Really there's no one-size-fits-all word count for fiction

I began my obsession with word counts a couple of weeks ago, at the beginning of writing a short story. I was 3,000 words into the first section and already wondering if the final draft would be too long to be published in a journal before I was finished with the thing. That, coupled with a new account on Pinterest, led me to create a Word Count Chart (which, FYI, I also pinned there on my Writers Tools and Tips board.)

Of course, there is no rigid definition of either a short story or a novel. I made the chart to get a general idea of what territory I was in—flash, novella, etc. But once you're ready to look for a publisher, it's best to know what your potential market wants: each literary magazine may have a different definition of the short story along with a suggested word count.

And those definitions may vary for special issues or occasions. For example, Glitter Train, which publishes only fiction, has a wide word count—"2,000 to 20,000 words"—for its Fiction Open. But they also have a Very Short Fiction Award for "up to 3,000 words."

I know of no short cut for finding a journal looking for a particular word count—but you can find journals according to genre through the Poets and Writers Literary Magazines database, and then link to individual journals to check their writers' guidelines.

Literary publications, contests and submissions guidelines available on the Web

In a continued effort to plump up the "Writers' Tools" section of this blog (and for my own use, so I'll have one place to put all these links), here is a list of useful and FREE (non-subscription) web sites for writers yearning to be published in literary journals:

• Literary Magazines :The NewPages Complete List - an A to Z listing of literary magazines, online and print, with links to their web pages. [Note: Newpages.com also has links to Writing Contests and other useful stuff, so check it out.]

• Poets & Writers Literary Magazines  - presents info in a useful column format, so you can see right away which journals accept electronic and simultaneous submissions, and what their reading periods are. Offers a search and a browse feature, as well.

• O. Henry Prize Stories has lists of journals from which it has drawn stories over the years arranged by frequency. It also offers a list of alphabetical Index of Literary Magazines, which gives contact info and web site only for each. The list appears selective (as in journals from whose works they take submissions for the O. Henry Prize) rather than comprehensive.

• The Best American Short Stories anthologies does not seem to have a similarly helpful web site; their web site offers only the barest of details. However, if you look at a paper copy of the most recent anthology, it lists American and Canadian magazines that print short stories.

• Finally, before entering a literary contest, you might want to check it out against the Writer Beware web page: Warnings About Literary Fraud and Other Schemes, Scams, and Pitfalls That Target Writers.

WH's Upcoming Call-Outs to Writers

In September, I issued WH's First Call Out to Writers, and printed the results (Writers on rejection)  earlier this month.

I'd like to schedule this as a regular feature because I enjoy hearing from other writers and feel I have a lot to learn, especially from better-published writers. In order to give writers a longer period in which to respond, I'm listing the topics for the next two Call-Outs below, along with a request for ongoing information on online writers' tools. 

Instructions

Please send your responses to me via my email thebethblevins -at- gmail.com, and put  "Writing Home" in the subject line so it will get through spam filters. Please reply to one topic per email to make it easier for me to know what you're talking about. The deadline for responses is given with each topic.

Topics

1. DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 12, 2008

If you don't work as a professional writer (i.e., write for money): how do you reconcile your writing life with your career? Do you work in a related field, or in an environment that totally takes you away from pen and paper (or computer) all day?  Do you find things in your workday to write about, or does your writing come from a totally separate part of your life and experience? How do you make time to write?

2. DEADLINE: DECEMBER 12, 2008

How do you keep track of your submissions—and publications/contests to submit your work to?  In my August 4 post, I wrote about the wonderfully tactile way that writer and instructor Nancy Naomi Carlson keeps track of her submissions. I'd like to hear if there are other ways to do this, which writers have found easy or especially beneficial. I'd also really like to know how you keep up with all the contest deadlines out there, if you regularly submit pieces to contests.

3. DEADLINE: ONGOING.

What are your favorite writers' magazines, web sites, blogs? How do you use them? Why do they particularly appeal to you?  Your responses will help me add links to a list of writers' resources in the right column of this blog. Feel free to send suggestions anytime and I'll add them as I receive them; unless you say so otherwise, I may sometimes print the comments you send about the resources in occasional blog posts. 

Learn from my mistakes: how to start a blog off right

I hereby impart the wisdom of my limited experience, gathered during the five short months I've been blogging. These are things I would do-over if I could:

1. Always try to make your blog name and blog URL coincide as much as possible.

I used "http://beblevins.blogspot.com/" for "Writing Home" blog because I used to be "beblevins" in all my past email addresses (@aol, etc.) and thought maybe people who knew me could find my primary blog that way.

