I Literally Forgot I Had a Blog

I haven't blogged in a while, and the title tells you why. In addition to this being the roughest market for finding content work that I've ever seen, I've had the novel monkey on my back as well as trying to shop short stories.

I do love crafting a short stories, but there are a few problems with doing so. I am considering not creating as many of them to focus more on the two novels I've been working on for the last couple of years.

Here's the trouble with short stories:

• They pay crap. It's unbelievable how little most publishers will pay for a short story. I generally won't submit to a market that pays like five bucks (yes, there are tons of those). There are actually a lot of them now that pay nothing at all- and they are still choosy and demand your best work. Nope, not subbing to them either. I always sub to the high payers first, get rejected by them and then start subbing to the mid-paying markets. Those markets, however, are still going to be low paying and not truly worth the time it took you to write the work and submit it out from a monetary standpoint. I have bills, man. Lots of bills.
• The submissions process is grueling. Speciality magazines, ezines and fancy literary magazines are the markets that I have primarily been submitting to with short stories. They are so specialized in both topics and voice that it's tough to get on with most of them. This has made it necessary to submit most of my work to dozens of them, and that takes dozens of hours. This has further reduced writing income by keeping me from doing my paid, non-fiction work to spend hour after hour querying, signing up for every site's submission system and altering cover letters to suit each. Again, bills, man.
• It's been a distraction from my novels. Since I've been writing and subbing out short stories, I've sold five or six and have another four or so that I've been subbing out. That is a significant amount of time that has been taken away from the novels that I need to finish. One of them is a strong edit away from being done, and the other is still just an adolescent learning to walk in high heels. They both need time and attention.

Once I get my remaining stories either sold or thrown in the trash and lit on fire, I think I may just retreat from short fiction for a while. At least, until all of the rights revert back to me and I can sub them all out again as reprints. :o