Annie Bellet

This year was my first for submitting my work for publication.  Over all, it was frustrating, but I think I made a lot of progress as a writer, so it could have been worse.

My ‘stats’ for the year:

8 short stories written.

1 novel finished.

38 rejections, 26 of which came with personal and generally positive notes (only one neg note).

1 novella finished, 1 started.

1 novel started and not finished.

Multiple writer friends connected with, and a ton of information and good advice gleaned (hard thing to quantify, but man I’ve learned a lot this year and really expanded my support/information network).

All in all, not that bad considering that grad school hijacked by time and energy for a while, as did family/obligations for much of last summer.

So I close out 2009 still unpublished, but a better writer.  I’ve learned how to finish things, I’ve stopped being afraid of writing dialog, and I have some idea of what I want to accomplish in the future and how to start doing it.  I also developed some pretty good writing habits, which I hope to continue and improve upon in 2010. And I seem to have more or less gotten over my crippling fear of submitting my work or letting other people read it at all.  Go me.

Update:  I do not, in fact, finish 2009 without selling a story.  Sweet.