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.
