Five Minute Rant

[george nik.]

Rant! Rant! Rant! IGMS just rejected my time travel story.

And an extra Rant! They rejected it on a Saturday. Why does that make it worse? Because Saturday is my deadline day: all stories must be out to markets on Saturday. So now I have to run a search I didn't expect.

Rant! Rant! Rant!

Oh, well, off to Duotrope!

Why only on a Saturday? My deadline is that all stories must be out to markets every day (except in special cases that for one reason or another I have modifications to make, so they can have a few days off). When I get a rejection I usually submit immediately and then report the rejection to Duotrope and then report the submission to Duotrope. It seems to be the most efficient way to go about it.

[Martin L. Shoemaker]

Why only on a Saturday? My deadline is that all stories must be out to markets every day (except in special cases that for one reason or another I have modifications to make, so they can have a few days off). When I get a rejection I usually submit immediately and then report the rejection to Duotrope and then report the submission to Duotrope. It seems to be the most efficient way to go about it.

In any process, I believe you need a regular means of measuring how close you are to your plan. That means you need a periodic meaurement or assessment.

I do TRY to get the story right back out there immediately; but maybe the rejection comes in during the work day, and I can't run a search right then. Or maybe a hundred other things might happen that could delay me from running a search right away. So when I set up my goals for the year, I set Saturday as my "meter day", the day when I check how I'm doing. If all stories are out to markets on Saturday, then I'm on track; but if any are sitting around idle, I'm falling behind on that goal.

I instituted this policy late in 2010 after reading Dean's post on setting attainable, measurable goals. It was actually part of my goals for 2011; but the last day of 2010 was a Saturday, and it happened that one of my stories got a rejection from Asimov's that very day. So I said, "Oh, heck, it's New Year's Eve, I might as well start the goal now. Where can I send this story today? Oh, hey, Writers of the Future... Hey, their deadline is today, and my deadline is today. I hate to waste a good coincidence. I'll send it there, find out what this contest is all about."

And Jerrry Pournelle loooooved that story! So I'm now irrationally attached to my Saturday deadlines. They served me well in that case, at least!

[LDWriter2]

I'm not sure about certain days of the week, like Saturday, but there are specific dates I feel a rejection worse on. Probably more mental and/or emotional but there it is.

Louis

[WriteToLive]

Rant Rant Rant! Penumbra rejected my one story which I had been waiting on for so long.

Oh well, sounds like it'll end up being my Q3 entry.

Off to the presses.

[Jennifer Hicks]

Bull Spec has had one of my stories since Oct. 6. Today I got an e-mail -- very apologetic -- from the editor. He said he had misplaced a lot of submissions from early October when the magazine switched over to a new submissions system but that the stories had been found and would now be read. A half-hour later, after 233 days of waiting, during which no one at Bull Spec apparently even realized my story existed, I received a form rejection. Rant, rant, rant ...

[Martin L. Shoemaker]

Bull Spec has had one of my stories since Oct. 6. Today I got an e-mail -- very apologetic -- from the editor. He said he had misplaced a lot of submissions from early October when the magazine switched over to a new submissions system but that the stories had been found and would now be read. A half-hour later, after 233 days of waiting, during which no one at Bull Spec apparently even realized my story existed, I received a form rejection. Rant, rant, rant ...

OWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!! Now THAT deserves a rant!

[ThomasKCarpenter]

Bull Spec has had one of my stories since Oct. 6. Today I got an e-mail -- very apologetic -- from the editor. He said he had misplaced a lot of submissions from early October when the magazine switched over to a new submissions system but that the stories had been found and would now be read. A half-hour later, after 233 days of waiting, during which no one at Bull Spec apparently even realized my story existed, I received a form rejection. Rant, rant, rant ...

OWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!! Now THAT deserves a rant!

Funny. I did too. The notification that I had sent them a story, but not a rejection. But I had just sent them a query this morning. Weird timing.

