Yesterday I posted the raw data for my story submission history. Here ’tis, if you want to look. And today I promised to cover some related topics: How many times do you submit a story? When do you trunk a story? What’s your submission strategy (i.e. top markets first?)? Do you revise rejected stories before sending them out again?

1) How many times do you submit a story? Until one of the following happens: a) I sell it, b) I trunk it. And by trunk it, I mean consciously decide that I won’t circulate that story anymore (as opposed to indecisively letting it rot in my files). So far, my record is 19 submissions before a sale. As for when to trunk it…

2) When do you trunk a story? According to my records, there are only two reasons I trunk a story. a) I don’t think it meets my current standards, or b) I run out of suitable markets to send it to.

What’s a suitable market? Any market that I would be proud to appear in which publishes that type of story.

What are my current standards? Well, when I finish a new story, I give it a thorough evaluation. I weigh factors like what I think of the story, what crit group readers said about it, its general salability, and so on. This process is non-creative and purely businesslike. It’s a lot of guesswork too.

I classify my stories (very loosely) on three levels: A, B, and C. A = I think I can sell this. B = maybe, maybe not. C = I’m not even sending this one out. To keep myself honest, I have a (very) approximate ratio of 2/3 A, 1/3 B, and the occasional C. Why such a biased ratio? Because the way I work, most of the stories which would be C’s never get finished. Many of the B’s don’t either, because I notice the problems while still drafting. You should see how many abandoned fragments I have in my files…

If I decide a story is an A, then I don’t care how many rejections it gets–it keeps circulating until I run out of markets. (I never decide which is my best “A” story; they’re all part of Team Kaftan once they make the cut.) If I decide a story is a B, then I still circulate it… but after a few rejections and several months have passed, I’ll take another look and ask myself, “Is this story worth it?” And that depends. Sometimes I think, “Yes, it’s better than I remembered.” Other times I think, “This one really isn’t that great.” And so I re-rank it A or C, and proceed accordingly. Sometimes I’ll keep it in B status for another six months.

You could say that my B ranking is like probation. If I’m unsure about a story, I put it on probation, and take another look 6 months later before I either lock it up, set it free, or possibly keep it on probation.

3) What’s your submission strategy? Same as all the pro advice I’ve ever heard: start with the top-tier markets and work your way down, with some exceptions made for themed anthologies and other “perfect fit” situations. Sometimes this means that a story circulates through the big markets before I notice a problem, and then I fix it just in time to hit the lower-tier markets. Annoying, but that’s the way it goes. Leading to the last point, which is…

4) Do you revise rejected stories before sending them out again? Now this is the most interesting and the stickiest question here. Because on one hand, you can make a lot of improvements to the story if it circulates for a few years, which can happen (as I demonstrated in my last post). After all, you should be a better writer a few years later. But, on the other hand… you can waste a LOT of time revising stories that aren’t worth your time. Your earlier stories are probably weaker than your newer ones. As some say, you can’t polish a turd (but I prefer to say “you can’t build a skyscraper on a sand pit,” meaning that your older stories probably are built on shaky groundwork). The amount of time it would take to bring an old story up to your current standards is usually better spent writing a new story.

I’m going to repeat that, because I see so many new writers get hung up on this. The amount of time needed to fix an old story is usually better spent writing a new story. It’s actually less work to build something new on a strong, fresh foundation than it is to retrofit a shaky old story that isn’t really working. (This is NOT the same thing as me telling you not to revise. I’m saying: draft it, revise it, then circulate it–but once you’ve started it circulating, don’t waste your time revising it.)

So back to the question: do I revise between submissions? The answer is mostly “no.” But there’s a few exceptions to my rule. I definitely look at stories again after they’ve been circulating for six months, if for no other reason to assess whether I still think the story is strong. I permit myself one (ONE!) passthrough on a prose level, to tighten sentences and catch bad phrasing that I originally missed. This process usually removes a few hundred words. I put an unofficial time limit on this revision: seven days or so. If I haven’t done the revisions within seven days, I put it back in circulation. Why? Because if you let it sit in your files, it tends to stay in your files. For a very long time. Not getting revised–and worse, not circulating.

Every once in a while I change a few sentences on the ending. (I don’t know why it’s always the ending, but it is.) I still make myself send it back out within a week. And I never revise “between every submission” or something insane like that. If I did, I’d never get stories sent out.

