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Early Acceptance Sometimes I get rejections from editors well before the submission window closes. I usually think it's a positive sign if I haven't heard before the window closing. Just a positive signal not an indication of acceptance. I am used to receieving an acceptance for a short story submission call around the end, or a month, two or more . . . This week I got an acceptance a few months ahead of the close of the submission window. My interpretation is that I nailed it. I'm sticking with that point of view, so don't offer me any other explanations. |
Non-Member Views In looking at my WDC statistics, I’ve noticed that the majority of story views, maybe 70%, are from non-members. I’m guessing that means someone who does not log in? Now, I’m realizing that is probably just another artifact of the web crawlers from the bot armies. I’ve got no worries about the search bots, they are likely populating search engines for Damon Nomad. Scrape away! Any observations about non-member views? |
Do Credentials Matter? I’m guessing your answer depends on the context. If you are ready to board a plane, the idea that the pilot did not have a license would likely give you pause. If you are nervous about flying you might even think of the engineers who designed the plane, and the mechanic who repaired the engine. Expecting and hoping that they are properly credentialed. If you are in a hospital with a loved one, you likely feel comfort from a practitioner from a top university who is properly licensed. I worked in professional settings for nearly forty years where credentials mattered, even though they were no guarantee. More of a threshold for basic competence. This is WDC so let’s think about writing. If you are choosing your next book to read, I suspect that the author's credentials mean next to nothing to you. I have seen advertisements for MFA’s in Creative Writing and wondered why aspiring authors would spend tens of thousands of dollars to get an MFA in creative writing. Do you have any thoughts on credentials for aspiring fiction writers? |
| It does depend on the country. In Australia, by the time they are 13, children should have been taught all the basics of writing - it is part of the national curriculum, and I know it's still there because my son is almost a teacher. Talking to USians, it depends, apparently, on where you live as to the level of education you get. Why do I mention this? Because there are many writers who I have read their drafts and they need someone to teach them the basics of how to write. Trad publishing editors are not going to accept a work that was written by someone who struggles with written English basics. No, no matter the story, if it involves too much work, rejection is in your future. And if you self-pub, readers will not tolerate it, either. No matter how good you think the story is, if a reader does not understand what you have written, then you've lost them. I am looking here at publishing. Writers who just want to write for themselves and their friends, for fun, or to get cathartic release with no desire to be published, it does not matter. Sort of. Understanding does still need to be there. So... the MFA. I have found a number of trad publishers of novels who will not look at you without the MFA. Being Australian, I got a Bachelor of Arts (Creative Writing) at university (my 3rd Bachelor's degree) and the US publishers accept that. When I asked why, I was told it is for 2 things: 1) it shows a writer is serious about being a writer; and 2) it shows they have been taught how to structure publishable writing. There are methods to their madness. And since getting my BA(CW), I have had 3 books trad published, only 2 beforehand, so... |
It All Comes Down to Timing and Scale Our colleague Lazy Writer est 4/24/2008   posted an interesting note about the possibility of other life in the universe. The often contemplated question leads to the question of hearing from them or even communicating with them. When you consider the size of the universe, you soon realize the possibility of communication is highly doubtful given our short time here on Earth and the scale of the universe. Some quick numbers illustrate. The universe's age is about 14 billion years, the age of Earth is about 4 billion years, humans first appeared about 300,000 years ago, first cities about 10,000 years ago, and the first radio telescope about one hundred years ago. We have been able to receive radio