Don’t Let Submission Tetris Get You Down
I’m not usually one for New Year’s resolutions, but last year I resolved to write more stories and worry less about submitting my older work for publication.
This was partially a result of something good; I’d sold enough short stories in 2024 that I needed to refill my coffers with new material. But, in truth, it was also a coping response to how fraught submitting to speculative fiction magazines has become.
Since I started submitting six years ago, dozens of respected magazines of fantasy, science fiction, and horror have folded. Others are embroiled in contract controversies. Those still hanging tough are dealing with record-level submissions from both AI and human writers, which makes the chances of an acceptance even more slim.
At the same time, many submission windows are shorter and less predictable–say, speculative magazines only open when the planet Saturn is in full retrograde, between the hours of 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. UTC. The amount of time and effort I was spending on submission Tetris was getting out of hand.
So for 2025, I sent things out when a call was convenient or seemed a particularly good fit, but I tried not to sweat it beyond that. In fact, I laughed out loud the day I submitted one piece and it was listed as being number 1,066 in the queue. I’m still waiting on a response, but with those odds, maintaining hope for an acceptance feels decidedly deluded.
(February update: That story was rejected but made it into the top ten percent of 7,000 submissions … so that’s something, I guess? Maybe next time? Go, Team Deluded!)
In the past, I’d aimed for 100 submissions a year. In 2025, I hit 26. I’m cringing as I type that number, because I didn’t realize precisely how low it was until I tallied it for this blog post. I thought it might be around 50, but apparently, I was a little too good at following my own resolution.
Which brings me to 2026 and my new goal: to start actively submitting again. I’ve got a few new stories ready to go out into the world, and a few older ones I still very much believe in. I can’t control how many – or if any – are accepted. But I can control how many I send out, and I can take advantage of one positive trend I see: increasing numbers of fantasy and science fiction ‘zines that accept simultaneous submissions.
This year, I aim to up my tally while keeping my expectations firmly in check.
Game on.