Inkd Publishing – Ink-Stained Wretches

Submissions and Rejections

By N.M. Cedeño

No one likes rejection. Being rejected certainly doesn’t feel good, but anyone who wants to write (and who isn’t self-publishing their work) has to become inured to receiving rejections. While some of my stories have been accepted on their first submission, the vast majority of my traditionally published work was rejected at least once before it was accepted for publication. If I believed that the rejections were commentaries on the quality of the stories, I might have thrown the stories in a drawer after the first rejection and given up. This post is for everyone out there whose fellow writers and beta readers have told them their work is ready for publication, but who are afraid of rejection or think a single rejection is the end of the line.

Sometimes stories (even phenomenal stories that go on to win awards, so I’ve heard) take multiple submissions to find a publication home. These stories, through no fault of the story or the author, simply have trouble landing at the right market with the right editor at the right moment.

If I was the type of person to give up on a story and forget it after one rejection or even after five rejections, several of my stories would never have been published in magazines or anthologies.

Why do some stories take multiple submissions to be accepted if the story is well-written and ready for publication? Mostly, the story has to land in the right niche.

For example, one of my stories, “The Wrong Side of History,” ended up finding a home after ten submissions in After Dinner Conversation, which publishes stories that examine particular ethical questions. The story contains difficult subject matter that some editors won’t touch. I knew the story would be a hard one to place when I wrote it, so I wasn’t surprised when it wasn’t accepted until its tenth submission. Since the story was partially inspired by a paragraph in an article I read in a bioethics textbook, a magazine devoted to advancing ethical discussions was definitely the best place for it. The story can be found in After Dinner Conversation: Season Five.

Another hard-to-place story, “It Came Upon a Midnight Ice Storm,” was a cozy Christmas mystery. It was accepted on its ninth submission. I can find far more markets right now for dark crime fiction than for cozies, let alone Christmas cozies. Trying to figure out the right time to submit a seasonal story for a particular market is also difficult. Happily, I spotted an open call for cozy mysteries from Black Cat Mystery Magazine and found this story a home in issue #12 Cozies.

Other stories just linger on submission. Who knows why.

Recently another story with a long submission history was published. I wrote the first version of “The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” in about 2013, then left it in a file for a while. As near as I can tell, I rewrote a second version of it in 2017 and reviewed the story almost every time I submitted it after that. This was one of those stories that I kept tweaking– a word here, a sentence there, a paragraph added, a paragraph removed– between submissions, as opposed to one that I simply turned around and resubmitted without any changes. While the heart of the story never changed, the details did. On its tenth submission, it finally found a home in the Inkd Publishing anthology Detectives, Sleuths, and Nosy Neighbors.

My ghost story, “A Lonely Death,” which was published in Noncorporeal II from Inkd Publishing, was accepted on its eleventh submission. Among all my stories, this story has the dubious distinction of having the most submissions before being accepted. I changed a word here and there, but after about the third submission, simply resubmitted it. I had a reader tell me recently that they thought this is one of my best stories ever, which is nice to hear!

A glance through my submission records spreadsheet shows I have two other stories with lengthy submission histories. One story that I particularly like and want to see in publication is on its tenth submission. I’m hopeful that it will be accepted soon. But I know it might take some time to find the right market. The story in question contains difficult material, making it doubly hard to place. If it’s not accepted this time around, then maybe it will tie or set a new “number of submissions before publication” record.

If you want to see one of your stories published in a magazine or anthology, and you receive a rejection, DON’T GIVE UP! Don’t dwell on the rejection. Resubmit. Consider rejections as stepping stones to eventual publication.

N. M. Cedeño is a short story writer and novelist living in Texas. She is active in Sisters in Crime- Heart of Texas Chapter and is a member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Find out more at nmcedeno.com.

New Ghost Stories

I started reading ghost stories as a child and enjoyed the chill that the best of them sent up my spine. I began writing ghost stories, with a sci-fi and mystery twist, almost ten years ago when I wrote my first Bad Vibes Removal Services story. The series features Lea, a young history graduate student, working in a new service industry. She sanitizes and neutralizes the lingering emotional history from buildings and homes using newly invented equipment. She was drawn to the job because she’s always been sensitive to emotional atmosphere in rooms and has always been able to see ghosts.

The technology she uses in her job was created by a private detective named Montgomery in his quest to create a device to read the subatomic changes in soft materials caused when sound waves pass through them. Montgomery wanted to be able to read the recordings of conversations held in rooms in order to solve crimes. He ended up being able to track the emotional energy left in walls along with the sounds. In order to put his new technology in the public eye, he started Bad Vibes Removal Services to serve as a sister company to his own Montgomery Investigations business.

Lea, with her team of coworkers, soon discovers that she can’t neutralize the lingering emotions in a house if the source, a ghost in distress, is still present. Many of the ghosts she encounters died under questionable circumstances, leading to murder investigations.

