Sunday Links & The Week in #storyeachnight: February 26, 2012 Edition

I've got some good news to announce. This week, on March 1st, I'll have a story published by Kazka Press as part of their monthly flash fiction contest. "A Minor God of Mischief" got submitted with literally just hours to spare before the deadline and I was thrilled to see that they liked it. I hope that you all enjoy it as well.

Recently I've been reading a short story (most) every day/night and tweeting about it under the #storyeachnight hashtag. Here are this week's stories along with my thoughts on them:

2/19 - "When Day is Dun" by Richard Matheson from THE SHORES OF SPACE. A poet seeks the proper epitaph for humanity.
2/20 - "Lobstersaurus" by Eric James Stone from the 5/12 Analog. Touching story of a girl & her giant alien pet.
2/21 - "The Prisoners" by D. K. Latta from Daily Science Fiction. Had an interesting, but maybe a bit unrealistic, scenario.
2/22 - "A Matter of Principal" by Max Allan Collins in FAVORITE KILLS. A retired hitman stumbles across a crime in progress.
2/23 - Accidentally Skipped
2/24 - "A Thousand Flowers" by Margo Lanagan from THE YEAR'S BEST DARK FANTASY AND HORROR: 2011. An interesting fantasy with some beautiful writing. Also, an interesting POV structure with three different first person chunks. (The formatting in my phone's Kindle reader app made the first POV jump a bit confusing to pick up on, but that's not a fault of the story.)
2/25 - "Clean Slate" by Lawrence Block from THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2011. I didn't realize it until I got partway into the story, but this is the short story where Block first wrote about the main character from his novel Getting Off (which I still haven't gotten around to reading). Block is one of my favorite authors and this story was no disappointment. I'm sure the rest of the collection won't be, either. It was a treat getting this one for $1.99 from an Amazon Gold Box deal... (* My favorite for this week.)

And now, here are this week's writing-related links that I found interesting and worth sharing...

"The Persistence of Recordkeeping" (Adam Israel) - Adam describes the tools he uses to keep track of his short fiction submissions. What he does is very similar to what I do and I thought he did a great job of explaining his approach and also providing a sample spreadsheet. If you regularly submit short fiction and are either struggling with your recordkeeping or don't have a formal recordkeeping process, I think you'd really benefit from what he says here.

"Jake Kerr's Eleven Rules on How To Get Great Critiques" (Jake Kerr guest-posting at Alex Shvartman's Speculative Fiction) - Jake has a lot of great thoughts here about the critiquing process. There are a couple of these I might not agree with across-the-board (for example, I've had some good experiences in direct violation of Rule #7), but he presents a good argument for his position on all of them.

"Six Years Later, Everything is Better" (M. Bennardo) - Matt talks about his history with writing and submitting short fiction. Like me, he had an off-and-on past (though his was much more successful than mine) and returned to submitting regularly in August of last year. Everything he says about why things are better now than they were before resonated with me.

Additionally, here's a recap of the posts from this week on my blog:

"A Rant and a Plan" - Monday was a particularly lousy day coming on the heels of a bunch of lousy-feeling days. I wrote about my want to take hold of a positive frame of mind which I had somehow managed to develop late in the day. So far, I'm not doing so bad with that. And it's a good thing, because some events later in the week could have really thrown me for a loop without the right perspective on things.

"Control" - Thursday I talked about things we can change and things we can't change and how sorting events in writing (and in life) properly into those two buckets is critical.

Have a great writing week, everyone!