Onwards into the future

[kiya]

I have achieved the point in my rejection-collecting career that my response to filling out a cover letter is not despair, but rather "Oh thank the gods, they don't want a short bio."

Also my spreadsheet is earning its keep; I saw a deadline was hitting, scanned my list of unsold stories to see what fit the qualifications, confirmed I hadn't submitted it to that venue, and just did the damn thing.

Comments

[graydon]

Woohoo! doing the thing!

[kiya]

Someday I will sell another short story... someday.

(Though honestly I still haven't adjusted to the fact that I can write them at all.)

[graydon]

Very likely you shall!

And, well, new skills take practice. I'm still kinda blinking at the "another novel" feeling. Someday I might write a short story.

[kiya]

Short stories started happening in a combination of "children give me smaller chunks of brain to work with" and "hey, I'm writing real-time fanfic of an ongoing performance art piece, what happened today", and that was a fascinating skill bootstrapping for sure.

Also my novels are nichey in complex ways, meh.

[graydon]

I might not be the best person to comment on the nicheyness of novels!

Short stories is a lot to turn not enough time/brain into. "What happened today" seems like an applicable heuristic, too. (I have no idea how to apply it, but it seems applicable.)

[kaifu]

Short bios are the worst. Even though I already have a boilerplate one, I still hate sending it.

For me, it's for talks and sometimes publications rather than fiction submissions, but still. Why can't you just judge my work without knowing anything about me? -_-;

But yay getting a story out there relatively easily! Fingers crossed on it selling.

[kiya]

Cover letters are now solidly in mental boilerplate, but I try to lightly tweak the short bio to be something relevant to the publication in case it helps?

I cracked someone up a while back by saying: "So here's the formula I kind of use: a whimsical comment relevant to the job, two boring biographical details, and about three scoops of angst about what personal pronoun to use."

While I was typing that, you see, they were typing something fretting about pronouns...

[kaifu]

Sounds about right. I always wonder how many people actually are able to blithely write out a short bio for themselves without hitting any awkward feelings around gender identity, ethnic identity/race, privacy concerns, or other issues that ought not to impact their work but might if the bio details get associated with the work. (Even if that might be positive, not everyone wants their personal experience to be required to validate their work.) From the way people ask for these things, the assumption seems to be that it’s no big deal, but wow is that coming from a position of privilege.

[kiya]

Yeah. I look at bios and I'm like, "I can use the generic word 'family' but I can't get more specific, I don't know how that'll go over; my day job is 'mama'; I don't want to be more specific about where I am than 'New England'; how do I write this with pronouns that don't make my skin crawl; what of my shit do I disclose?" And a little personal detail makes them sound not-robotic but what details are okay, fucked if I know, even if I weren't a goddamn weirdo I don't know how to say the right things....

Meanwhile brooksmoses shared this with me.