Thursday, August 28, 2008

Guidelines and wordcounts

Just got my third rejection from Cinema Spec; at least this one was personal. I think basically what's wrong with the story, and all the stories I've sent her, is that my style and the editor's style just don't mesh. So I'm not going to bother to write anything else for that market.

Incidentally, if an editor really wants stories under 1,000 words, she needs to put that in her guidelines instead of changing the pay rate for stories 1-2,000 words long and thinking that'll keep people from sending her stories 2,000 words long. Witness the guidelines for Cinema Spec here, and the editor's blog about story lengths here.

At least now I can put all the fun character bits back in to the story that I had to take out to get it under 2,000 words. I am not a 2,000-word-and-under story writer anyway. Only one of my published stories (not counting flash, which is a different animal) is under 2,000 words, and it just barely. By the time I'm done with the rewrite, this story will probably be around 3,000 words and it'll be something I can be proud of.

4 comments:

Cate Gardner said...

My stories are the opposite - they seem to be on the shorter rather than the longer side (though I always aim for as high a word count as possible). :( I envy your abundance of words.

K.C. Shaw said...

I envy your brevity! :)

Unknown said...

CinemaSpec sounds like a tough one- from the sounds of things, I better get started on a second submission - I think I know the outcome of my first. Like the blog. I'm over at

http://jointhebirdies.blogspot.com/

K.C. Shaw said...

Yeah, I had no luck last year with the Sporty Spec anthology either. It just makes me more and more determined to get into this one, though. Congrats on your Northern Haunts sale, by the way!