In an attempt to keep focused on my writing goals, I’ve started tracking the time spent on different types or phases of my writing, from blog posts to new pieces to re-writes. Looking back at the collected data (roughly a month) I can honestly say I suck at keeping on task. In spite of this, I’m still gaining useful information.
Take my most recent piece “Light” as an example. It took me 2 hours and 35 minutes to hammer out the initial draft (roughly 1,100 words). Afterward, I sank an additional 5 hours and 18 minutes into re-writes, expanding it to 1,600 words. That’s a total of 7 hours and 53 minutes invested into this story before I felt it was ready to send out. I wish I had tracked my last two pieces to use as a comparison, but this is a good baseline. Being the first metric I’ve taken, hopefully it’ll only improve from here.
With a healthy word count injection and solid feedback from the Beta Readers I decided to submit “Light”. Since it fell outside what I usually write (genre-wise), I had to do some digging in Duotrope. My search criteria was Mainstream/Literary genre, pro-rate payments (at least .05 cents/word) and the acceptance of simultaneous subs. Having never submitted something like this before, I couldn’t let it sit somewhere for 90+ days before kicking it to the next spot. I needed as big a response as possible to know whether or not this is a genre I should continue pursuing. Here are the markets I ended up submitting to:
The average response time for the five publications range from 20 to 150 days, so at the very least I should be receiving rejection letters pretty soon 
Speaking of which, OSC’s Intergalactic Medicine Show sent me a lovely form rejection for “Moonlit Faith”. That’ll be the second rejection for this piece. I reviewed it again and taking into account feedback from some of my author pals, have decided to trunk the story. The effort necessary to fix it (which would be a complete rip/replace) is more than I want to spend on an older piece. Pressing forward in creating new material is more beneficial to me at this stage. I know some elements of it will appear elsewhere, but as it stands now it isn’t good enough for publication.
“Light” is a stronger piece, dealing more with emotional elements and real situations, which was a welcome change of pace. Hopefully this new direction will yield publishable results.
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