And bummer for the rejection.

[Jennifer Hicks]

I sent them a query about a month ago and never heard anything until today. Considering the mess this has turned out to be, I'm not sure whether I'll be submitting there again. We'll see.

[ThomasKCarpenter]

I sent them a query about a month ago and never heard anything until today. Considering the mess this has turned out to be, I'm not sure whether I'll be submitting there again. We'll see.

Got a rejection a few hours later. Yeah, I'm skeptical about Bull Spec now. A story I sent this summer was supposedly "eaten by a falty harddrive" and I didn't get an answer for about ten months. I've heard complaints from other people as well about them. They're not usually open for submissions anyway, so not much to worry about. Hopefully they pull it together in the future. Hate to see any markets close or have problems.

[WriteToLive]

I've been finding most of the markets which qualify you and you can submit to online are often closed (Cemetary, BullSpec, etc.). Especially after you get 30+ stories out at market.

[LDWriter2]

Hopefully there's only one of these that show up.

I think I tried Bullspec once. Didn't seem to have any problems--took a while, if it's the one I'm thinking of, but some others online do also so that didn't bother me too much.


But in the last couple of weeks got some rejections back with my best writing.

What might be worse are the comments on a couple of stories. I post at Universe Annex submission forum. They crit the stories that are posted there and give writers a chance to try again and again and again. My latest story was full of nitpicks and such. There is no blankly blank way it should have been. It was a story I received a HM on at WotF, looked over by a few people, once I got the HM I went over it a bit and spell checked it with two spellcheckers, a proofreader and a grammar check. I felt like I was cursed or something. As I said there is no way it should have had tons of typos, wrong tenses and such. Ugh Ugh and Ugh...

And there's another story on another forum which evidently came out the same. That one only had one spell checker and proofreader and me but still it should have been a lot cleaner than it was. To top it off that story is going be on the bottom of a challenge...again. Written a little fast but so much for what I've learned about writing in the last few weeks.


That was probably more than five minutes but thanks.

[Martin L. Shoemaker]

What might be worse are the comments on a couple of stories. I post at Universe Annex submission forum. They crit the stories that are posted there and give writers a chance to try again and again and again. My latest story was full of nitpicks and such. There is no blankly blank way it should have been. It was a story I received a HM on at WotF, looked over by a few people, once I got the HM I went over it a bit and spell checked it with two spellcheckers, a proofreader and a grammar check. I felt like I was cursed or something. As I said there is no way it should have had tons of typos, wrong tenses and such. Ugh Ugh and Ugh...

Now I feel guilty, 'cuz I think I prompted that rant. I was the one who told you I had a lot of nits to pick, but not enough time to pick them in. (Besides my very great weekend, work has been hell, and Mom's health has taken a downturn.) I still will if you're interested. I liked the story in large parts, and I pointed out the few weaknesses that I saw. But I didn't pick the nits at the time. Besides lack of time, some people don't want line edits, they only want the larger issues. I've had some people even get annoyed when I line edit, because they say, "Oh, I can clean that up any time. Tell me how the story and the characters work for you, not what was misspelled." So I'm never sure how to approach a crit.

I would have to reread the story now to remember quite how much it needed line editing. I just remember that there seemed like a lot of them needed, and I had to turn off that part of the brain to hear the enjoy-the-story part of my brain.

[Rebecca Birch]

What might be worse are the comments on a couple of stories. I post at Universe Annex submission forum. They crit the stories that are posted there and give writers a chance to try again and again and again. My latest story was full of nitpicks and such. There is no blankly blank way it should have been. It was a story I received a HM on at WotF, looked over by a few people, once I got the HM I went over it a bit and spell checked it with two spellcheckers, a proofreader and a grammar check. I felt like I was cursed or something. As I said there is no way it should have had tons of typos, wrong tenses and such. Ugh Ugh and Ugh...