The other reason I did this is because http://www.writinghome.blogspot.com/ had already been taken—though it hasn't been updated since 2005; and http://www.writinghomeblog.blogspot.com/ had also been taken, but it hasn't been updated since 2006.

That leads me to my second do-over:

2. Come up with a name for your blog that hasn't already been used.

I know that's getting to be nearly impossible since so many people are creating blogs now (and they get to keep those blog names even when they're no longer updating them...). Be willing to compromise, if necessary. When I started this blog, "Writing Home" was the name that stuck in my head and I couldn't let go of it; although I still really like the name, I wish I had come up with something that hadn't been used on Blogger before and which also isn't the name of at least one book and several other web pages, as I found out after the fact. (I also wrote about this in my April 8, 2008 posting, Writing Home—Not such a unique name after all). 

3. Create a somewhat generic email address that you can use for signing into all of your Blogger accounts.

This is really important if you're planning to do more than one blog—or if there's any possibility that you'll do more than one blog in the future.

I made the mistake of creating a unique email address for each of the blogs I started so that I had to sign in four different ways at one point—and I sometimes couldn't remember the unique sign-in for each one. Now I have added "thebethblevins -at- gmail" as an administrator to all my active blogs, which is why "B. Blevins" and "Beth Blevins" are both listed as administrators for Writing Home. I don't need B. Blevins anymore, with her unique writinghomeblog -@ -gmail address, but I haven't been able to bring myself to kill her off yet.

4. Decide what you want your blog to do or even achieve.

Do you just want an electronic refuge for your thoughts? To simply try your hand at blogging? To make a visual/photo record of your family life? Then proceed immediately to the nearest free blogging space and blog away, knowing that only your friends may read it (and you may not be able to persuade them to read it, either).

Do you want to reach readers (or even make money)? Then you'll need to think about this for awhile, preferably before even finding a name for your blog. To be a successful/popular blogger, it seems that you need to find a niche that no one else has filled or that you can fill better than anyone else even if others have attempted it.

5. If your aim is to write a popular (and/or money-making) blog, do some research first.

To find your niche you'll need to look at a lot of other blogs, or at least be aware of them. When I've begun to look at blogs, I've been overwhelmed with the variety and number. For lack of time on my part, I've been unable to sit down for hours and scroll and hyperlink through them. There are directories and lists of best blogs that I've looked at, which I found after I already started blogging. But I don't think that I would have been deterred from letting this blog evolve the way it has evolved if I had looked at and studied them first. Mine was the first impulse listed in #4—I just wanted to create something and get it out of my laptop. Now I wonder why my audience hasn't found me even though I've never really gone out looking for my audience.

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It should be noted that this blog originally didn't start out as a writers' blog anyway. The original focus wasn't just on writing, but was anything I happened to be thinking of the day I wrote it. Then I went to a blogging workshop and described my then one-month-old blog to the instructor, who said it had no focus. So, I divided up what had been posted on the original blog into three different blogs, keeping Writing Home as a blog about the writing process. (I described my reaction to the workshop in the post, I'm doing this all wrong). 

The other two blogs have since fallen to neglect; in the meantime, I started two other subject-focused blogs—Cooking for Four, my food/cooking blog, and QACW, a databank/blog of quotes about creative women. It's too soon to tell which of these, including Writing Home, will survive in the next few months.

Useful Writers' Web Sites

I took a workshop on Flash Fiction yesterday with C.M. Mayo at the Writers Center in Bethesda. Two of the web sites she recommended were:

• Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. Offers a directory of its members, which include quality lit journals, both in print and as a list of links:

http://www.clmp.org/directory/index.php. You can check the list for possible markets and verify legitimate/literary pubs.

Another page on the CLMP web site simply says "Links"--there you'll find four categories of links:
Get Indie Lit (123)
Publishers (192)
Resources for Publishers (225)
Resources for Writers (57)

• Mayo also recommended her own web site, of course: C.M. Mayo.

A useful resource on her web site is the "Workshop" page, which links to her Giant Golden Buddha page--365 days of 5-minute writing exercises. We did a few of these in class and they were fun and stimulated lots of ideas.

Workshop also includes Resources for Writers, which discusses the writing biz, writing workshops and editing.