Sunday, March 31, 2024

Virtual stage fright

I recently submitted a short story to an anthology. Like, really recently. Probably be a while before I find out if it's accepted. 

The process was a little different than usual. The submission was in the form of a Google Doc, made shareable with the editor. Which I could figure out how to do easy enough, but I quickly found that I couldn't actually write in Google Docs. It just felt too public and exposed for me to be creative. I wound up doing 3-4 drafts in Word and finally copying and pasting into Google.

2 comments:

susan said...

We always like to see your stories in print. It would be great if some day you had a book of them published.

As if writing and formatting the stories wasn't already enough it sounds like the submission processes keep getting more complicated. I wouldn't like writing in that context either. In fact, I think I'd be yearning for the days when you could type up a clean copy of a finished story, go to Kinko's for copies you'd mail out to publishers and let them do their own layout.

Ben said...

That's one of the things I'd like to do. I'm hoping to catch a few more curious souls who'd like to read them.

The nice thing about electronic submission is that there's no postage so it's generally free (unless the publisher makes you pay to submit, an obvious red flag I thankfully don't see that much). The nice thing about old-fashioned mail submissions is that you don't have to keep checking your email. When it comes back, it comes back. Life is full of tradeoffs, I guess.