Simultaneous Submissions

When it comes to submitting short stories or poetry, I do not believe in simultaneous submissions.  One should submit their work and forget about it.  Many little and literary magazines take weeks, even months to respond.  Work on your next story.  Target a different publication for your next submission.  After that, move on to your next story.  Soon the five months that one publication takes to respond, flies by because you are busy writing more stories.  It should never be a waiting game.  If you managed to get it accepted, great!!  If not, send it to another publication.  Create a spreadsheet to keep track of things.  What should you put in it?  Whatever info you find is important to you (circulation, response time, etc.).

Any who aspire to become writers should have an arsenal of ideas ready to be flushed out into short stories, poetry, novels, scripts, etc.  There's a world of events, news, people, experiences, and subject matter one can draw upon to cultivate writing ideas.

Currently, I have over thirty short story ideas that I was able to come up with in the last month mostly inspired by current events.  I carry around a composition notebook with me all the time.  Usually a working title is good enough for me to trigger what it was that I wanted to write about.  You may want to write a short paragraph or put them on 3 x 5 index cards, whatever works for you.  Sometimes the perfect opening sentence or paragraph pop to mind.  I do not ignore it.  I jot it down to be revisited when I am ready to write that story, then I continue to work on the current story at hand.  This works for me because I do not like being constrained.  It may not work for you.

This brings me to one last point I'd like to cover in this post.  I will probably go into it in detail later in a post of its own.  You should know if your idea is best suited to be a short story, poem, flash fiction, a script (movie), or if you think you have enough content for it to sustain the length of a novel.  Sure, as you go along what you thought was a good idea for a book might only be good enough for a novella length of fiction.  It's a gut feeling.  Be flexible.  Have fun and write, then write some more.