BY NANCY KAY CLARK
CommuterLit editor & publisher
Copyright is held by the author.
HAPPY NEW Year everyone!
I have made some New Year’s Writing Resolutions (separate, but of course connected, to any goals I have for CommuterLit or my personal life). And I know what you’re thinking — am I setting myself up for failure? No one can keep resolutions up for long, right?
Well, perhaps these are more like “intentions” than “resolutions.” But let’s set that issue aside for now.
One of my resolutions is to more consistently promote and generate interest in my own writing. With that in mind, I have started a new “Nancy Writes” blog, to chronicle the ups and downs of my writing life, as I strive to finish up a few writing projects I have on the go. My intentions are to share best practices in terms of the writing (and in particular, the re-writing) process.
I have listed my New Year’s Writing Resolutions in the inaugural post of my new blog, which you can check out here.
Editorial Critiques
For those of you who I owe editorial critiques to, thank you for your patience. I’m doing my best to get them to you as soon as possible.
Contributor News
Kay Smith-Blum ended 2023 with both a contract for publication for her debut novel, Tangles and a flash fiction piece published by Zoetic Press in its Heathentide Orphans anthology.
Which brings me to my next question: Do you look up sites/publications/anthologies, find out about issue themes and deadlines and write a story to spec? Or do you write a story and then try to place it?
I do both. I enter some contests (w/out entry fees) and write to their prompts. But the bulk of my short stories are the result of my leading a short story critique group, and I try to set a good example by submitting a short story every two weeks, either a new one or a revised one. I’ve found that publication is a numbers game. I use Duotrope to find good matches for my work, and I had nine stories published in 2023, one on the first try, one on the twenty-first. I currently have twenty-seven stories circulating for acceptance. When I have fifteen stories published, I’ll put them into my second self-published collection.