After posting my first goal update for the year, I realized that I had started my goal update way ahead of time and then never included that information. So, I’m dipping back a little in this update.
Short Stories
Submission Goals
By the posting of this blog post, my goal was to have 81 submissions of stories towards my year’s total of 120. As of the writing, I have submitted 109. I had a few big pushes – my annual first of the year push and another push when I broke my ankle in June – that really boosted this number. I also did a better job than previous years of finding or polishing pieces to submit to open windows of magazines I’d really like to be published in.
This puts me within spitting distance of my goal well ahead of schedule.
Rejections and Acceptances
I make a 100% rejection rate my goal because then I “win” whether I get an acceptance or not. One thing I haven’t shared much is that I went a full year with no acceptances from May 2023-April 2024. The same market was my last and first acceptance bracketing that time period. It was rough.
Since the two acceptances within a week of each other in May, I have not had any more acceptances. I’ve had several second rounds and “close” responses. Unfortunately, response times are often months long at this point.
Drafting and Revising
My drafting goal was complete back in February and I’m just going to copy and paste from my last update:
For 2024, I made a goal to write four (4) new stories.
Because I participated in a “contest” with a writers group in January and February, I actually wrote six (6) new stories already this year.
Additionally, I drafted three (3) new stories in June and July.
Giving this a COMPLETE! ❣️
For 2024, I made a goal to revise twelve (12) stories.
By my last update, I had four (4) revised that I counted and one (1) that went into a Newsletter I wasn’t counting unless desperate.
As of posting this update, I’ve fully revised two (2) more stories. I am still behind goal even if I count the newsletter story. I still have six (6) stories in queue to revise, so I can get there if the end of my year is dedicated to revising. Unfortunately, that’s not looking to be something I have time for due to some non-writing life stuff and novel drafting (see below.)
Giving this a doesn’t look good.
Retirement
A decision I made earlier this year was to retire two stories that I wrote in 2021 that have not yet sold. One was approaching 30 submissions, the other less than 20. Even though I have sold stories after a couple of dozen submissions to pro-rate paying markets, and I have my hard-to-place not-quite-spec novelette that’s been submitted more than my first 2 years of stories submitted combined (and still has many more places I’ll send it if necessary), these two just feel like I’m submitting them to get my submission numbers up. I’m not excited to submit them anywhere.
I’ve decided they are good Newsletter fodder for my bimonthly original story from me. (And they have gone out already.)
This isn’t the first time I’ve decided to retire a story. There was a story that went on about three submisisons before I got a form rejection that said, “This didn’t work for us,” and I re-read the story and thought, “This doesn’t work for me either” even though I had done all the things I normally do to make sure a piece is ready for submission. At the time, I didn’t know how to fix the thing that I liked when I sent it out and disliked when I got it back. Some day I may take a look at it again. But it’s important that the things that I publish at the time I publish them are things I want my name on.
We all grow as writers and a few years down the road from any piece I might feel it no longer reflects my style, capabilities, or whatever. For those already published, I can point to them to show my growth. And for those not, retiring (for now) is a good option.
Novels
Whatever my goals were, I’ve completely re-mapped them.
Since 2019 when I began writing fiction again in earnest, I have three (3) novels that have made it to “query ready” where I’ve polished both manuscript and query materials until they are the best I can make them (including with feedback from others.)
Over the course of the last five years, all three have had “likes” in pitch contests. Two have been pitched in-person and requested by agents and editors.
Querying and Direct Submissions to Publishers
I officially queried my adult science fantasy April 2021 – October 2022 and called it done in January 2023. Until I submitted it to the Berkley open call earlier this year. It’s still there and some rejections and full requests have been made. That novel holds records on my longest rejection of 830 days from a publisher, and I got a rejection in June of this year on it from an agent, putting it at my longest agent response of 683 days.
I started querying my YA science fiction tragedy with an in-person pitch in October 2022, resulting in a full request from that pitch. However, that agent is years behind in reading and/or doesn’t send rejections. I sent a revision with a slightly less bleak ending in October 2023 per that agent’s response that he hadn’t read it yet and to send the updated MS. Meanwhile, it did very poorly in the query trenches, garnering less interest than the adult science fantasy.
My YA science fiction tragedy is still in the query trenches and is also under consideration with some publishers. I’d actually wrapped my agent querying up in October of 2023. But in June when I broke my ankle, I decided to “finish up” the query list I made because why not? The worst that happens is that it continues to be rejected. And I believe in this novel. This story is a story that has been with me and I’ve written different versions of since I was a tween. The current iteration is a good story representing many facets of myself and is possibly the best writing I’ve done at the line level yet. It’s done better this summer with requests.
Finally, I started querying my YA science fiction romance in October 2023 with some pitch events and at a conference. The book was complete but I was burned out from querying the other two books. I didn’t officially send it off to anyone until April. Everything from that first batch was either a rejection or a CNR. I resumed querying it in June, after I broke my ankle and had a little more time while I healed. I’m not exactly sure why, when supposedly the querying landscape is not as bad as 2021 when I queried my adult science fantasy, this book that is what many agents and editors are supposedly looking for is not gaining traction. I wrote it as a response to “no one wants sad books right now” and it is a fun book with a happy ending. Oh, well. I’m going to finish out my query list on it because I’m a completionist.
New Novel Drafting and Revising
I had no goals to write another novel this year when the year started. My goals were to finish revisions on the YA science fiction romance and focus on short fiction again. However, a novel-length idea struck in April (which seems to be when those things strike for me). Instead of the pouring out of the idea immediately, which is what happened with the YA science fiction romance, I let it simmer for a few months.
In June, after my personal life had settled down, plus I broke my ankle and had an excess of sit on the couch time, I began drafting this adult science fiction novel, which I describe in Bluesky LateNightWrite chats as a couple of lesbians trying to survive in a dinosuar apocalypse. I had a low daily word count goal, at least 425 words, which I stuck with for 39 days, according to my Scrivener file, writing over 14k words in June and nearly 8k in July. And then I put it in a writing group as a part of my weekly motivations and it dried up. (This has happened to me before with that same group so I’m a bit supersitious about it at this point.)
Anyway, I’ve been accepted to attend the Fall Futurescapes workshop and I will be submitting materials for this novel. After that acceptance and over the course of two weeks in August, I wrote/revised an additional 7500 words.
My goal will be to finish drafting this novel during September, October, and November with an average of 666 words/day. I do not expect to be able to write every day because of some other things going on in my life. But I hope to have some high word count days to help with that and starting at a goal of 675 words per day is a feasible level most of the time and I can push that up if I need to should the first half of the period not be quite as fruitful as I want (which is when I’m expecting most of the disruption to my routine to happen.)
Unfortunately, it seems highly unlikely I will be able to revise short fiction (especially as one of the six in queue is a novelette and another is a novella) during the same time. Nor does it seems likely that I will be able to revise six short stories in the month of December.
In conclusion, whatever my novel goals were at the beginning of the year (essentially revise and start querying my YA science fiction romance which I give a COMPLETE! ❣️), my current goals are to (1) keep querying/submitting the three finished novels until my lists are done or I receive and accept an offer and (2) finish drafting this current novel.