The thing that I find helps me most with this is either reading it out loud or, sometimes better, having the computer read it back to me. My eyes will often read what I intended to write, and sometimes readers will see what was clearly the intent of the author to write, but if I close my eyes and listen to that mechanical voice reading to me, I am much more likely to notice stray missing words or typos or if my fingers wrote one thing while I was thinking another. It's been a really nice trick since I started using it.

[LDWriter2]

Shoemaker:
Are we talking about the Universe Annex stories? My quote you use is from that part of my post. I just checked and unless you go by another screen name there I didn't see a post form you on the story I'm referencing.

But most of the damage was done by Edith, DrCrispy and Mishoe even though Crispy did the least of the three.


But from the hatrake stories it wasn't that type of challenge to produce a full line edit even though one person did it anyway. So I wasn't expecting a crit that through. And I still say it shouldn't have been that bad. Of course evidently some of the comments deal with the writing which doesn't improve my mood. But that's my fault not the person who sees the bad or wrong writing.

[LDWriter2]

Thanks for the suggestion Rebecca. I may have to try it, nothing else has worked. Well, one story had hardly any nitpicks but when I tried to copy what I did for that story it left a bunch of stuff in the next story. I look like I have even tried to proofread it when I worked over time on it. Of course part of that could very well be that there are so many nitpicks and bad writing sections to begin with that it would be hard to find half of them.

[Martin L. Shoemaker]

Shoemaker:
Are we talking about the Universe Annex stories? My quote you use is from that part of my post. I just checked and unless you go by another screen name there I didn't see a post form you on the story I'm referencing.

But most of the damage was done by Edith, DrCrispy and Mishoe even though Crispy did the least of the three.

It's not Mishoe; it's MLShoe, as in Martin L. Shoemaker. It's my usual nickname on boards that don't encourage full names. And I'm sorry if it came across as damage. There was a lot I liked there.

[Martin L. Shoemaker]

Of course evidently some of the comments deal with the writing which doesn't improve my mood. But that's my fault not the person who sees the bad or wrong writing.

That's OK. That's what Five Minute Rant is for: irrationally complaining about things that bug us but are beyond our control. Sometimes they're our own mistakes. Sometimes they're decisions others make and we can't influence. This thread is about admitting that sometimes we're annoyed. Then we get over it, and we move on.

[Strycher]

What might be worse are the comments on a couple of stories. I post at Universe Annex submission forum. They crit the stories that are posted there and give writers a chance to try again and again and again. My latest story was full of nitpicks and such. There is no blankly blank way it should have been. It was a story I received a HM on at WotF, looked over by a few people, once I got the HM I went over it a bit and spell checked it with two spellcheckers, a proofreader and a grammar check. I felt like I was cursed or something. As I said there is no way it should have had tons of typos, wrong tenses and such. Ugh Ugh and Ugh...

The thing that I find helps me most with this is either reading it out loud or, sometimes better, having the computer read it back to me. My eyes will often read what I intended to write, and sometimes readers will see what was clearly the intent of the author to write, but if I close my eyes and listen to that mechanical voice reading to me, I am much more likely to notice stray missing words or typos or if my fingers wrote one thing while I was thinking another. It's been a really nice trick since I started using it.

I hadn't thought of that. That's a really good idea. I found that printing it out and marking it up with a pen helps. Though (see below) there are still some errors you'll never notice.

Shoemaker:
But from the hatrake stories it wasn't that type of challenge to produce a full line edit even though one person did it anyway.

You're never going to catch everything. Even published works still have typos.

With my last two stories I had:

-11 people read before the 12th person noticed I had typed "marital" and meant "martial"

-6 people read before someone noticed an affect/effect confusion (and by "people" I mean "writers" who should be looking for that kind of thing)

I wouldn't worry about it too much, or take it too personally. Typos happen.

Looking at the updated forum posts with the crits added to the end of the 13 lines, I don't see anyone doing full-on line edits, but maybe you got an e-mail or something? It's also possible that having a a couple dozen strangers review two of your stories on different forums is stressful. Don't get discouraged!

