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Kelly I. Hitchcock Posts

Another poem selected for “Best of the Year” collection!

Published by Kelly on December 27, 2010

A few weeks ago, a poem I submitted way back when to an independent online magazine was selected for their “Best of the Year” collection. I found out about this site last year when I was at South by Southwest. It’s a collaborative content site that posts new submissions of art, literature, poetry, and other random stuff every hour. I submitted two poems to them in the last year, and they accepted both of them, and now both of them have been featured in their “Best of the First Year” collection!

You can check it out here:

http://w5ran.com/2010/12/best-of-the-first-year-to-a-moth/

http://w5ran.com/2010/11/best-of-the-first-year-things-in-my-stuff-drawer/

I must be New Years resolved to write more stuff in 2011!

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My life with Kindle: Part 1

Published by Kelly on December 26, 2010

Apparently the Santa in my life thought I was just nice enough to deserve a brand new Kindle for Christmas. Eventually, maybe, I would have gotten it for myself, but it really is a very thoughtful gift and so far, I love it. It’s also important because it will probably be the first format I publish my novel in, and as writers, we’ve got to get with the program.

My favorite feature on it so far is the ability to download a sample of a book before buying the whole thing. I decided to try this feature out on a writer I follow on Twitter who has done a shitload of self-promotion and whose persistence I figured warranted my no-cost 30-minute (40 if you count the part where I stopped to reheat my leftover Christmas ham) perusal. On Kindle, his book’s list price is $5.99, which is about 3 times what I typically pay for a book, and since I had the option to try it before buying, I leapt at the chance.

I was THIS close to buying the book after the sample, and it wasn’t even that good. Still, it had enough good moments to make buying the book a weighty decision in my mind. I know the sample will sucker me into cracking open the wallet for much better written books in the future.

It also gave me a little confidence boost. After all, this guy isn’t some schmo who self-published in his basement. He’s a guy that got picked up by an independent press that does their business mostly in ebooks. He was trying way, WAY too hard to imitate Tucker Max but did so badly. He overused metaphors and even did some shifts in tense in the same sentence – things even a lowly barely-published writer with a BA in Creative Writing from a state school could pull off. If this guy can get accepted by an independent book publisher and charge $5.99 for his work, then I probably can, too.

New Year’s Resolution to follow…

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New Essay: Christmas with Just Dad

Published by Kelly on December 7, 2010

I’ve posted a new manuscript that is somewhere between a flash fiction piece and an essay. I’m not sure which fits more, so I put it in essays because it starts out most like an essay. It’s called Christmas with Just Dad and you can read all about it here.

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The writer’s dilemma: carspiration

Published by Kelly on December 1, 2010

Any writer will be able to brandish on command the handy-dandy notebook they carry with them at all times for the moments when ideas strike that must be either written down or forgotten forever.  If they’re anything like me, though, these moments almost always happen while driving.

I spend about an hour in my car every day going to and from the office, and cruelly enough, my moments of inspiration usually happen after a particularly difficult day.  I’m one of those who refuses to talk on the phone while I am driving as well, so even if I were to try and make a voice note, it would probably be just as dangerous as writing out my brilliant idea that comes to me in the car.

Writers – how do you deal with “carspiration”?

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New story up: The Pollen Bath

Published by Kelly on November 23, 2010

I got the idea for this short story way back before it was 30-some degrees back in Kansas City, but I hit a wall with it so many times, it sat in various stages of incompletion for a long time. NaNoWriMo was my kick in the ass to do something with all these works in progress, and I finished this one. It’s called The Pollen Bath.

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Seeing my name in print

Published by Kelly on November 21, 2010

It’s a pretty damn priceless feeling. My work got accepted by a print journal all the way back in February, but it still has yet to be printed. I’ve also had several things be accepted by web magazines and other bookish sites, and seeing my name in an HTML heading was also pretty damn cool. But nothing could compare to my elation when I ripped open the package that contained my two contributor’s copies for the first issue of Line Zero. Holding the book in my hand and seeing my name on the back cover in the list of contributors, it was a pretty unmatched feeling.

Maybe I’m just a dork, but it rocks to see my first published short story, Two Steps Forward, in words on a page. It’s a feeling I hope to enjoy several more times.

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New poem up. They should call it NaPoWriMo.

Published by Kelly on November 12, 2010

Well, it’s National Novel Writing Month, but I am not writing a novel. I have several reasons, all of which I can back up with my own flawed logic. Regardless, I did set a goal for the month, a goal to finish all the works in progress that plague me. My second goal was not to start anything new until I accomplished the first goal.

So far, I have broken both goals. I have only finished one work in progress, and I wrote a new poem. What can I say? I just kinda happened. Besides, you can’t stifle inspiration when you are lucky enough to get it. Anyway, I was down in Springfield, MO, my old stomping grounds back in college, and I drove by the bar I used to go to several times per week back in my heyday. It was “our bar”, with the other half of the our being my ex-husband. The building is vacant and looks exactly the same.

It inspired me to use it as a metaphor for the dumbest decision I ever made. It’s called Culley’s Pub: An Elegy. Check it out.

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New Short Story: The Camera

Published by Kelly on October 25, 2010

Last week I was struggling with whether to finish either of the 2 short stories I’ve been working on for what seems like ages and whose writer’s block has given me fits of semi-insanity, or tabula-rasa it and start over, when a friend told me a crazy story.

