I’ve deleted all of my stories on here. I’ve left my Harold and Sallie stuff up. Link to them at the top of the page. I’ve become very….disappointed with the direction this platform is going in and the changes that have been happening.
What I really need to do is create a website for the published stories that I have.
I had someone beta read through Harold and Sallie, looking for plot holes and continuity issues. And did he find those! So I’ve been working my way though all that, fixing/editing/tweaking.
I’m not really submitting anything right now. Mainly because anything I can submit to I’ve gotten rejected on or their submission windoows are closed or am waiting to hear back from. There are a number of places that open in January to new submissions.
There are five storeis (two CNF, one thriller/surrealsim sort of story and 2 fluff/slice of life fiction stories) that I’ll be focused on submitting next month.
The thriller/surrealism story has gone through a number of title changes. Current title is The Dream of my Backrooms. It was a dream I had last year (or year before) and was probably influenced by Kane Pixel’s YouTube channel.
The two CNF pieces are memoir types, Tales of the Regift (about some of the re gifts we’ve gotten) and Uptown Again (memories of my bar hopping days in New Orleans in the late 80s/early 90s).
The two fluff pieces are Wrong Number - I got the idea from a writing prompt in Writer’s Digest a couple of years ago. It’s a text message exchange between me and someone who turns out to be a well known famous actress. (I had Jennifer Lawrence in mind when I wrote it)
The other story is totally fluff/slice of life - It Must be a Monday. While a young women is waiting for her Uber to work, she’s watching everything that’s going on on the block she lives in.
And finally, while there’s still a few days left in the year, here are the stats of my submitting to lit mags for 2025.
238 lit mags submitted to
31 stories
571 submissions total (keep in mind I submit in spurts and do sim subs)
9 stories accepted for publication
111 stories pulled from lit mags as a result of those 9 stories being published
326 rejections
If you celebrate, have a good Christmas. If you don’t, do as we are doing, invite a friend over and then stuff your face with booze and food.
I'm sorry you've deleted your stories on here, but from the little I've caught of news of the changes, I guess I can understand. I need to go back and catch up on the Harold and Sallie stuff; I've really liked those.
I myself haven't been on Substack that much due to my turning off my phone notifications. Those had the tendency to turn into going down rabbit holes for large chunks of the day, so I wasn't getting much done. (In the interest of transparency, it's a bit of an open question how much more I am getting done now, with those notifications turned off. I've had the dubious fortune of discovering the game Royal Kingdom. Oh my. I am firmly not spending any money on this game, but still.)
BTW, those are some frightening stats that you've turned in, in terms of the ratio of submissions to acceptances. Yikes. Good for you for persevering.
I hope that you will still be a presence here, as, even though I'm not here often, I do look forward to your posts. Take care.