I spent a lot of the day reading Kaleidotrope slush on my iPad, trying to get caught up on older submissions. I’ve actually been burnt a few times in the past couple of weeks on submissions that turned out to have been accepted elsewhere by the time I replied to accept them. I’m not a big fan of simultaneous submissions, and do in fact explicitly state in my guidelines that I won’t accept them, but I do understand why it’s a popular practice among writers. Writing a story takes considerable time and effort, so the natural impulse is to cast as wide a net with it as possible. Still, reading a story is not an insignificant investment of my time, especially when it’s a story that I like, that I might need to read more than once before accepting, and it’s very aggravating to learn that my investment was for naught. I do my level best to reply to all submissions within a three-month window, and I welcome queries from writers when I fail to reply in that time, but I realize that’s not enough of a guarantee for some people. I don’t necessarily hold it against writers when I find out their stories have been submitted elsewhere, but I also hope they realize that not every editor is going to be as forgiving. It depends on the venue, and their rate of response, but if they have a specific policy against simultaneous submissions, it might be best not to ignore that policy.
Beyond reading some stories — and accepting a few that I hope I’ll actually be able to accept — I watched a little television and played a little with the dog, a pretty typical Saturday. This evening, my parents and I went out to dinner to celebrate my father’s birthday, which is this coming Monday. We had a perfectly nice dinner at a local Italian place recently written up in the New York Times.
And that was my Saturday.
See, I make simultaneous submissions – sometimes – but the odd time I’ve had a publication offer, I’ve pulled every other sub I have out there. Right away. And at best, I’ve only got a piece out to two or three different markets at once, and I’m pretty anal about keeping my spreadsheet updated.
Admittedly, it doesn’t help when the editorial staff have had to read a piece several times. But to be honest, it’s only ever happened once. If I was publishing more, I think I’d probably scale back on those sim-subs.