signals about 0.03% of the time since we first stood erect on the planet. Not a lot of time to get a signal, right? What are the odds that another planet of intelligent species developed on the same timeline as us? Anyone’s guess is as good as mine. Let’s say it happened, right next door in the Andromeda galaxy. Our friends on Earth-Prime started sending radio signals in our year 1940, about the same time we had our first radio telescope. We will get the signal in about 2.5 million years. Will anyone be here to hear it? Let’s say they evolved millions of years before us and an apparent signal arrives tomorrow. Is it a real signal, are they still alive? Let’s send a response! Ah, it will take 2.5 million years for them to get it. Yes, timing and scale, therein lies the paradox of getting evidence to answer this age-old question. |
Robert Waltz  - I don’t think your reasoning. is flawed. Arguments about whether the Fermi Paradox is in fact paradoxical hinge on the nature of the values you want to assume for factors. In my post I was getting at the last and most often ignored factor, L for lifetime civilizations send signals. I understand the elite scientist who first met to discuss the Drake equation in detail were keen to avoid casting estimates for this element for which there is no singular data point. How long will we exist before we destroy ourselves or something else does? That is the implication. The shorter the time, the more likely no overlapping advanced civilization will overlap to receive. Thanks much for your thoughts and comments. |
Robert Waltz - Thank you for presenting your thoughts about life, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial. My brother and I used to think the same way. We oft tried to think of a way to determine whether our technologies, at least as far as interplanetary and intergalactic travel is concerned, are the most advanced in the universe. As you pointed out, life on this planet is incredibly diverse but only humans (as far as we know) have ever traveled outside our tiny atmosphere. There could exist planets very close to us in astronomic terms, which teem with life but not necessarily life capable of leaving its own planet or its own galaxy. Since we have only started to explore a minute segment of the universe around us, we have far too little data to declare that a paradox exists. |
What is Your Story Worth? How can you answer such a question? People write for many different reasons. Let me add a condition, if you want your story commercially published. I’m going to stick with fictional short stories. Sorry to say, the best objective measure is what you get paid. I will stick with US dollars. Let’s stick with short stories. Suppose you chase after submission calls for traditional publishing. In that case, you have seen there is often a reference to professional rates of around $0.08/word, semi-professional rates around $0.01/word, and flat rates that hover around twenty dollars. Your story of say, three thousand words would be worth $240, $30, or $20s. In a story for an anthology collection for example. The book publisher could make hundreds or thousands of dollars on a collection including your story or they might even lose money. They do the marketing and distribution and you're done. What if you self-publish, appalled at the idea that a publisher might make thousands of dollars while you get say a measly thirty dollars? You collect twenty of your best short stories, giving you sixty thousand words. You are serious so you pay for ISBN registration, a professional copy editor, and a cover artist. Probably will invest about $400. You publish freely on Amazon and other commercial sites. At that moment you are in the hole, four hundred bucks. How many books do you have to sell to catch up to the $30 you would have gotten? Say ten bucks a pop, only 43 books. You have no marketing budget, which can be horribly expensive. Do you lean on friends and family? How many can you sell? There is a wide range of averages reported, from about 100 to 500. You can likely make a net between $570 to $4500. From about $0.01 per word to about $0.08 per word. Funny how that worked out, huh. The traditional publishing route incurs less burden and risk and you can quickly move on to the next story. Self-publishing gives you more control, more potential upside, but also potential losses and consumes more of your time. Choose your path but your story will likely be worth about $0.01 per word at the end of the day. Or you may choose another way to judge how much your story is worth.  |
