Ken Liu (incorrectly referred to by the OP below as “Lee”) is a prolific short story writer and, as of recently, also a novelist. He uses an apt metaphor to point out what those of us who write in both forms generally discover: they’re structurally different, and the skills involved in writing them are not all the same.

Originally shared by Kantuck Nadie Nata-Akon

Two interesting writing articles.

The one from Mr. Lee sums it up best for me. I posted this to an IM to a writing friend.

(10:06:16 AM) Kantuck: Mr Lee writes: “When I write short stories, I generally don’t outline at all. I can  proceed by instinct and experimentation, feeling my way and sculpting  the story piece by piece while the shape of the whole is held in my  head.”

(10:06:47 AM) Kantuck: I’ve said before I can write a short story or micro fiction because I can see it all in my mind. But a novel? almost impossible.

(10:07:09 AM) Kantuck: although I /do tend to get a bit wordy, once a story starts going./ Case in point my last one 🙂

http://www.space.com/32384-writing-scifi-requires-a-sense-of-scale.html

and

from TV tropes:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale

I think I can scale this down to help get more of a scale. Imagine me, living in Kentucky USA and want to walk to Juno, Alaska. According to Google maps that’s 3,315 miles. At 15 miles a day, that’d take me around 8 months.

Now scale that up to just the size of the solar system and go to Pluto. 7.5 billion km; uh…jezz…12,962,962.96 years.

Looks like I’ll need a couple more hiking boots now.

http://www.space.com/32384-writing-scifi-requires-a-sense-of-scale.html

Sent off “Aspiration Value” to Fantastic Stories of the Imagination this morning. I have a good feeling about this little story. It’s based on a throwaway remark by a futurist in a video I watched, from which I pulled a clear but far from simple conflict to build the story around. 

And if Fantastic don’t want it, it’s the kind of piece that’s suitable for a dozen other pro markets. 

Sam is a stand-up guy and does good work, and now he’s found love, after much too long. Are you going to stand in the way of all that?

Plus, if you buy his books or his cover designs, you will get good books and/or cover designs, which is a thing in itself.

Originally shared by S. A. Hunt

Help me get back to my lady in Michigan! I just need a few hundred bucks for a plane ticket — please let anybody and everybody know about this badass Amazon Top 10 horror-fantasy epic Malus Domestica or my award-winning, Dark Tower-inspired gunslinger series The Outlaw King! Please spread word as far as you can get it!

And for you indie authors, I’m still doing custom book covers for $100! My portfolio is at the “Art” link in the address below.

http://www.sahuntbooks.com/malus-domestica.html

From the award-winning author of the Outlaw King series comes another harrowing adventure in the grand tradition of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Charlaine Harris.

Robin Martine has come a long way.

She’s not your usual college-age girl. More often than not, Robin’s washing a load of gory clothes at the laundromat, or down at the lake throwing hatchets at pumpkins. She lives in an old van, collects swords, and dyes her mohawk blue.

Also, she kills witches for a living on YouTube.

You see, Robin’s life was turned upside down by those hideous banshees from Hell. She spent high-school in a psych ward, drugged out of her head for telling the cops her mother Annie was murdered with magic. Magic from a witch named Marilyn Cutty.

After a 3-year warpath across America, she’s come home to end Cutty for good.

But she’ll have to battle hog-monsters, a city full of raving maniacs, and a killer henchman called the “Serpent” if she wants to end the coven’s reign over the town of Blackfield once and for all.

A decent writing day. Substantially rewrote the 6000-word fantasy story I wrote two weeks ago; it’s now darker and less predictable, and may be suitable for submission to the Were anthology that’s currently on open call. (They don’t want werewolves. This was a werewolf story, but now it’s just a woman-turns-into-a-monster story.)

That was this morning. This afternoon, I drafted an SF story that I had fairly well worked out already; 2300 words, based on an idea I got while listening to a lecture about future technology trends. It’s starting out fairly dark and (I think) not too predictable, or at least full of new ideas.

When I say “dark” I mean, of course, “dark for me”.

Solarpunk – about a future of environmental crisis, but approached hopefully. Pro rates. (Opening in April; this is a heads-up.)

http://www.upperrubberboot.com/sunvault-will-open-for-submissions-soon/

Refugees are a big concern right now, not least in Australia, where they’re being treated shockingly. 

Here’s a charity anthology, which is also offering to pay writers generously. Looking for fiction about refugees (SFF and otherwise), up to 7500 words. 

http://ticonderogapublications.com/web/index.php/our-books/193-refugee-anthology/398-we-want-your-refugee-stories

So, on the one hand, readership of SF/fantasy short stories through the traditional magazines seems to be declining year on year, in general. 

On the other hand, there are still plenty around. I counted more than 100 pro and semipro markets for SFF last time I checked. 

On the gripping hand (we are talking about SFF here), there’s a revival in people reading short fiction, snatching moments when they’re waiting in line or waiting to pick up the kids from school to read on their phone, tablet, or ereader. Amazon have a special section of their ebook store based on how long it will take you to read something. 

Maybe (I thought last night) we need an app that will connect SFF (and maybe other?) readers with stories.

Sign up the magazines, which act as curators of content, and maybe some of the anthologies, too. Allow authors to put their own stories in directly, if they’ve previously sold the story to at least a semipro market and the rights have reverted.

Enable the users to choose what to read by magazine/antho, or by author, or by editor, or by length, or by (user-generated) tag, or a combination.

Charge a small monthly subscription, and track which stories people read, and pay the source magazine/anthology/author proportionately (kind of the Kindle Unlimited model).

Yes? 

With the payment I received yesterday, I’ve now passed $500 in total earnings from short stories. But I’ve also already earned 40% as much this year, with that one payment, as I earned in the whole of last year. 

Getting up into the pro rates really makes a difference. 

Wrote about 6000 words of a short story on Friday, and finished off the last 700-odd this morning. It’s about a princess cursed to turn into a wolf at night, and features an older female protagonist. 

Not sure where I’ll send it once it’s been revised. It’s maybe not literary enough for Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It could be another one for Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, perhaps.

Little bit of research for my short stories book. How hard is it really to sell a story to a top professional SF market? 

Methodology: I consulted The Submission Grinder (thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com), and considered only those markets that are SFWA-recognised (since these are longer established and are likely to give the most conservative figure for acceptances). Most of these have submission numbers in the high hundreds – if not over 1000 – recorded in the database, so the figures should be reasonably accurate.

Things that could make them less accurate:

1. People who submit successfully may be more likely to use the paid alternative to The Grinder (duotrope.org). 

2. People may not record all of their rejections (but they are highly likely to record an acceptance to such prestigious markets). 

I ran the figures only for science fiction, since most of the fantasy markets are also science fiction markets, but not necessarily vice versa. (The only SFWA-recognised fantasy short story market that isn’t also an SF market is Beneath Ceaseless Skies, with an acceptance rate of 4.71%.) 

Results:

Acceptance rates (in percent) for the 12 SFWA-recognised markets for SF short stories: 

Daily Science Fiction 9.89

Unlikely Story 8.1

AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review 7.69

Escape Pod 2.95

Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show 2.77

Analog 2.75

Lightspeed 2.43

Grantville Gazette: Universe Annex 2.08

Strange Horizons 1.86

Fantastic Stories of the Imagination 1.74

Asimov’s 0.81

F&SF 0.53

Average 3.63

However, consider this, which I’ve heard from several editors: Ninety percent of what is submitted to these magazines is completely unpublishable drivel. If you can actually write a story, you should multiply the number by 10 to get a more realistic figure. 

That still leaves your chances with F&SF at about 1 in 20.