And what kind of credentials do these critiquers have anyway? I bet they're all hacks. Especially this MLShoe character and particularly the person who sent in your line edits at the Hatrack challenge.

For what it's worth, I haven't noticed anyone who needs to abandon their writing career. Ten bucks says you're doing better than it feels like you're doing right now, under a barrage of crits.

As Martin pointed out you ought to be allowed to rant on the Rant thread unfettered, so I'll leave you alone now.

[Dustin Adams]

Louis, the Hatrack contest is anon, so they weren't critting you, just the story. Maybe they did that with everyone?
I've got my guess as to what story is yours and if I'm right you're in the opposite group as I. Thus I don't know if someone did line edits on all seven or not.

[Strycher]

. . . if I'm right you're in the opposite group as I. Thus I don't know if someone did line edits on all seven or not.

But we've got til next week. Surely not all the crits are in already ( . . . Because I haven't turned mine in yet. >.>). And are we supposed to get e-mailed the crits back? I thought they were all going to be posted online?

But, yes, I agree with Dustin. I imagine that it wasn't just your story. I be that person did the same thing to all the stories they critted. And I'm sure they all needed line edits--because no one's got a perfect story.

[LDWriter2]

It's not Mishoe; it's MLShoe, as in Martin L. Shoemaker. It's my usual nickname on boards that don't encourage full names. And I'm sorry if it came across as damage. There was a lot I liked there.

Oops, But I should say that the damage was done to my mood at the moment. Sometimes it doesn't really bother me but I expected that one to be near perfect when it came to the lack of nitpicks. I knew the writing needed help or it would have done better than a HM. It's a continual frustration that I can't clean up my stories better than that. Plus this time my mood about my writing was bad anyway. That isn't your fault.

[LDWriter2]

You're never going to catch everything. Even published works still have typos.

With my last two stories I had:

-11 people read before the 12th person noticed I had typed "marital" and meant "martial"

-6 people read before someone noticed an affect/effect confusion (and by "people" I mean "writers" who should be looking for that kind of thing)

I wouldn't worry about it too much, or take it too personally. Typos happen.

Looking at the updated forum posts with the crits added to the end of the 13 lines, I don't see anyone doing full-on line edits, but maybe you got an e-mail or something? It's also possible that having a a couple dozen strangers review two of your stories on different forums is stressful. Don't get discouraged!

And what kind of credentials do these critiquers have anyway? I bet they're all hacks. Especially this MLShoe character and particularly the person who sent in your line edits at the Hatrack challenge.

For what it's worth, I haven't noticed anyone who needs to abandon their writing career. Ten bucks says you're doing better than it feels like you're doing right now, under a barrage of crits.

As Martin pointed out you ought to be allowed to rant on the Rant thread unfettered, so I'll leave you alone now.

I wouldn't care about a couple of typos, but it's like 10-15 lines of various types of mistakes. And having someone tell me I need to proofread my story before posting it. I did.

As to the line edits I don't know who but someone did do it for all seven stories, they were sent out via E-mail. It was a lot of work by someone and even though it frustrated me, I appreciated it.

[Martin L. Shoemaker]

I wouldn't care about a couple of typos, but it's like 10-15 lines of various types of mistakes. And having someone tell me I need to proofread my story before posting it. I did.

There's a principle I teach in my UML classes: your REAL design isn't on your page, it's in your head; so when you look at the page, you actually see what's in your head, what you meant. So even when you're trying hard not to, you fill in the gaps that are on the page. And then here I come: I don't have the design in my head; I just have your page, and I'm trying to understand it well enough to stick it into my head. So by approaching it from a position of ignorance, I see the holes that aren't there in the design in your head.

Writing and proofreading are like that: you see the story that's in your head, not the story that's on the page. I see only the page. This is something we all suffer from to one degree or another. We always see the other person's errors more easily than our own.

