and where letting poor work out into the world is a shortcut to tanking your entire career.

To which I say: Fuck that. 

Writing careers are crazy resilient—folks get torn down for plagiarism scandals or creating fictional stories that are fraudulently sold as autobiography, and they still rebuild their writing careers and go on to success. Bad books get released all the time, and people still rehab and rebuild. They do it because they keep writing, keep submitting, and keep searching for writing work. 

Fuck fear. Do the work. Write more stories.

Does the fear ever leave you entirely? I’m not sure. I do know that I’m writing this post as a pep-talk to myself, finishing up a handful of new short story projects and deciding what’s next for them. And I can feel the familiar fear again, my subconscious throwing what-if designed to protect me from the sting of rejection: what if this story bombs? What if the editors all say no? What if I’ve lost the knack that got me through five novellas, fifty-odd short stories, three collections, and countless years of blogging, writing courses, teaching, and starting a small press? What if you publish it yourself, and nobody ever buys a copy?

(The answers to those questions: then write a different story; then send them a different story, dumbass; then keep writing until the knack comes back; then the blurb and cover are still leads that will pull people towards older work, and it will go in a collection eventually and make money there. Notice how volume lies at the heart of all those answers?)

My best guess is the fear is still there, waiting to come out. Inducing hesitation when the process that’s always worked best for me is damning the torpedos, sending things out, and getting on with the next story. Being willing to fuck up, because there’s always another story coming and that might be the place where I finally get it right. 

Because, at the heart of it all, I know the answer to fear is volume. Making each individual story much less important in the overall narrative of my career. Writing enough that people forget the awful stuff and focus on the stories that really worked. 

Three Digit Thinking

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Brain Jar Press recently announced our sixth Writer Chap, Headstrong Girl from the powerhouse of Australian genre, Kim Wilkins/Kimberly Freeman. It brings a close to season one, which was a test case for what seemed like an improbable and weird idea back in the middle of 20202.

But this isn’t a pitch for the new Writer Chap, or even the Season One subscription/bundle that gets you all six at a discount. It’s a post where I talk about my favourite bit of cover design going up on the top left corner of every Writer Chap.

I chose a very specific numbering convention, three digits for every book even though the first two are 00. Faintly ludicrous at these early stages, when a single digit is all we’re really working with, but that 00 is a subtle statement of intent that we’ll get to three digits one day. That I built the writer chaps concept with a long-term strategy in mind, and Brain Jar’s dedication to archiving the best writing about writing in Australian SF isn’t just about the here and now.

One of the early lessons you learn in publishing is this: the first book in your print run is expensive as hell, but every subsequent book gets cheaper. Set-up and development costs are relatively consistent from book to book, but quantity both makes books cheaper to print and divides your initial cost into smaller and smaller chunks of the whole. 

But here’s another less: the value of your books also goes up the more books you produce, as the weight of repetition carves out a brand, consolidates expectations around the work, and generates new leads that bring people into the backlist. 

Every new Writer Chap thus far has seen a percentage of new readers go back and buy another instalment, and many have jumped straight into the six-book subscription. Every book has a little reminder that there’s more just like it out there, and the series is driven by a  mission as much as commercial concerns.

Plus, the slow accumulation of symbolic value makes the series more attractive to future authors (there is one chapbook in season 1 where the author went from an unsure ‘I don’t really have time’ to ‘here’s my manuscript’ in the space of 48 hours, largely because it was a hell of a list of names to be included alongside). Plus, what seems like a weird pitch (“short chapbooks of writerly non-fiction, released like comic books”) becomes a little clearer with concrete examples.  

It’s notable that all of this was nearly impossible to pull off twenty years ago, when the realities of the marketplace increased the risk of thinking this long-term and made it nearly impossible to keep a three-digit backlist accessible. 

But the challenge when kicking off Brian Jar 2.0 was building a strategy based on the publishing landscape I’m working in now, rather than cleaving to conventional wisdom predicated on the realities of small press and traditional publishing that’s now decades out of date.  

Brain Jar may not make it to 120 Writer Chaps, but there’s definitely six books in the series and we’ve already contracted another six to make up Season Two. Not long after this blog posts, I’m off to do cover design, copy edits, and sales pitches for the next few books on the docket. 

And, really, once you divorce publishing from the velocity model, the only reason to stop is because you decide its time to stop. 

