Negates numerous rejections

I sent out a couple of stories this week, so I haven’t been working on the new novel or re-reading Missing Persons. I’ll have to get on that this weekend so my agent doesn’t finish and then have to wait on me to catch up.

I stumbled across a free manuscript tracking program called Sonar last weekend and I like what I’ve seen of it so far. I used WinSAMM to record things on my computer, but my primary submission log was a small coiled notebook that I wrote in when something went out and when it came back.

Here’s what I like about Sonar

1. The main window is a wide listing of your manuscripts that shows whether it’s been accepted, rejected or still out and for how many days it’s been out. At a glance you can identify stories that aren’t in submission or ones that have been out a long time without response.
2. After you enter a market listing, the program can be used to directly print mailing labels. (I haven’t tested this feature yet, but anything that cuts down one step in the process sounds good to me)
3. The market entry system has a place where you can paste in the entire set of guidelines.
4. It’s free and under development. The newest update is from December 2005.

So far the only thing that is a mild irritation is that the tabbing between fields sometimes skips fields so you have to click to enter certain information, but that’s no big deal.

I’ve been transferring my entire submission history over to the new program, which is tedious work to say the least. However, it’s the sort of thing you only have to do once. Then you can sit back and reap the benefits of the drudgery.

Lots of rejections among the list. However, one acceptance, especially a peachy one, can negate a whole stack of rejections. My story, “Rule Number One,” was accepted for an anthology called Burden of the Badge, to be published by Little Brown in 2007. The editor is one of my favorite authors: Michael Connelly. (The 2006 anthology, edited by Harlen Coben, will be out later this summer.)

The anthology was open only to MWA (Mystery Writers of America) members. Seven stories were selected from 230 blind submissions (no author information on the manuscripts). The rest of the stories will be from invited authors. I’m tickled pink to be part of this publication! You can bet this was the first datum I entered into Sonar.