The Writer’s DB Blog

A minor new feature announcement which, sad to say, will come in handy sooner or later for nearly every submiting writer:

When you’ve sent out a manuscript, you may be expecting to hear from the market within 8–12 weeks because that’s what their guidelines say. Around the 35th week, anxiety sets in. This is the time for what some writers of my acquaintance call the “polite WTF note.”

The end result of such queries is typically the discovery that your manuscript was lost in the mail. It is beyond the scope of this discussion to explain why editors refer to their desks as “the mail.”

The “Submission Details” page for each piece you’ve sent out now offers a mechanism for keeping track of these queries, separate from the more general “Notes” field.

Please note: The queries that you send for a longer work, or a piece of journalism, prior to sending the entire manuscript, are a separate topic. The site will be enhanced to allow tracking of those as well—but this is not that announcement, yet.

The most recently reviewed writers’ web sites I’ve noticed lately have been in the category of collaborative storytelling. You know: One writer starts a story, another picks up somewhere in the middle and keeps it going, and so on. Not necessarily a way to create publishable work, nor whole stories that you can call your own . . . but a fun way to stretch the writing muscles.

Links:
• Protagonize
• StoryMash

Any others to report? Any experience with these ones? I haven’t had time to check them out yet; I’m posting the links because the concept is interesting, and because it looks like a bit of a trend.