With all rules, there are exceptions, and I suppose someday there will be the story that I pull from circulation and completely revamp. If my intuition told me to do this, then I would. (Just don’t confuse intuition with laziness or fear.)

If I find myself stressing about whether my stories are good enough, and shouldn’t I revise them more so they sell, and maybe if I revise them they will sell… you know what? 100% of the time, that indicates I should be writing new stories. Because you can’t really assess whether your older work is any good unless you’re writing new stuff. You’ll be too biased and want the older stuff to work so you don’t have to write anything new. If you only have one story circulating, there’s no way you’re going to make smart decisions about what to do with it. By generating new material, you give yourself the freedom to be honest about your older work.

In short, this whole post boils down to The Rule, which has only a few exceptions as detailed above: Write new stories, polish them, and then circulate them until they sell. That’s how you get stories published.

Hopefully this is helpful for someone. Ask if you have questions.

As I said in a previous post, I’ve published about three dozen short stories, and perhaps 1/3 are SFWA-qualifying. I thought I’d open my submission history in case it would help a new writer see what the submission process looks like. Because the data is less clear-cut and requires some history I don’t have, this won’t be quite as nifty as my diversity statistics, but I hope it’s helpful for someone.

The first thing to know–this is only my submission history post-Clarion West, so it starts in 2004. I did send a few stories to the big magazines in the very early 2000s, but they had staples and single-space and all sorts of horrors. I still have those stories in my files, but I don’t think I have their submission history.

Second, this is not in chronological order. I sorted it by times submitted, since that’s the primary question people wanted to know. I did look for any patterns, like whether stories were selling faster or not in more recent years. No pattern. I mean, this list includes everything from my Clarion West submission story to my Nebula-nominated story from Lightspeed. You really can’t tell which is which from the raw numbers, which I think is fascinating.

Third, this doesn’t include any of my stories currently in circulation or waiting to be circulated. (I treat stories like hot potatoes and try not to keep them in my pocket very long, but sometimes I have to wait for particular markets to open.)

*****

Here’s some raw data.  Sorry I’m bad at formatting things like this on the web; hopefully you can read it.

That’s 42 stories. I sold 34 and trunked 8 (81% and 19% respectively). Of the 8 trunked stories, my reasons were: didn’t like the story anymore (5), or ran out of suitable markets (3). That’s a simplification, but close enough.

Average number of times submitted before a pro sales: 6.1. Average number of times submitted before a semi-pro or other sale: 6.5. I don’t remember how to do the math for statistical significance, but I’m pretty damn sure those numbers are not very different. 🙂

*****

So, some observations about that data now.

1) That story with 19 subs (18 rejections, accepted at the 19th place) received 6 Nebula recommendations, back when we did that sort of thing. There was nothing wrong with it. It just had to find the right home. Here endeth the lesson.
2) If I scan the list looking for my “best” stories, using any of several measures, I can’t see a pattern. Possible measures include: the ones I liked best, the ones readers emailed me the most about, the ones my crit groups loved, the ones editors wrote personal rejections for. I really don’t think there’s any conclusions to be drawn there except that submission history and the story’s quality are only somewhat correlated at best. Certainly not the Holy Grail that I’ve heard some writers proclaim.
3) I don’t track personalized rejections, but I’d estimate that in my early days, I got perhaps 10% personalized rejections. Nowadays I get more like 70% personalized rejections. Most of the non-personalized ones are from editors/magazines who don’t personalize for anyone.
4) Check out that “months waited” column. Yes, it can be 4 years from the day I start circulating a story until the day someone buys it. Add the fact that sometimes I don’t start circulating a story until a year after I wrote it, and/or it can take a year for an accepted story to actually be published… makes me wonder what’s sitting in my files right now that will eventually be exciting for me. Which I think is pretty cool.

I will do another post, possibly tonight, regarding other questions people asked me: how many times do I submit a story (that should be obvious from this post), how do I decide when to trunk it, what’s my submission strategy (where do I send first), and whether I revise rejected stories before sending them out again. These topics deserve an entire post to themselves.

So if you have specific questions, ask and I’ll try to answer.

ETA: Here’s answers to the other questions.

A guide to navigating NPR’s top science fiction and fantasy books.

