Writing Life: Keeping Track of Your Shorts
While I was working through the Story Match challenge, I was wondering what on earth I was going to do with the stories I was producing, and I toyed with the idea of submitting them to external markets, which meant I would have to be very careful to make sure I didn’t put them in any anthologies if they were accepted, and that I would have to be prepared to track their availability and any periods of exclusivity to which they might be subject. I also considered some of the competitions I’d entered in the past which considered only the first year of a story’s publication, anywhere, for eligibility, and came up with another important reason to track them. The resulting Excel spreadsheet listed the title of each piece vertically, had columns for the date each was created, completed and first published, as well as length and genre. Beside the ‘first published’ date was a column for recording where. I keep separate pages for poetry, flash fiction and short stories, and then c...