I mentioned once before, but failed to remind again until now, my story “Her Very Shape and the Way She Says My Words” is featured in the September 2013 issue, number 24, of newmyths.com. It’s a very short, enigmatic little story.

Click on the “Issue 24” link at the top (though if you see this later, it may be located under “Past Issues”) and scroll down for the Table of Contents.

Here’s the site link again: newmyths.com

It’s tempting to observe a writer’s work as it’s published and think that’s what they’ve been working on lately. Very often, I’ve learned, the lag between finishing a story and seeing it published can be quite long, even if the story is accepted right away by the first place it’s submitted. For any story that goes through a cycle of rejection and resubmission, this is even more so.

Readers observing a writer’s recently-published work might think they’ve just finished those stories, and maybe started a new one as well. More likely those stories were finished six or twelve or eighteen months ago. The writer probably has a whole bundle of new stuff in the pipeline.

So, what have I been working on that nobody’s seen yet?

May. I finished a longer story with significant self-reflexive or metafictional elements. It’s about a guy who owns an ambient music record label, and receives a strange, unmarked demo in the mail. This was written with an anthology in mind, ended up being rejected, so I’m looking for another place for it.

June. I started a weird little story about a husband who used to perform with the city’s orchestra, but had to quit due to vague mental problems and now stays shut in his room, and a wife whose reading group encourages her to give her husband a very unusual “gift” to cheer him up, or maybe to keep him from bothering her, so she’ll be free to go do other hings. By the end of the story I was unsatisfied with how I’d rendered this unusual arrangement. It came across like a crude male fantasy, almost exactly opposite what I’d intended. I decided to set the story aside and take another crack at it later.

July. I completed something for a themed anthology, a riff or loose sequel to a story by a well-known weird fiction writer. The editor seemed to like my story, and sent notes suggesting improvements. I need to finish those revisions and resubmit. My fingers are already crossed, as this anthology should be a great one.

Also in July, I started planning a novel, actually a series, though for now I’m mostly focusing on the first. The premise will have weird or supernatural elements, though it will mostly come across like a straightforward crime/thriller story, especially at first. I worked on characters and setting, a story arc, and ideas for where subsequent novels might go. Lots of Post-it notes stuck to a board, moved around, changed and rearranged.

August. I did a bit more work on the unfinished weird married couple story. Strengthened the wife’s character, made her reading group friends more interesting. I also tried to develop ideas to solve this story’s fundamental problem, and got part of the way there, but set it aside again.

Also in August, a busy month, I spent a few weeks writing “No Mask to Conceal Her Voice,” a story inspired by the work of Robert Chambers, for a special KIY-themed issue of Lovecraft eZine edited by Joseph S. Pulver Sr. I’d hoped to have this story finished before Lena and I went to Providence for the NecronomiCon, but didn’t quite reach the finish line. The convention was wonderful fun. Between preparation, travel, the con itself, return travel, and time spent recovering and returning to normal, it consumed well over a week.

As soon as I returned, I spent an intense week or so (including a full weekend shut in a room from morning to night) finishing up “No Mask…” The good news is, the story was immediately accepted, and should appear in a few months.

While at NecronomiCon, I received an invitation to submit to a small press. I said I’d like to expand one of my earlier, abandoned stories into a novella. This project has been my sole focus for the past six weeks or so. It’s tempting to think of anything less than novel length as “just a story,” but the fact is, a novella of almost 20,000 words is very different from a short story. It simply takes more time to write something that long. I also believe crafting a story on top of an existing framework takes longer than creating something from scratch. There’s something especially rewarding, though, about taking an idea I wanted to explore but could never quite figure out how to develop, and finding new ways to give it life. It’s very nearly finished. I’m very excited, and anxious to see if the editor likes it enough to publish.

I have several other things lined up to work on next. Maybe when I make some progress on those, I’ll post another “works in progress” installment like this one.

Since I started writing fiction again late in 2009, I’ve mostly concentrated on writing shorter stories, in the 3,000 to 5,000 word range. My fellow writers will have a sense of what kind of length this indicates. For readers, figure 10-15 paperback book pages.

The main reason I’ve been concentrating on this length is that it seems to be what most editors are looking for, at least from newer/emerging writers. I might have preferred to write something, say, 8,000 or 10,000 or even 12,000 words long — and some of my story ideas might have been best expressed in such a length — but there are very few places that will accept such long stories. When you’ve just started trying to get published, I believe it increases your chances if you write stories that can be submitted to many different places.

Most short fiction venues seem to prefer stories in that 4,000 to 5,000 word sweet spot. Some will express this outright. Others will say they accept work up to maybe 8,000, but everything they actually publish is much shorter.

Say you’re a science fiction writer, and you write a 14,000 novelette. Once you’ve sent it to Asimov’s, Analog, and Fantasy and Science Fiction (which mostly take stories from established big-name pros, and are tough to break into otherwise), there are only 2 or 3 more places that you can send something that long. So once you’ve sent this novelette around to 5-6 places, your story’s at a dead end.

I felt it was a bad risk to spend months writing something so long, only a few places would consider it. Write a story of 4,500 words, though, and you have dozens of places you could send it.

Lately I’ve been getting more of my work published. That’s wonderful, and not only does it encourage me to keep going. It also makes me more confident that if I try something, it will probably work. Better yet, I’ve received a handful of invitations to write specifically for a given magazine or anthology or small press. If I’m planning to write a story for an invite, I can ask the editor what kind of length is OK. So far it seems as if 5,000 to 8,000 words is no problem.

I’ve even had a couple of editors tell me, “This story would work better if you fleshed it out.” In other words, time to write longer. This turns out to be something I enjoy. My last three completed stories average over 7,000 words, and I’m nearing completion on a novella in the 18k to 20k range.

I now realize how much I was constraining myself in order to fit what I thought the market wanted. I still think it was a good idea to start out this way, but it’s a relief to be able to stretch out a bit.