Breaking Into the Craft hit a milestone of receiving it’s 100^th short story submission on 12/16/25. Considering I received the very first submission on July 1^st, I feel that is a respectable amount of submissions for the period.

I review all submissions on my own and pride myself in providing at least a modicum of feedback to every author. That takes a bit more time but at the current cadence of a little over 16 a month, I can still swing it – for now at least.

I appreciate the comments readers have been providing for the stories that make it onto this site. BITC still has a rather small footprint, so I have a deep gratitude for any comment someone takes the time to post. Thank you sincerely.

I also want to say that if you have submitted and been rejected, please know that deciding what to publish is a challenging endeavor. I try to accept only what I think the audience will enjoy or find value in, but I am also publishing stories that I, myself, really enjoy. 

As the BITC guidelines indicate, I prefer Sci-Fi and I do enjoy humor when it is done well but admittedly lean away from fantasy and horror. With that being said, the main criteria is that it is a good story, something that is enjoyable to read, with engaging and believable characters being true to their own motivations, with an ending that is rewarding, surprising and inevitable.

One final note – If you are considering submitting, it helps me a great deal to specify the word count of the story in the body of the email.  I log the stories before reading them and it really helps me to know how much time I will need to allocate to a read through.

Thank you to all who have submitted over the past six months and thank you to those who have read the stories that made it through to publication.

-James