Submit or Bust

I made another round of submissions today.  I had one come back, so I sent it out, and I wrote a new flash and sent it out as well.  Yep, you read right!  Wrong or right, I believe that flash either works or it doesn't.  If I were more of a poet, I'd compare it with fair confidence to poetry, but I'm not.  I'll simply hazard that flash fiction can handle only so much fiddling before it's in utter ruins.

Ooo, hey, I can compare it to art!  When working on a big piece, I can muck around for quite a while and still have things work out okay.  But if it's a miniature, working in that space can quickly turn to overworking, and the next thing I know I've worn a hole in the paper or made a muddy smudge where the art used to be.  Better to just start over from scratch.  Seriously.

I bounced the story off of a reader before I emailed it to the market (thank you agrathea for your time and patience when I pestered you during the Fireside write-in today) so I didn't send it out completely naked, its eyes still closed and its little ears folded over.  It's bright-eyed and fluffy-tailed and should be able to eat solid food.  

I got the initial idea at the Concert for Cline on Sunday, and kept fiddling with it until I had an epiphany today, just in time to pin it down for Fireside.  Have I whined lately about how hard it is for me to write short?  Probably, so I'll let you fill in the blah blah blah yourself.  The story came in at about 800 550 words, not my shortest ever, but pretty darned short for me.  My army of maggots helped take out dead tissue.  There's my good little maggots.  They may not be pleasant creatures, but they're handy to have around.

I've got to get on with agent queries next.  Those are getting easier for me, but it's a tough market out there, tougher than usual, so the added experience is offset.  Poop.  Sometimes I feel like I'm at the end of an era.  It's a very unsettling suppose.  All I can do is submit, or bust.