It was all about how he found this camera while we were in Lawrence, which I remember, and how he found the person it belonged to, just by the pictures that were on it and his powers of deductive reasoning. Well, the truth might be stranger than fiction, but I’ll let you be the judge of just how implausible this really sounds. Check out The Camera and let me know what you think.

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The winding Internet road

Published by Kelly on October 15, 2010

Do you ever start at one place on the internet and end up on a completely different place, with only vague recollection of how you got there?

Today, I was late at work waiting for some other people to provide some stuff for me, so while I was waiting, I decided to catch up on some Google reader. As much as I try to stay up on what’s going on in the industry, it’s really tough, and I often fail. Still, there are a few choice sites that I like to make sure I’m always up on. One of them is midlist thriller writer J.A. Konrath’s blog – A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing. I rarely read an entire post end-to-end, because they are often long and I am lazy, but I was entranced by this one. If you’ve dealt with anyone offering you a book deal, which I have and to this day am SO glad I declined, even though I am a nobody, take 5 minutes and read this post. It’s a lot of fun.

After I read the entire post, I did something else I almost never do – I left a comment, and took some time to read some of the other comments. I typically avoid these because I get overly emotionally involved in comment arguments between strangers hiding behind the safety net of anonymity the internet affords and my temper starts flaring. These things never matter, so it’s usually just best I leave them alone. I once read 3 pages worth of comments on an article about Uggs. People have some seriously strong pro-Ugg and con-Ugg opinions. Despite my general avoidance of comment spaces, I decided to troll the comments on this post for A) other writers and industry professionals I can follow on Twitter and B) to see what the response was on this very flagrant post.

One of the comments left was this:

Hi — love the post! I’m an author and I run a small independent publishing company (Bucks County Publishing) and we are primarily involved in paperbacks but we do eBooks too… it is a side thing really because the overhead is so little to do it. We price all of our full length eBook novels at $2.99 and anything shorter is $1.99. Simple pricing. It is ridiculous that these publishing companies want to gauge the customer OR kill the medium…. or both.

I, too, am an author, and I love small independent publishing companies. So I decided to check out their site, and see if they were accepting submissions, because I am a predatory author. As it turns out, they are, and as far as I can tell, it would be a really really good fit for me and my work. Then again, I’ve thought that about lots of book publishers I’ve submitted to who have summarily rejected me. Still, what luck to just find this by link-jumping on the internets. Then, I got to thinking about other neat things I’ve stumbled upon by random internet jumping…

Line Zero: I heard about this new print journal on Twitter. They were looking for submissions for their first issue, I submitted, and I got accepted. Really, I just lucky at the right time with the right journal.

LinkedIn is notorious for sending me down these weird internet paths. Somehow I got from a friend’s LinkedIn page to Smashwords, and that’s how I found out about them. I am still evaluating whether I want to take the ebook self-pub route, but if and when I do, this will be how I do it.

Rose City Sisters: Another Twitter find. The site editor started following me on Twitter, put out the call for submissions, I threw a flash fiction thing together, and decided it would be a good venue for getting some flash fiction practice under my belt. They’ve posted 2 of my stories since.

The volunteer thing I didn’t get: Another stumbly motion on Twitter.

Oh, and I guess I should mention that I found J.A. Konrath’s blog when I was doing some research for a post on this site regarding my distaste for SASEs.

So, if we’re counting, three of my publications came from internet-winding, even if they’re on independent sites and journals. If the Bucks County Publishing people publish me, that’ll make four. Not too bad for just messing around on the internet and finding the right opportunities at opportune moments. Maybe I should just set aside an hour a week for internet “creative space.”

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The submission withdrawal process, round 3

Published by Kelly on October 11, 2010

I got my first short story accepted for publication, which is super fantastic, but always comes with the horrible chore of withdrawing the manuscript from everywhere else you sent it that hasn’t rejected it yet. The first time I found out a poem of mine was getting published, I was completely overwhelmed by how much work it was to complete this chore, and how rude some of the publications were. Last time around, I got some interesting responses, including the following:

  • “Umm… we don’t have your stuff.” Hmmm… that probably means I put it in an envelope and was too cheap to mail it off. My bad.
  • “How dare you! We don’t accept simultaneous submissions!”  Oops… I must not have read the fine print. But you really should if you want work from real writers.
  • “Mail daemon: undeliverable.” Update your mail server if you want submissions.

This time around, I was much more prepared. I made sure I read the fine print over again for everyone I sent to, to make sure I hadn’t been violating their rules in the first place. I also prepared an email template, so I wouldn’t have to think about what to write every time. So I was both mentally and resourcefully prepared. These are my findings from this round of submission withdrawal:

  1. It was far, far easier than last time. I had sent my poems to about 3 times as many people as I had this manuscript, which significantly lessened the chore.
  2. I had sent this manuscript to a total of 18 publications. Of those 18, 1 accepted it, 6 rejected it, and 11 still had it under consideration.
  3. The range of dates for submission were from March to September.
  4. Of the 11 who still had it under consideration, the longest period was 7 months.
  5. One of the publications who I had still recorded as pending had rejected me without notification.
  6. I was able to withdraw 4 submissions myself using an online manager.
  7. I had to email 6 of the publications I had submitted to.
  8. There was only one snail mail submission that I had forgotten to mail, and I knew it without having an embarrassing response email.

Lesson learned: keep good track of your submissions, and be prepared when you get lucky and one of them picks it up.

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