Yes, we can all fall back on William Goldman's famous "Nobody knows anything", uttered in the context of the fickle nature of Hollywood, to explain away bizarre editorial responses to story submissions, but sometimes the email coming back to you is so off-beam that you can't help think... WTF?
I've just had such a wtf moment - appropriately, in an alphabetic way, to WotF as the Writers of the Future contest has just returned my 4th quarter 2023 entry as a 'did not place'.
Now, I'm not arrogant enough to think I should automatically be at the top of the list, or even on the list, every time, but with some 75 stories published and four appearances in the Best of British Science Fiction anthologies, I'm not exactly wet behind the ears at this game and can tell when a story has merit. And this one (call me superstitious, but I don't like referring to a story by name until it's sold) had been a very near miss with Shoreline of Infinity, liked by Strange Horizons, and had just been let go by Galaxy's Edge having been held for further consideration for 600 days. (Yes, that's not a typo - 600 days, from New Year's Day 2022 until this September.) That is not the palmares of a 'did not place' story. Hence, I ask again: WTF???
I thought it may be instructive, for my sanity if nothing else, to plot out my success, or otherwise, with the Scientologists, since I made it into the final six years ago...
- 2nd quarter, 2017: finalist, with a story that's been rejected 21 times since, without ever being an obvious 'near miss' for anybody other than WotF
- 3rd quarter, 2017: didn't enter
- 4th quarter, 2017: honourable mention for 'The King of China's Mirror', published by Shoreline of Infinity earlier this year
- 1st quarter, 2018: unplaced, with a story currently held by Apex, albeit significantly rewritten
- 2nd quarter, 2018: unplaced with 'Inktomi and the Skyship', which appeared in Wyldblood #7
- 3rd quarter, 2018: honourable mention for a story that already had positive feedback, albeit a pass, from F&SF
- 4th quarter, 2018: 'The Disappearing', which later appeared in Bourbon Penn #27, was unplaced
- 1st quarter, 2019: unplaced, with an earlier draft of my latest 'unplaced' story - they clearly don't like it!
- 2nd quarter, 2019: silver honourable for 'Faivish the Imbecile', later published by token market Quiet Reader
- 3rd quarter, 2019: another silver honourable, this time for a triptych of stories, the middle of which is released next month as 'Don't Eat the Bundyroot' in Ossuary Press's Under the Stairs anthology
- 4th quarter, 2019: an early draft of 'Thus with a Kiss I Die', published by Aurealis in March this year, is unplaced
- 1st quarter, 2020: 'Roadkill' fails to place, but is published in 2021 by Uhri as part of their Needle Drops' series
- 2nd quarter, 2020: a novelette of which I am very fond but remains unpublished is unplaced - but given it's about cults, maybe that's not a surprise
- 3rd quarter, 2020: silver honourable for a story that's had 25 rejections, and almost made it into Parsec, but remains unpublished
- 4th quarter, 2020: silver honourable again, this time for a redrafted 'Thus with a Kiss I Die'
- 1st quarter, 2021: honourable mention for 'The Credo of Comrade January', which is scheduled to appear under the Dragon Gems imprint before the year is out - so they assure me
- 2nd quarter, 2021: a silver honourable for my 3rd quarter 2018 story, already liked by F&SF and directly off the back of a couple of rewrites at the request of Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores, up from honourable mention
- 3rd quarter, 2021: silver honourable for a 17,000 word novella that remains unpublished and, having run out of obvious homes for something of an inconvenient length, remains in a drawer
- 4th quarter, 2021: an honourable mention for a story that's otherwise racked up 20 rejections without even a hint of buy-signals
- 1st quarter, 2022: an honourable mention for 'The Charmed', a hard-to-pigeonhole tale due to be published in the Alchemy Book of the Unknown by PS Publishing next year
- 2nd quarter, 2022: an honourable for another squad player that has kissed 28 frogs and found none of them to be princes
- 3rd quarter, 2022: continuing the run of honourables for a story that Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores requested a rewrite only for the next draft to be dismissed in a single line
- 4th quarter, 2022: just an honourable for another story busy collecting rejection slips, although I'm particularly fond of it
- 1st quarter, 2023: an honourable mention for a story written for an anthology call from a publisher that never even bothered to respond
- 2nd quarter, 2023 - as if presaging the WTF direction of travel of WofT, I resubmit my 3rd quarter 2020 effort, which received a silver honourable, and it doesn't just get an unplaced, it's deemed "not quite ready for us" - i.e. not even considered
- 3rd quarter, 2023: an honourable for another reasonably told tale that may find a home eventually
Which brings us to my latest result, the repeat first round knockout for the resubmitted 1st quarter 2019 entry.
So, what to conclude? Well, these may not be statistically significant, but 0% of my finalists, 43% of my silver honourables, and 33% of my honourables have been published, but the success rate for those unplaced or worse is 50%, plus other 'failures' are being held. Plus my unplaced seem to have as good a chance at semi-pro or better rates, with silver honourables like Faivish the Imbecile going for a token rate.
The most statistically watertight claim may be that there's little to no correlation between the Writers of the Future contest placing of individual stories and eventual publishing success, at least when you raise the quality threshold to at least 'honourable' levels. Perhaps the acid test is to resubmit my 2nd and 4th quarter stories to see if their 'not ready to be considered' and 'unplaced' status is repeated - or else, sell them in the meantime! Watch this space.
Like the man said, nobody knows anything.
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
Twenty-four slipstream stories. Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
