I posted a summary of 2020 and goals for 2021 at the end of December. We are one-third of the way through the year, and it seems like a great time to do an update of meeting my goals.

Polishing a story to submission: By now I should have four new stories done to stay on target for thirteen by the end of the year. I have five!

Submitting stories: I have submitted fifteen pieces thus far in 2021, which is two more than my time-tracked goal!
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Rejections: I have received exactly the amount of rejections if they were to come in like submission. However, I happen to have two acceptances this year. So I’m quite happy with this!

I got trapped in a quagmire with Author Mentor Match and my novel. After mentee selections were announced (and I was not one), I realized I was using mentorship programs and revising as a way to procrastinate sending out my novel to agents and pursuing publication. After talking at lengh with a critique partner and attending Flights of Foundry, I got myself organized and started querying agents.

My goal had been to query five agents per month (starting after the AMM announcement) with a partial/full request rate of 10%. However, the implementation of that goal didn’t end up working for me.  (Also, it would mean I should have queried fifteen agents at this point and another five by the end of next week.) Instead, only about two weeks ago, I put together my list and queried sixteen agents since. My plan is to keep about a dozen queries out at any given time until my list is complete or everyone closes. I try to send out a new query every time a rejection comes in. However, the 8-day of query out mark was rough with four rejections coming in within about 24-hours of each other and I did not have more querying in me. I will try to get more out this weekend to get back up to a dozen queries out.

Still hoping for that 10% request rate, I received a partial request within my first eight queries. I’ve modified the goal that it should be a 10% request rate amongst rejections/assumed pass due to time passing.  (Therefore, as of this moment I have three more rejections before I need to consider reworking my query package – ie general query letter, first pages, synopsis, etc.)
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This is somehow a first third of the year and only two week update with also the immediacy of what I’m doing right now reported. To date I have queried sixteen agents, recieved one partial request, and six rejection including on the partial request. This marks me as on-target for my novel goals.

While that novel is in the querying trenches, I need to make some decisions about the novel-in-two-parts, the one-in-progress, and new novels.