Plodding to Publication

I've had greater success publishing short stories than novels. The answer is simple - deadlines.

There are generally submission windows for submission of short stories to anthologies, and short story contests invariably have a deadline. In 2017, I had good short story publishing success for a complete amateur, with three stories in Off Highway: Journeys of Nova Scotia Writers, an anthology published by the Evergreen Writers Group, and another in The Coldest December, an anthology of stories commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the 1917 Halifax Explosion published by Quarter Castle Publishing. I had two flash fiction pieces published in On the Premises, a New England based literary ejournal, and one in The Stand. I also had one story that was runner up in a short story contest. Not bad for someone who is just dabbling in this creative writing business.

Novels are not as simple. There are seldom deadlines for submission, and endless opportunities and excuses for revising, editing, rewriting. I said in a blog post in October of last year that I needed to bite the bullet and publish my first oft-revised novel. Since then, I've done another rewrite. Once again, I find myself in need of something to push me toward publication.

This is step one: a cover for my new novel to be - a mystery set in an imaginary south shore Nova Scotia town. If I follow the front cover with a story synopsis, map of the town, back cover, and I don't know what else, I just might turn the manuscript that has been finished for some time into a book.

Or, I could go back and revise it all one more time.