End of Year Wrap-up
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So I close out 2009 still unpublished, but a better writer.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.