Taking Stock at the One Year Mark

I took my first real crack at the market with a submission to Liminal magazine one year ago today. It was a ghost story set in Roman Britain, and has been out a couple of times. It’s currently with a fiction contest in the UK. 365 days is both a long time and goes by in a flash – this blog has been running since October and I started it specifically to document my progress once I had some progress to talk about, the publication of my first sale, Lo, These Many Gods with SQ Mag on September 1^st, 2016. The sale itself was made on April 29^th. I started work a lot earlier, of course, I trace this whole endeavour back to my vampire short story Crimson Blade, written late 2013 and published in Spectral Visions: The Collection the following year. That one started the ball rolling, got me back into writing short fiction after a long absence, and I’ve kept going. By the beginning of last year I had enough stories in hand, in enough genres, to be worth beginning a program of submission, and it’s been a long process.

So, what do the numbers look like? As of the one year mark, I have made 301 submissions, which averages more than one per working day throughout the year; I have at this time 51 stories on submission (including two shortlistings) plus nine placements, therefore I have been rejected 241 times. Some of them have been near-misses, a few times editors have profoundly regretted the necessity of turning a story away, but the cruel fact is they can’t find a home for every good story they see. In addition, I have been awarded Honourable Mention in the Writers of the Future Contest twice in successive quarters. My overall acceptance rate is running at 3.73% of total rejections, which is somewhat ahead of the general industry curve to the best of my knowledge. I also have a novel under consideration in the UK.

What of productivity? During calendar year 2016 I completed 52 stories, ranging from flash to half-novel length, and have three more incomplete at this time, for a total wordage on the year of 297, 781 words.

Where do I go from here? More of the same, keep up the intensity, continue to research markets, keep writing. Fingers crossed for a breakthrough to better-paying markets, hopefully up in the pro range, and in time perhaps join the professional writers’ guild. The second year will be as much an adventure as the first; I began its first day by redirecting two rejections, and one of those submissions, interestingly enough, went to Liminal, which rather closes the circle of year one!

Cheers, Mike Adamson