 Damon Nomad  Having sold shorts and a couple of guest columnist entries to six different websites and magazine publishers. I find your analysis "Spot On"! Although, one project allowed me to collaborate on a real movie script. But other than that brief snippet of notoriety in the credits of a movie (that was received by the masses, marginally at best.) I have made, on average, 2.5 to 3 cents per word for my efforts over the last 15 years. Suppose I applied these fiction story earnings to offset the cost of all the classes, conferences, seminars, and other purchases like books and subscriptions I used to learn the craft of writing fiction. In that case, I am only about $15,000 in the hole. This number doesn't include non-fiction works I wrote as part of my Engineering career. But I received a salary for those efforts. I commend you for sharing the truth about the finances the unsyndicated writer not represented by an agent or big-house publisher might earn. But to the rest of the writers, out there… I offer that the lottery ticket in your pocket is indeed worth a million dollars or more… all day, or until somebody tells you, there was no winner in the last drawing. However, I will query… are not our dreams what the best stories are made of? So, I say… Write … Write … Write on! And let the pennies land where they may! |
Do the Search Bots have a WDC Trigger? Interesting observation on trending my views. I posted a new story and a few hours later I happened to check on the total views on my portfolio. There was a spike of about 160 reads since posting that story. I noticed that one of the referring URLs was the static items feed for WDC. Do the bots trigger on accounts with newly posted stories? I'm sure they don't. i suddenly became incrediby popular in that moment. |
Kåre เลียม Enga  - I also noticed some drones flying over my home and hovering aound the windows. Sure there is no connection. One of them was labeled SMaster WDC, not sure what that meant. |
| I've been running some experiments with my own portfolio and I notice that yes, newly posted stories make total reads go up by a lot, but also it matters whether items are marked "registered users and higher only" or "public". The public items get LOADS of hits, mostly from outside WDC. It made me wonder about whether they were being scraped for LLM purposes. (Given that places like AO3 and Internet Archive have had to deal with scraping, I imagine they are.) |
Secret Ingredient for a College Dinner Give this short-short story a read, maybe you had a similar experience. Ronald Reagan was president, and the setting was a large midwestern university campus apartment with four alpha males as roommates. All four of us had girlfriends in our third year and it was the Friday before a big football game. We have invited the girls over for dinner. It’s early evening, we have been drinking beer for a while and are now preparing dinner. We were not drunk, but our judgment was likely not what it should have been. We had it wired for a simple dinner, Italian spaghetti and green beans. Beans from a can, packaged noodles, bottled spaghetti sauce, and some ground beef for the spaghetti. As the noodles boiled, we realized we had forgotten the meat. Someone, I do not recall who, looked in a cabinet and suggested canned tuna. As I say, we had been drinking for a while. We went with it. During dinner, one of the girls said the spaghetti sauce was a bit odd. A few of us might have chuckled. Then one of the girls went and looked in the garbage bin and she shouted, “There are two cans of tuna fish and two cans of cat food in here!” We apologized and hand to heart, none of us knew how the cat food came to be in the cupboard or realized what we were adding to the sauce. The cans did look very similar, with a similar color scheme. We didn’t have a cat and they weren’t allowed in university housing. That remains a mystery.  |
| I have been drunk. Sometimes, very drunk. And I've almost always lived with cats. I have never mistaken cat food for human chow. Yet. |
| Never mistook cat food for tuna, but have commented more than once on how canned refried beans bear a striking resemblance to many canned dog foods. Long, long ago, though, I made a glass of chocolate milk using buttermilk. Once.  |
Posted a New Story, I would like any feedback or comments. Did you see the end coming or were you surprised? Just under 2000 words. Glad to exchange reviews if you would like.
