Earlier this summer I contacted a publisher to whom I had submitted a linked short story collection. Five of the stories have been published elsewhere and the remaining three were written to complete the collection. They haven’t been published. I asked the publisher to disregard my submission as I would like to work further on the stories. I felt somehow that I or the stories didn’t know what they were about. I won’t go into details but there was lots of cutting, lots of ruminating and a fair bit of insecure doubt. Oh, and plenty of rewriting.
That is done now.
I have or will be sumbitting the remaining stories to contests and litmags. Some of the contests do not want you to submit simultaneously which really slows things up. However, in the end it will be about the quality of the collection and not how quickly I got it out into the world.
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