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.
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