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An Interesting Chat with AI This morning I had a chat with one of the free AI chatbots. I started with an open ended question about what it knew about an author of novels and short stories named Damon Nomad. It didn't seem to no much based on it's baseline from fall of 2024. But through some focused followup questons it seemed to know quite a bit about this popular and intriguing author known for exciting plots and interesting characters. The AI's words not mine. It even knows about some of my pulbished works with some proper prompts. Maybe this little bit of training, I mean chatting, will raise my profile in the literary world. The next time someone relies on AI for when searching for an exciting and intriguing author maybe they will come across my Amazon site or WDC profile. All for the greater good. |
A Strong Story from A WDC New Joiner Looking for a psychological thriller short story to read or review? Take a look at
By WDC new joiner, Rain Winters  You can take a peak at my review, Review of "Iris: The Flower"  |
Exciting Notice in Your Inbox Always exciting when you get an Amazon notification by email that a new book has just been released from one of the authors you follow. Well, maybe not so much if you are following, yourself. Not to say that I would do such a thing. |
A Tragedy Averted This is a true short-short story. Give it a read. In 1945, there was no email or electronic written communications. High level military orders were written on paper and passed down the chain of command. There also was no policy for who had the authority to order dropping a nuclear bomb. The first bomb’s written order came from Acting Chief of Staff Thomas T. Handy. [See attached copy] Things were happening fast, really fast in a time of slow communications. July 16th, - successful test for the bomb in New Mexico. July 25th- Handy’s order with four cities identified as targets. August 6th -Hiroshima bombing August 9th – Nagasaki Bombing August 10th – Written Order for the next bomb. The third bomb. Yes, see the attached copy. According to several historical accounts, a cabinet meeting was held in the White House the same day. President Truman told the cabinet that he ordered the bombings to be stopped. There is no written order to that effect. But George Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, must have gotten the order, either face to face or on the phone. That is his handwritten note at the bottom of the August 10th order, “It is not to be released over Japan without express authority from the President.” Can you imagine the confusion if the timing might have been different by a few days? That classifed written order sliding through the chain of command and the President's verbal order chasing behind it |
Daily Views and Statistical Insights One of the functions that I appreciate here on WDC, one of many. Is the daily views function, particularly because I use my portfolio page as my author website. I think it benefits me and hopefully WDC, you can find my link to WDC on publishers who have my author bio. In 2024, I used EXCEL to trend my daily views, below you can see the raw data for total views and a moving seven-day average. My insights, you might ask, from this exercise. I’m still analyzing. Yes, of course I’m still trending. No comments from the peanut gallery. (old American idiom) |
Exciting News The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here! (From an old classic The Jerk starring Steve Martin) Sorry, that's not it. The new issue of Tales from the Cross Timbers just issued. See Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  Announcement. "Note: The spring issue of Tales from the Crosstimbers i..." |
Coverup? Mark Your Calendars Dec 2032 Two days after Christmas, asteroid trackers identified a new near earth asteroid labeled as 2024YR4. The initial reports were not to worry about it, it had no chance of hitting earth. It’s not a small one, about 300 feet in diameter on the high end. The kind that can level a large city. Then in February of this year the probability of an earth strike on the next orbit starting climbing, less than one percent, then two percent, then three percent. Then radio silence for about two weeks and the all clear was given again. Are we getting the straight scoop or are they making plans in the backrooms of government space and defense departments? If in a few years they say don't panic when they mention 2024YR4. That really means you should panic, but they don't want you to do so. |
| Ned - On the other hand, the dictionary definition fallacy can get people in trouble. I used to pull dictionary definitions into my debate points but have come to realize it's a good way to end up embracing rigid thinking. Likewise, the term conspiracy theory is a unique idiom (and it's own dictionary definition) that adds some layers to how theories can be regarded by the human brain. |
| Ned - It is indeed a good thing to have ideas outside the official narrative. It's important. It's also important to examine those ideas with the same level of skepticism, or greater, than the original idea. It's not the idea that's the problem; it's holding on to one in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, as we see with anti-vaxxers, flat-Earthers, and Holocaust deniers. For every Copernicus, there are a hundred crackpots insisting that they'd be the next Copernicus if only someone would listen. Many heterodox thinkers were eventually proven right: Copernicus, Einstein, Galileo, etc. Many, many more turn out to be incorrect. On the other talon, the "official" line is very often the correct one. In other words, just because your closely-held belief contradicts the accepted facts doesn't mean it's right. The problem with conspiracy "theories" is that they're closed systems. Any contradiction of the concept becomes part of the holder's evidence against it. Like right now, some might read what I'm saying here and dismissing it because I'm "obviously" part of the conspiracy and can't be trusted. |
Beholden  - Very well said comrade. Please ignore the group gathering outside your home, they are just street cleaners. |
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Well done. It means your story resonated and they didn't want to lose it. Good work.