When it comes to writing, I much prefer harsh criticism to compliments. As good as it makes me feel, praise of my work doesn’t help me that much. I need something to light a fire under me, make me put in the hours and effort to correct the problems. Submission rejections do this more than anything.

It hurts to get those emails; they can often ruin my day. But ultimately, they inspire me to work harder. Rejection emails are often no more than a sentence or two, but the words “unfortunately it didn’t quite work for me” can be so powerful.

Short Stories

For one of my New Year’s resolutions, I said I would submit at least 5 short stories. And as of this month, I can say I have! I’m not going to stop there. I called this “The Year of Short Stories,” and I’m going to live up to that.

For the past several months, I’ve been writing “on spec” stories for anthologies. Each month, I look for open submissions, think of the most original approach to the theme, outline it, write it, edit it, repeat.

This month was a toy-themed horror anthology. I just so happened to have written an outline for a toy-based story years ago, saving me one of the biggest steps. But as I wrote the story, I realized I had no clue what I was doing.

I’m a self-taught writer. Except for reading a handful of books on writing and taking a couple classes in my youth, most of my writing knowledge comes from trial and error. I throw words on the page and sometimes they work, often they don’t.

In a dream world, I would get my MFA, but I don’t see that happening any time soon. Instead, I’ll do the next best thing:

I am a frequent borrower and contributor to Little Free Libraries, and I just so happened to find a college textbook entitled Behind the Short Story in one of them. Over the next month, I’m going to put the spec stories on hold and work my way through the exercises. There are 27 chapters, and I’m trying to do one a day. Hopefully, I emerge a stronger writer who knows what the heck he’s doing.

Convention Season

My favorite part of the year is close at hand: convention season. I have KillerCon in August (just weeks away!) and BizarroCon in November. I’m flirting with the idea of attending StokerCon next year in San Diego, but the size intimidates me. While the first two have between 100-200 people, StokerCon, put on by the Horror Writers Association, has a massive attendance, and I much prefer the intimacy of a smaller crowd.

I’ll be doing write-ups of both conventions here on this blog.

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I should be getting a response to last month’s submission in the next couple weeks. I know I said all that stuff about rejection fueling me, but it would be nice to get an acceptance!

Tchau,

Zé