I suggest, though, that whoever's reading your work for you isn't doing you any favors. I don't want to criticize someone who's probably well-meaning and trying hard, but they're missing some pretty obvious stuff. They don't have the "story in my head" excuse, so they're missing stuff that they really shouldn't. You may want to cultivate some new First Readers, ones who aren't afraid to nitpick and who know how to do it well. Some things are really style issues: there are places I suggested you break up some sentences or combine some others, and those might be seen merely as differences of style (even though Evil Martin is in the back of my head muttering, "But I'm right! I'm right! I'm right!"). But some of the extra words or missing words are things you want a proofreader to catch.

[Isto]

My son, who is an excellent fiction prof, just told me that the ending to my Q3 story would make a dynamite beginning. Problem is.... he's right.

[Martin L. Shoemaker]

My son, who is an excellent fiction prof, just told me that the ending to my Q3 story would make a dynamite beginning. Problem is.... he's right.

But that doesn't necessarily mean the story doesn't stand on its own as well. Did he say anything there?

[Martin L. Shoemaker]

Rant! Rant! Rant!

Daily Science Fiction just rejected my high fantasy piece. Grrr...

Rant! Rant! Rant!

OK, off to Duotrope!

[Strycher]

Rant! Rant! Rant!

Daily Science Fiction just rejected my high fantasy piece. Grrr...

Rant! Rant! Rant!

OK, off to Duotrope!

You have a high fantasy piece? o.O Do let us know when it finds a home . . .

[Martin L. Shoemaker]

Rant! Rant! Rant!

Daily Science Fiction just rejected my high fantasy piece. Grrr...

Rant! Rant! Rant!

OK, off to Duotrope!

You have a high fantasy piece? o.O Do let us know when it finds a home . . .

Yes, I do write some fantasy, though I don't talk about it nearly as much. Looking at my works (finished and in progress), around 30% are fantasy, 12.5% are "squishy" science fiction (time travel, parallel worlds), 10% are hypertech (FTL, etc.), and 47.5% are near future hard science fiction. But I actually finish a smaller percentage of fantasy than I start: around 20% of my finished works are fantasy.

This one is one of my rare short works (3,750 words). It's a dual POV piece, told from the POV of the evil wizard overlord and that of the the brave young hero leading the army that storms his castle.

Oh, I guess it's really triple POV: one scene is told through the eyes of the evil wizard's cat.

[E.CaimanSands]

This one is one of my rare short works (3,750 words). It's a dual POV piece, told from the POV of the evil wizard overlord and that of the the brave young hero leading the army that storms his castle.

Oh, I guess it's really triple POV: one scene is told through the eyes of the evil wizard's cat.

Not even having read it, I detect the hand of Evil Martin...

I have a rant as well incidentally. My semi-finalist has been rejected by nearly every pro market now, and I wouldn't mind, but after my early glowing personal "send me more" rejections from Asimov's and Lightspeed, in addition to the WotF semi, it's been form rejected everywhere! So what's with that? It's not so much that I expected to sell it , I just would have expected a few more personals...
One thing I do know about Asimov's and Lightspeed and WotF: a top editor gets to read the slush in each case. Namely Sheila Williams; JJA and the late KDW. And at this point I shall say no more.

[Jennifer Hicks]

I have a rant as well incidentally. My semi-finalist has been rejected by nearly every pro market now, and I wouldn't mind, but after my early glowing personal "send me more" rejections from Asimov's and Lightspeed, in addition to the WotF semi, it's been form rejected everywhere! So what's with that? It's not so much that I expected to sell it , I just would have expected a few more personals...

I hear ya. We got semi in the same quarter, and I've had the same experience. My story got an acceptance right out of the box at Digital Science Fiction, which then went into hibernation before publishing my story. Since then, it has gotten form rejects galore. I have some hope for the market it's out to currently. We'll see ...