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Please support your writer friends and say something nice. Especially if the dang thing is free to read on the internet….

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I don’t generally camp out watching the stats but I’ve been both writing and submitting more short stories lately and it is making me a little more invested in how it will turn out.

But you can make yourself anxious by becoming an analyst of patterns like this when all you can do is get a vague idea of what might be going on IF the pattern continues (and you don’t know it will). Editors are rarely transparent about their process, and even when they are, they can get sidetracked or slowed down by circumstances that affect their queue.

(And before you say I’m claiming editors are cruel, no, I don’t actually think they enjoy rejecting us, though I’m sure many are at least neutral.)

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They’re waiting. . . .

I swear I do want to do all those projects! The in-progress novel has seven chapters already. But I stopped when other projects took over my life. The short story idea is a cool one and I even added some shower thoughts about it to an ideas document recently! And the short story I want to rewrite totally has potential–I successfully revamped another older short story this year so there’s precedent, right?

But I don’t know what it is about these other stories that keep cutting in line.

• New short story, March 2026: A 6,000-word contemporary fiction story that sold less than a month after I wrote it.
• New short story, April 2026: This one was BRUTAL–23,000 words of this fantasy story came out in 8 days. Became a 27,000-word novella. Currently on submission and somehow receiving publisher interest (no contract yet).
• Revamped short story, June 2026: Old idea, reused half of the original with tune-ups, reinvented the other half of the story. Became a 10,000-word science fiction. On submission.
• New short story, August 2026: 10,000-word science fiction story for a submissions call. Submitted.
• In-progress novel: I’M NOT TALKING ABOUT THIS BUT I’M OBSESSED

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Maybe I should just aim for short stories, exceed word limits, and use this trick to get short books?

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Three statements of interest from three separate publishers over the course of six months, and yet, no “yeses” in my pocket. It still has to be a good story to get that many “not-no” responses, though, right?

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As someone who had to write TWO one-page synopses for two different projects within the last week, the struggle is real.

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I have just written a novella that grabbed me by the shorts and made me write it, and now I have noticed things in it that I REALLY do not feel like I understood the story enough to have put there in the opening scenes. If I’m not careful I’m going to start looking like I’m competent over here.

I think we are secretly wizards

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Dude, some of us are not okay. The stereotypes have a grain of truth! Be kind to your writer friend today.

(Only the first panel with the doctor is a recent real example for me. WTF Doc! He actually said this to me.)

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Yeah, so. I’m trying to add a few new faces to my beta-reading pool (in addition to the people who have been test-reading my stuff for years). But we’re in a new age of scammy types, and a large number of people who contacted me pretending they wanted to beta read for me simultaneously agreed they understood this was a volunteer opportunity AND asked me for money in the same breath (well, they usually either said it would be a “trial period of free chapters before we discuss how we can collaborate moving forward” or tried to sidestep the volunteer requirement by insisting that they were only asking for a review on their professional Fiverr page, which necessarily costs money to do). Some of them straight up agreed to the terms (including their understanding that I’m only looking for volunteers) while quoting their per-page rate. Are you literally incapable of understanding that I’m not looking to hire a professional at this stage? I mean, yeah, you are incapable of understanding that. Because your responses are automated.

But the worst ones were the ones I backed into a corner and made them agree in writing “yes I understand this is volunteer and I will not use AI to generate comments or use AI in any way” who STILL ASKED ME FOR MONEY AND USED AI. AND IT WAS SUPER FRIGGING OBVIOUS.

I was trying to be nice at first, kinda making excuses in my head–okay these comments are kinda cringe but maybe they’re just a young person trying to get started, they think this sounds professional and smart, they think they’re being epic with their awful rephrasing suggestions. But damn, a couple of them made me seasick with their “It’s not X. It’s Y.” “It’s not X. It’s Y.” “It’s not X! It’s Y!” The comparisons usually weren’t even particularly appropriate. It was all weird, hollow, and markedly different from how they communicated in e-mails. One of them literally sounded like broken English unless she also used AI to generate the e-mails (which she did a couple times).

Finally when it just felt too itchy and the comments made one too many comparisons that didn’t make sense–for instance, suggesting a character should discuss the “taste” of water she was STANDING IN, not drinking–I tested her output in an AI detector and it said it was nearly 90% sure this was entirely AI generated with no human involvement. And I tried some of my own beta-reading content that I’d done for other people–for free, many times, because I love authors and I love reading and sometimes we were critiquing each other–it came back with an assessment of human-written content. It doesn’t just automatically think this type of content is AI. It was noticing the tells. Surprise!

I gotta say. I can respect the hustle! Go on out there and sell your services, girl! Small creators have it hard and I have no problem with you trying to get that bag!

But say that. Don’t misrepresent yourself as volunteering and then turn around and tee hee suggest you should be paid despite signing an agreement. And you better frigging not pretend you’re offering a human opinion and then get a robot to do it. I am not out here wanting to pay for an auto-generated book report. I want to know what audiences think of my damn book and help me make it better before I move on to submission. It’s so dishonest and gross.

But even though a small part of my naïve little heart wants to say “but they agreed they weren’t using AI! could that be . . . A LIE???” . . . these are the people who have been turning in unoriginal work for assignments for years. Today, they’re using AI to do their homework. In my generation, they were buying essays from online hubs, stealing them from websites, and cribbing details from Cliff’s Notes as if they were their own observations. In previous generations, they were bribing or threatening the smart kids to write it for them. Jackasses have been using super underhanded techniques for their own gain forever. This is just the latest manifestation of it.

It sucks. Go away, liars.

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No, I do not in fact claim anywhere that asexual people aren’t queer and can only belong in queer spaces as allies. Literally the opposite of what I said, but if you need to read imaginary positions into my work to feel like you said something, you do you /send tweet