I’m impressed. For fantasy, it steered me toward two of my all-time favorites: Kushiel’s Dart and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. For sf, it sent me to The Left Hand of Darkness (yep) and The Dispossessed (which I really should read, since this is about the 12th time someone has told me I’ll like it).

If I were to blog details about my submission history, what sort of things would you want to know?

I was thinking–I’ve got enough history now that I might be able to help someone who’s just starting out. I have a significant sample of stories (35 sold, and a handful in circulation right now, and about 1/3 of my sales are SFWA-qualifying).

What would you want to know? How many times I submit? How many days between submission? What sort of rewrite requests I get, or how many personal rejections or what?

When do I trunk a story? When do I keep circulating it?

These are all possibly interesting, but I don’t have time for all this. What do people want to know?

For the last time I did an analysis post like this, I did it for diversity within my fiction. See Diversity statistics and Diversity statistics: a follow-up.

So this weekend I played in Microsoft Puzzle Hunt 14, which is part of a series of Puzzle Hunts. It was a total blast! I was in the Bay Area simulcast (meaning I didn’t have to go anywhere to do it; I think Seattleites had an on-site puzzle they had to do). Eleven friends and I formed a team called Disobedient Children. We spent from 10 AM Saturday to 5 PM Sunday solving a series of complex puzzles, which led to other metapuzzles, and so on. The puzzles involved math, language, pop culture, music, free association, visual thinking, logical deduction, social networking, and a whole bunch of everything.

We had already declared to each other that we’d be relaxed and just have fun–not too organized or worrying about the deadline. Some team members were only there for an hour or two, so our team was more like 7-8 people for the whole session (but people switched in and out). Two or three people stayed up all night, but I didn’t. We placed 13th of 24 teams, which we thought was great given our casual attitude, and the fact that we were competing against the best of the best.

Now, some of you know I’m a pretty good puzzler. These were some incredibly complex puzzles. These weren’t things like “name three capital cities that start with S”; many of the puzzles involved figuring out what the puzzle actually _was_. Like, you’d get a sheet of 27 pictures, and that’s it. All you knew is that you had to determine some sort of word answer for the puzzle, and the word could be anything. And the word answers for a set of puzzles might combine to make some other puzzle, but you didn’t know which ones belonged together and so on. That’s part of the metapuzzle.

Here’s an example of a first-level puzzle. I think it was called Star Chart. This puzzle was a jpg image. You had to print it out in four pages and assemble it into a giant page. Then you had a giant page with pictures of about 50 people scattered all over it. It was easy to see that they were celebrities, but it took four different people looking at them to identify around 75% of them. (Some were pretty obscure.)

Once you had many of the celebs identified, you had to realize that the placement of the pictures mapped to constellations. And then you had to use a constellation chart to ID the constellations, which all happened to be astrological signs. (None of this is given to you; you have to figure it out!)

And then you have to wonder why the pictures are grouped into signs. And you need to see that each constellation contains many actors from the same movie. By doing this, we ID’d six movies. The exact movies weren’t important, but they gave the insight to how to solve the whole thing. We spent some time trying to find a connection between the six films, but there wasn’t really anything.

The next aha was to realize that each constellation (astrological sign) contained precisely one actor with that sign, i.e. Glenn Close was in the Pisces constellation, and she was the only Pisces. Remember we started with just pictures–thinking of birthdays was part of the puzzle. So after checking lots of birthdays, you end up with six different actors who are the “representatives” of their sign.

And then you have to find a movie that contains those six actors. Once we had Glenn Close and Martin Short and some football player whom I forget, we found Mars Attacks. And that was the word (phrase) to enter into the solution box and score our points.

So we went from 50ish celeb pics in a seemingly random pattern, to that phrase. All through teamwork. Of the 55ish puzzles in the competition, I only saw two puzzles that individuals solved on their own; the rest required multiple types of thinking and discussion among teammates. For example, I’m the one who mapped the constellations and noticed the astrological signs; I could never have ID’d those celebrities. I couldn’t even get a single one. Apparently I can’t tell Demi Moore and Kim Kardashian apart. 🙂

That’s the kind of puzzles they are. Generally I was very impressed with the puzzle quality. Here are things I learned about myself as a puzzler this weekend.

