Year end

As it’s the end of my first year submitting stories, I decided to compile everything I managed to finish into a single collection. This has got me thinking about stats, so I thought I’d tap down a quick update.

My 2018 collection contains 29 stories, 120 pages (Times New Roman, single-spaced!) and 53,143 words–enough for a short novel. It is broken down into three sections: Good stuff (15 stories), Not so good  (9 stories), and Stuff I wrote before 2018 but scrubbed up this year (5 stories). It was an useful process deciding which of my works were not so good, and has led to me retiring 8 pieces. I should really be even more remorseless with this, as resubmitting rejected stories is rather time consuming.

On top of that there’s the approximately 40,000 words of the first novel, which I think is around 60 per cent finished. I think it’ll take till summer next year to get the first draft done.

Moving on to submission stats, and grabbing these from Submission Grinder:

– Stories: 30
– Submissions: 118
– Rejections: 84
– Acceptances: 6
– Pending Submissions: 19
– Lifetime Earnings: $53.89

Happy or not? Dunno. But it gives me something to compare to in December 2019.