Two summers ago, I participated in a series of workshops for an anthology project. There were six anthologies, all with a different genre or theme and a different editor for each. One of them was a mystery anthology. All writers got personal feedback from the editors if their stories weren’t selected.

None of my stories were selected. Not a big surprise, but I got some useful feedback.

Fastforward to January of 2025. Igot off my butt and sent the mystery story to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. for those who might not be aware, AHMM has an abyssmal response time. The few stories I had submitted before had a response time of a year. Or longer.

Time marches on, I put the submission out of my mind, the ownership of AHMM changed, (as did the ownership of Ellery Queen, Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF. I’ve written about that here.) I focused on other projects.

There have been some complaints about the contract terms the new publisher has put into the contracts. I know some writers who no longer submit to any of these magazines because of some of the terms the publisher won’t negotiate on.

Then I got an email recently.

The story had been accepted. Contract attached. Publication date August.

Sixteen month response time.

I read the contract and withdrew the story.

This was the first time I’d seen one of the new contracts, although I had heard plenty about them from a few writer friends.

The word “irrevocable” was used frequently.  I would be signing away all rights, including audio, film, and media. There was no reversion clause.

Sorry, but I’m only interested in licensing first North American and/or English language serial rights. Not anything else. And certainly not in perpetuity.

It was a thrill to get a contract. On the other hand, I have to wonder if I would have gotten the acceptance if the contract terms hand’t changed. Have enough top writers stopped submitting to AHMM that they are buying from second-tier?

I don’t know. I’m not going to worry about it.

As for the story, I don’t recall that much about it. I’ll reread it and decide what I want to do with it.

But that’s what’s been going on with me lately.

So for the last eight days, I’ve had four short story deadlines. I made three out of four, including the last about half an hour ago.

The first was for a mystery sf workshop. So were the next two, although the setting had to be the same in both and different from the first. These were for a study along I was doing since I couldn’t attend the in-person session. I’d had some lead time on the first one since it had to be written before the workshop started. The other two I got during the workshop and had only two days on each one to finish. I didn’t  make the second one because I was driviing the day the prompt was given and spent half of the second day dealing with insurance and roofers. By the time I got to it, the day was nearly over, and I was falling asleep over the keyboard.

I also think this story would have ended up too long for the length requirement. I’ll finish it since I like the setup, and I got good feedback on the setting in the first story of this pair.

The fourth story is for a holiday project that will be published at the end of the year. I would love to be published in this project and the anthology that goes with it. We’ll have to see. I got started on it yesterday, and today I scrapped what I’d done. I’ll still go back and finish the story, but the fantasy element, which is one of the things the editor will be looking at, was weak. The story I wrote this afternoon is, I think, a much better fit for the project.

On the 2024 words per day in 2024, I’m about a day behind, alhtough I’ve made a lot of progress catching up today. There have been, and will continue to be, some days when I won’t be able to get much writing done due to having to be on the road. Some of those days I won’t get much notice on since they are job-related, and the nature of the travel is such that it happens when it happens.

Now, back to the keyboard.