1. I am unbelievably good at any puzzle involving the format of “name a word of X letters meaning Y,” often getting immediate answers. Up to 11-13 letters. Doubly easy if I have a few letters as clues.
2. Any word pattern puzzle falls into my superpowers, such as anagramming long strings and seeing words within words and so on.
3. If it’s just a substitution cipher, I can solve it fast. If it it involves anything more than that, I get crabby and switch away from the puzzle. (Luckily I had teammates who loved ciphers and codes, and I was more than happy to pass the puzzles off if they were beyond me.)
4. I’m great at filling in answers once I have an idea of what I’m doing. I don’t like the part where no one even knows what the puzzle is. I respect that some puzzlers love that state, but I don’t. I hate staring at a puzzle and not being sure that the next step is within my powers. Just a personal thing.
5. I discovered entirely new swear words while trying to map an undersea railroad. If there was an aha, none of us ever saw it.
6. Astrological expertise is burned into my brain from my younger days, and will never leave. Much to my embarrassment.
7. I’m very good at math, but I had teammates who were such geniuses that I left those puzzles for them. Probably some of them felt the same way about my word puzzle skills. (It was very flattering to be called over to several puzzle-groups, and asked to fill in the words that they couldn’t get–and being able to do it! Hooray teamwork!)
8. I can’t _not_ be competitive about these things. It was very hard to relax and enjoy the process when a puzzle made me mad. And then when I solved something, it seemed easy and trivial–so I downplayed my successes and inflated my frustrations. A personal failing, but it’s the way it is. I’m pretty sure I pulled my weight as a team member, but it sure didn’t feel like it at the time.
9. On a related note, I am unclear how my teammates didn’t kill me by about 3 PM Sunday, but I appreciated it. I liked every single person I puzzled with, which is crucial for having fun. I noticed that two people in particular made good puzzle-partners for me; our thinking complemented each other.
10. Man, I had a great time.

If this sounds fun, follow the links at the top and you can join a Puzzle Hunt with your own team. I will totally do this again.

Shimmer asked five writers five questions about storytelling technique. The writers are myself, Luc Reid, Krista Hoeppner Leahy, Don Mead, and Justin Howe. Check out what we have to say about beginnings, titles, middles, and POV. Endings will be the final topic, posted next Wednesday.

I’m up at Escape Pod with “Kill Me.” Professional masochist hires herself out to be murdered. You can listen here.

Also, Lightspeed Magazine just purchased “The Sighted Watchmaker,” which will run in December. I’m very excited to be back with Lightspeed again.

FOGcon!

FOGcon 1 was awesome, and I know many of you are anxiously awaiting news of FOGcon 2. We will make a major announcement on Aug 15 or so, where we will tell you all about next year’s event. (I won’t announce anything until it’s inked. You may have noticed I don’t announce story sales until they’re inked, either.)

Consider this a pre-announcement, and thanks for being patient. Also, thank you to everyone who’s been asking me all about the next FOGcon. It makes me happy that so many people care about it and are already excited. I am too!

I’ll be at Worldcon. I’ve got a spa suite in the Peppermill (come visit my spa!)

Here’s my schedule:

• Writers Workshop, Section F (Workshop), Thu 10:00 – 12:00, Roma2 (Peppermill)
• Autographing: Thu 16:00 (Autographing), Thu 16:00 – 17:00, Hall 2 Autographs (RSCC)
• Infections and Viruses that Could Doom Humankind (Panel), Thu 17:00 – 18:00, A09 (RSCC)
• KaffeeKlatsch: Fri 16:00 (KaffeeKlatsch), Fri 16:00 – 17:00, KK1 (RSCC)
• Fans Turned Pro (Panel), Sat 10:00 – 11:00, A09 (RSCC)
• How I Learned the Craft: Three of My Favorite Books on Writing (Panel) (M), Sun 11:00 – 12:00, D03 (RSCC)
• Reading: Vylar Kaftan (Reading), Sun 13:00 – 13:30, A15 (RSCC)

Meghan McCarron took a really great pic of me at the Genderfloomp dance at WisCon. I call this my femme girl at work look.

The whole dance was super awesome and I’m grateful to those who ran it! I especially liked the extra boas, hard hats, and mustaches available at the door, for those who wished to floomp their gender but had no tools to do such.