A quick behind-the-scenes note: You may notice there’s a bit of a backlist-driven theme going on in the next couple of weeks. That’s because I’m off to deliver a workshop on making good use of your backlist at the Romance Writers of Australia conference in December, and I’m writing the occaisonal blog post to clarify my thinking and make sure I’ve got language in place to field questions folks may ask (much the same reason my peak blogging-about-writing period coincided with working for Queensland Writers Centre)

While I’ve got a rough plan in place, I’m also taking requests! Anything you’d like to know about Brain Jar’s backlist-driven strategy? Any details you’d like to see covered in a workshop about making good use of your old work?

I’ll likely record a version of the workshop as a bonus for Patreons after it’s fully drafted, so give me a yell if there’s anything that might be useful to cover. 

November Process Experiment: VE Schwab’s Calendar approach

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November Process Experiment: VE Schwab’s Calendar approach

Anyone who has followed my blog, newsletter, or Patreon for longer than a minute knows my love of tracking work in a physical, visual form. Usually I post about it in the form of white board set-ups or bullet journal hacks, but for November I’m doing a thirty-day experiment with an old-fashioned calendar on the wall. 

This was inspired by VE Schwab’s Calendar trick for increasing writing word count, whereby she gives herself a star sticker for every thousand words she produces in a day (and has a bunch of celebratory options for events like finishing a book). It sounded like a nifty thing to try, but I was talking myself out of it because calendars are a year-long investment and a print-out of the monthly grid sans art and design would not tap into the aesthetic pleasure that’s part of making this work.

I spent a few days tracking things in my bullet journal instead, but I couldn’t quite shake the idea of the calendar being a more useful way to present things. First, because my life involves more stuff than it has for the past few years. Fortnightly gaming sessions are becoming a thing again, and working for the Writers Festival obligates me to be a little more involved in Brisbane literary culture than I have been for a few years. Putting something on a wall that my beloved could check at a glance, and see when i was out for an evening, meant I didn’t have to remember to do a series of reminders (of course, we’re both out of the habit of checking for such things…)

Then I remembered that the incredible Kathleen Jennings does a monthly calender page full of lovely art for her Patrons, which meant I could a) go visual now, and b) had a good reason to throw a little support at a friend’s Patreon, which was a win-win combination.

And, being me, I ended up doing a little hack to apply this method to multiple parts of my life. 

The white spot at the top of each day is there for tracking events and commitments, like launches and gaming and, I don’t know, finishing a project. 

The yellow band is for tracking my writing success. Schwab uses stars to track a thousand words of productivity, trying to fill a day with as many stars as possible, but that’s not feasible for me. Instead, my stars represent the production of 750 words (or three handwritten pages) rather than a thousand, because that’s about what I can fit into a morning writing stint (and, at least one day on the above, I turned a not-so-good morning write into a pretty good writing day by coming back to do a final page in the evening, then jamming out another two more).

The pink band represents Freelancing and Brain Jar work (and is missing the fact a few things I did this week, because I wasn’t tracking them until this calendar went up). Today’s big victory was breaking the spine of the major freelance gig still on my plate, which means I can clear it by next weekend (and, with luck, put in the invoice!). 

That happy Edits! represents working my way through two pages of proofing notes, many of which were…well, not formatted as well as they could have been for ease of implementation. Such are the challenges of working on a project that’s edited by a committee, with no formal agreement or consistency in how proofing notes appear. My morning was spent snarling at the choice to put the chapter four edits after the chapter eleven edits, all of them organised in such a way that I couldn’t do a quick chronological sort.

The Yellow band at the bottom represents my engagement with the outside world through Patreon, Blogging, and Newsletters. I’m still figuring out how to track productivity there — I’m far less focused on word count in that arena, and far more focused on getting content done because it’s so short form. I suspect I’ll just flag that something has gone out, and take comfort in something approaching a routine forming.

It kinda works already, given that I hadn’t planned on writing a post today, but seeing that blank spot on Saturday irked me enough that I wanted to fill it in 🙂

I do have a whiteboard set-up as well, tracking the five big things I want to achieve for Brain Jar this week. Things are chaotic at the moment, with Sarah and I still figuring out whose doing what, and the best way to get Sarah up to speed on all the moving parts. One of the things I’m noticing is how complicated certain routine activities are when trying to explain them to someone else, even if they’re a zombie-walk job for me most days. 

Incidentally, my fiction project du jour is a short novella I wanted to pull together for a pre-made cover I did prior to landing the BWF job. It was one of my favourite designs of that brief flirtation with design freelancing, and the day job means I no longer need to rely on selling those covers to pay my bills, so I figured I’d reclaim it as an Eclectic Projects story. 

I expect I’ll be throwing up a few rough drafts and process notes as the month progresses 🙂