Heckuva week: A new #kidlit blogging gig and 3 story sales!

It's been a crazy few days. And I mean crazy in a good way (for once). Here's the scoop:

1. I've been named the first-ever Children's Lit columnist for a wonderful website called Eat Sleep Write.

2. Dreaming Robot Press will publish my middle-grade sci-fi story "Leafheart" in the 2016 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide. I'm especially pleased about this, both because I was also in the 2015 edition, and because the folks at Dreaming Robot are outspoken advocates of diversity in kidlit.

3. Urban Fantasy Magazine will publish my weird, funny tale called "The Duchess of Fitzrovia," which I wrote a couple of years ago during a trip to London.

4. Strange Musings Press will publish my story "Motherlode" in the anthology Alternate Hilarities 2: Weirder Science. If you're a fan of my Webrid books, you'll enjoy the style of this space mining caper.

Items 2 and 3 are made especially sweet because both were revisions requested by the respective editors. This maintains a stat of which I am exceptionally proud: I have a 100% acceptance rate on stories I've been asked to revise. That's a darn good skill to have in this biz.

How Learning New Tech Can Help a #Writer

No, I don't believe that computers make us more creative. In fact, I tend to agree with Annie Proulx who, like me, writes all her first drafts by hand. She's made statements to the effect that typing your words the first time through makes you think less carefully because the process becomes "facile."

Yet I cannot deny that technology has a huge impact on the act of writing for publication. The frustrating thing, though, is that we must wade through an ocean of tech and decide what really matters. It's something I think about a lot, especially when I get frustrated by yet another program or machine I have to learn about. Today I offer a few ways in which embracing change and actively learning new skills has benefitted my writing career:

• Income opportunities. I have picked up two regular freelance jobs (one as a website fact-checker and one as a social media manager) from writing colleagues because of tech skills I've acquired. This, in turn, helps me remain a freelancer rather than going back to the traditional working world.
• Promo opportunities. If you can run a blog, keep a website updated, and post regularly to social media, you certainly have a leg up the steep slope of Mount Marketing. These days, I'm amazed when writers don't have an active, organized Web presence. Not that I don't still have a ton to learn!
• Ease of editing. For some, it's novel-writing software like Scrivener that makes the difference, but even getting to know the ins and outs of Microsoft Word can change the editing and revising stages for a writer. And now there's Word for iPad, and a dedicate cloud service called OneDrive that gives you editorial access to all your documents on all your devices. Yay!
• Ease of submitting. Duotrope. Submission Grinder. Submittable. Query Tracker. Google Drive spreadsheets. There are many ways now to keep really detailed, sophisticated records of what we've submitted, to whom, and when. And often, we can find out how long to expect responses to take (based on real user data, not just what the magazine editor says). I always have at least twenty pieces out looking for homes, so programs like these truly help me stay sane.

Your turn: How does the digital world color your writing life?

A Writer's Joy: The Editor Who "Gets" You

This week my story "Rain Puddle Man" was published in the e-zine Spaceports & Spidersilk. The October issue is full of Halloween stories for kids, and you can buy it here.

When the editor, Marcie Tentchoff, emailed me that link, I started reminiscing over my relationship with that publication, and with her specifically. She's chosen to publish six or seven of my stories over the past three years. In fact, of all the stories I've submitted to her, she's rejected only one. It was the first one, and I was very green; she was absolutely correct in calling it seriously flawed.

Marcie is an editor who "gets" me. I've been incredibly lucky to find a few such advocates already in my short career. That kind of partnership is a huge boon to a writer's self-confidence. Statistically, I suppose it's as unlikely as a successful love affair, since it's all about taste and personality and world view. Those three elements are very tough to match between two people.

An editor who "gets" you doesn't necessarily always buy your stories, but s/he always sees what you're aiming for and appreciates what you've tried. And s/he is always eager, even impatient, to see your next submission. I hope every writer gets a chance to work with an editor who's so in tune with his or her vision. It can make all the difference.

Alex Shvartsman on Humor, Subjectivity, and Slush

This week's guest talks about fiction-writing from a different perspective: as an editor. Alex Shvartsman, whose own collection of published science fiction stories would stretch from here to Cleveland if laid end to end, has edited an anthology called Unidentified Funny Objects. He shares with us an insider's view about the difficult task of picking stories from the pile of submissions.

*   *   *

Humor is subjective.

This was the mantra of my associate editors and I as we read submissions for Unidentified Funny Objects last year. My stated goal was to collect a wide assortment of humorous stories and to feature a variety of styles and sub-genres that would offer something for every palate. But how to make certain that my personal tastes don’t skew the book toward the kind of humor *I* like at the expense of what other readers might enjoy? In order to build a healthy, balanced collection, I developed a slush system that’s quite different from most publications.

Each story we received was read by the first reader (in most cases it was me, only about 20% of the stories were seen by one of the other editors first). The first reader’s job was to look for stories that *might* be a good fit even if they weren’t that reader’s personal favorite. This culled well over 80% of the submissions and left us with a handful of very strong contenders.

Each story that made it past the first reader was stripped of any personal information and sent out to 5+ associate editors for evaluation. Anonymity was meant to help the editors judge the story solely on its merit – they didn’t know whether they were reading a submission by a Nebula winner or by a previously unpublished author.

Each editor offered a Yes, No, or Maybe vote with some comments. Based on those votes and feedback I either released the story back to the author, held it until the end of the reading period, or (in a few rare cases) bought it immediately because I knew I had to have it for the book.

I ended up buying 29 stories out of over 900 submissions. Do you know how many of those 29 received a unanimous vote from the associate readers? None. Not a single one. Because--say it with me--humor is subjective.

I don’t truly expect any one reader to enjoy every single story collected in this book. However, I strongly believe that almost anyone will find multiple stories they can love. Both readers and critics have been very kind to the volume so far, sharing this sentiment.

But don’t take their word for it – you can read a number of additional bonus stories posted for free at www.ufopub.com -- and if you are a Twitter user, may I suggest that you begin with this one: http://www.ufopub.com/twitter

Unidentified Funny Objects is available as trade paperback and eBook at Amazon, B&N, and Kobo, as well as directly from UFO Publishing:

http://www.ufopub.com/buy-our-books/