Since I’ve been back from Clarion West, I’ve mindfully adopted the Jay Lake-Cory Doctorow*-kamikaze approach to submissions. Every single piece that is done goes out, somewhere, and the second it comes back, it goes off to the next market.

This is about as opposite from the submissions process I had in my pre-CW days. I’ve talked about that before. It was a languid, lazy process that usually involved me waiting for someone to ask me for something.

The unremitting process is exhausting. As soon as I send off a piece, I am already researching where it should go next, should it come back—which sort of makes me feel like I am jinxing it (stupid, I know).

But it’s also weirdly zen and somehow inoculating against taking rejection personally (which is normal, even though we all know better)—it doesn’t give me a lot of time to wallow. Always a good thing. And because everything is always out, I seem more motivated to write new stuff**.

So, is it successful?

I don’t know yet.

So far, I’ve had between 3 and 7 pieces out at a time, to over 40 markets (many of those duplicate markets that rejected one piece, so I sent them another). 3 acceptances, 2 holds that turned to rejections, the rest , of course, rejections of varying types and friendliness. You can do the math on those percentages, should you be so inclined. When I crunch the numbers, it doesn’t feel very successful—I get something around 8% success, fudging it a bit here and there. But it certainly makes me feel successful, in the fact that my productivity is up something like 400%.
The jury’s still out, I reckon. Maybe I need to revisit this after 12 months of cumulative data***. Right now, I need to figure out market one for my newest—a weird little light piece about a shapeshifter in the mall on a Black Friday with bonus Elvis/Buddy Holly impersonators and an unidentified shooter.

 
*“To double your success, triple your failures.”
**as a side note, I’m writing an average of one new piece a month now.
***for the love of God, am I really this geeky?