Caffeineforge

Recently, my 6th short story was accepted for publication in an upcoming anthology. Sound’s pretty good, right? Well, that’s 6 stories out of 37 that I’ve written.

Still, one in six? Those aren’t bad odds.

Well, most stories are submitted and rejected multiple times before they find a home. To date, I have submitted those 37 stores 155 times, and been rejected 120 times. So in reality, we’re actually closer to a 2% acceptance rate. That’s not too much better than the 1-2% average you see people talking about here and there, online.

I have 120,000 words worth of shorts at this point, and I think I’ve made a little under $50 off them. So why do it? For the love of the game. Seriously, shorts are a lot of fun, more than that, though, they are excellent skill builders. You think you wrote a pretty good 4,000 word story? I’ll bet it would be even better at 3,000 words.

When you are writing a web novel, you have infinity pages to tell your story. More is almost always better. When you are writing a trilogy, or a book, you have hundreds or thousands of pages, which is plenty of room for almost anything, but when you are writing a short, well, every word matters, and I love that.

Nothing improves my writing for my longer projects like sharpening my pen on shorter projects. It’s great; honestly, you should try it.

Below is a screenshot of my tracking matrix. It’s how I see what is where, so I don’t send a story to the same event twice. The sharp-eyed among you will notice that to date, only a single story was accepted on the first try. In theory, every story gets five shots at greatness, and the ones I love most get ten shots before I give up on them. This isn’t just to keep from shoveling trash into every open call, it’s so that I can improve them.

Every time I get a rejection, I review the story, and fix it. Some of the ones I wrote in 2023 are much better than they started out in 2025. Practice really does make perfect.