The series started with one story. But I liked the characters so much that I wrote more stories, which led me to write a novel, The Walls Can Talk, then more stories, and another novel, Degrees of Deceit, then, more stories. The series currently has 15 or so published short stories and two novels. The latest story in the series, called “Wedding Vibes,” was published in Black Cat Weekly #145 courtesy of editor Michael Bracken. The story features Lea’s wedding reception being crashed by both a ghost and thieves trying to steal gifts. Luckily, her boss, Montgomery, her coworker and Maid of Honor, Kamika, and the rest of her friends are on the case. The thieves chose the wrong reception to crash.

Another one of my ghost stories is rolling out right now, too. “A Lonely Death” is coming out in an anthology of spooky stories from Inkd Publishing called Noncorporeal II. Those who ordered the anthology from the Kickstarter should be receiving their copies shortly, and it will go on sale to the general public soon. The story begins with a cowboy digging a grave in the “middle of nowhere Texas” in the mid 1800s. Soon there after, a little boy whose home was built in what once was the “middle of nowhere Texas” meets a ghost. This story is told from the point of view of the ghost and from the point of view of the people in whose home the ghost appears.

This story was inspired by a three-year-old who was seen in his home talking to and looking up at an adult who the child’s mother couldn’t see. The family had several guests report either seeing a man who vanished or feeling “creeped out” in their guest room. The house was brand new, built on what had been farmland in Central Texas. My story answers the question of why a brand new house might have a ghost.

****

The Ghostly Lady’s Curse and Kickstarter

By N.M. Cedeño

As I have written in other blog posts, I am fortunate in that I have access to a great deal of my family history, thanks mostly to my father, the family genealogist. I am lucky that relatives collected stories, wrote them down, and then passed them down. And because of long life spans and long generations, I can reach back to the 1860s via only a few people on multiple lines in my family tree.

This brings me to a show I enjoy, Finding Your Roots on PBS. In the show, various celebrity guests sit down with the host to learn about their genealogy and family history.

If I sat down in front of the host of the show, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., he’d have to dig deep into my family tree to surprise me. After telling some crazy family story, Gates always asks his guests, “Have you ever heard that story?” In most of the episodes of the show, the answer is “no.” Stories from family history get lost and forgotten all the time. People fail to pass them down.

This brings me to my story entitled “The Ghostly Lady’s Curse.”

The main character in “The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” is a homicide detective named Tina Jones, who didn’t know her father’s family history because her father never discussed it. Tina never heard anything about the small Texas town where her great-grandparents lived. Until a series of events drew her father back to that town, Tina didn’t know that her great-grandparents’ house was considered to be cursed by a ghost because so many family members died suddenly over the decades. Like most of the people interviewed by Henry Louis Gates on PBS, Tina is surprised by the stories that no one bothered to tell her.

“The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” is set in a fictional Hill Country Texas town somewhere near Enchanted Rock State Natural Area. The Hill Country in central Texas is a beautiful, but sometimes forbidding area of the state. At Enchanted Rock Natural Area, an uprising of igneous rock from the earth’s crust forms a pink granite batholith that has been smoothed into domes, weathered by the elements over time. Like my character Tina Jones, I’ve enjoyed many hikes at Enchanted Rock over the years. It’s a beautiful and popular park for hiking and camping, especially in the spring and fall when the temperature isn’t dangerously hot.

“The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” is coming out this year in an anthology from Inkd Publishing edited by A. Balsamo called Detectives, Sleuths, and Nosy Neighbors. Right now, the story is on pre-order via a Kickstarter until March 8, 2024. If you’d like to support the production of the book and pre-order an e-book, print book, or audio book, check out the Kickstarter.

*****

A New Story Coming Soon and Updates

By N.M. Cedeño

I have a couple stories pending publication right now. One of the publishers revealed an author list and book cover this month.

My story “The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” is scheduled to be published in an anthology entitled Detectives, Sleuths, and Nosy Neighbors from Inkd Publishing. The publisher announced the author line-up for the anthology this month. You can see the announcement here.

I am pleased to see “The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” published. It’s one of those pieces that languished on the computer, ignored for years, after I first wrote it in 2013. I rewrote a second version of it in 2017, and I’ve updated it a few times since. This story is an example of how publishing a short story can be a matter of persistence in the search for the right market with the right editor at the right moment. “The Ghostly Lady’s Curse” was submitted to ten other markets before editor A. Balsamo selected it for inclusion in this upcoming anthology. I’ll write more about this story, and it’s inspiration when the publication date approaches. In the meantime, here’s what the cover is going to look like.

A glance through my submission records spreadsheet shows I have two other stories with at least ten previous submissions, still looking for homes. One story has two strikes against it– a word count that is higher than most markets prefer and difficult subject matter– making it very difficult to place. The other is a niche story: part western, part ghost story. I’m keeping my eyes open for markets for them. I could always self-publish them in collections, if I had enough similarly-themed stories to make collections. That can be a future project if the right markets don’t appear…

As I mentioned in previous blogs, my house was bombarded by baseball to softball sized hail last September. The damage was substantial. I had hoped that all the repairs would be completed before the new year started. Of course, we aren’t finished yet. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel though. The final repairs have been scheduled.

I’ve been down the research rabbit hole this week, diving into background material for a new story, so I only wrote a few thousand words. However, I did write the first draft of a 7000 word short story last week. That story needs editing and trimming before I ship it off somewhere.

I hope your January went well.

*****