1Q24 Update

What can I say about the first quarter of 2024, except that it’s over? That’s not true. Well, it’s true that the quarter is over, but there is plenty to say. The mid-Atlantic actually saw snow this year for a change. Of course, gone are the days of the office closing, so you can play a little in the snow and maybe write a little with a warm beverage in hand. With modern technology, as long as the power and internet are flowing, so should the work. Let’s look at my first quarter numbers anyway.

• Words written = 8,203
• Submissions = 16
• Rejections = 11
• Acceptances = 1
• Shortlists = 0
• Publications = 2
• Rewrites = 0
• Withdrawals = 0

As always, it’s a mixed bag but the opposite of my usual mixed bag. Normally, my submissions and rejections are well on track to reach 100 for the year and my number of words written is sad. For 1Q24, I wrote more than I have in any first quarter since 2019, but my submissions are about 10-15 less than normal. I suspected my submissions would fall after taking a lot of stories out of circulation last year to include in my first short story collection, We’re Here to Help… Ourselves: Short Tales of Time, Space, Aliens, and Paperwork. 

The number of words written was encouraging. I finished The Hitchhiker’s Guide series of books last year and wanted to write a humorous sci fi story in that vein. I also wanted that story to be on the long side to anchor and fill out my next short story collection, which will consist of funny and terrifying tales (though not necessarily both at the same time).  Those 8200 words all went to the resulting story. I’m pleased with the outcome, and I hope others find it funny. Now I must decide if this collection is long enough at 49650 words, or if I should write one more story to put the collection over 50k words. 

I did reach my goal of one acceptance for the quarter, which was published right away. I wrote about the acceptance of “Fair Winds Travel” here and what that story meant to me. My other story published during the quarter, “Grenada Lake,” had been accepted just over a year prior. I wrote about that saga here. (For those paying attention, it’s the same link.) I don’t have anything scheduled to be published this quarter, but maybe I’ll get lucky with an acceptance soon.  

My goals for 2Q24 pretty much relate to my second short story collection. I need to decide whether to include one more short story and then write it if I do. Then I need to start the process I followed last year. First, hire an editor. The one I used last year is willing to work with me again. Once the manuscript is edited, I’ll need to format it, likely purchasing another pre-designed format, and locate another interesting graphic to use as a section break. Then it’s figuring out the cover design and uploading the manuscript to KDP to start working on the formatting issues… because there are always formatting issues.

That was my reverse mixed bag quarter of writing, submitting, and publishing. How did your first three months of 2024 work out?

A Double Feature

I have a double feature for you this time. Double scoop? Double fantasy? However you prefer your doubles, it’s coming your way.

By the whim of the Fates, I have two short stories publishing within in a week. First up, on Valentine’s Day itself, February 14, “Fair Winds Travel” will be published in The Sprawl Mag. This magazine from north of the border states it is “is a (cyber-)feminist, anti-colonial speculative fiction, poetry, and visual art magazine focused on publishing perspectives that have historically been left out of canonical sci-fi and fantasy.”

I wrote “Fair Winds Travel” as a tribute to my paternal grandmother. She was my last grandparent and passed away in 2022. My family and I went down to Florida for one last big get together with my entire extended family. Unfortunately, we ended up catching COVID at Disney World on the way down and spent the entire time isolating in our one bedroom Airbnb. Despite feeling terrible, I cranked out “Fair Winds Travel” which is the name of a travel agency my grandma owned. Both she and the travel agency play a prominent role in the story.

Next up, on February 20, the READER BEWARE anthology finally publishes. I say finally because my story, “Grenada Lake,” was accepted over a year ago. Regardless, I am pleased the anthology is ready for release. From the editors: this is “a collection of super-chilling tales of teen horror. A little nostalgia and an ode to Stine, this anthology promises to keep you up at night.” My understanding is the stories in the anthology are supposed to invoke the ’80s and ’90s. My story fits in nicely as it’s about a group of teen scouts who find something unexpected while camping at Grenada Lake. It just so happens that I camped at a place called Grenada Lake as a scout in the ’90s. This story floated around awhile, so I am pleased it found the right home.

Maybe the theme here is a double dose of nostalgia. 

4Q23 Update and 2024 Goals

Holy frijoles, it’s 2024! Looking back at my 2022 recap last year, I noticed two big differences. First, I’m barely on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter any more. Maybe a goal for 2024 is deciding on an alternative social medial platform. Second, I didn’t receive a hold request on NYE. That would have been amazing but probably unreasonable to expect two years in a row. Also, while that hold request turned into an acceptance, that publication was delayed and still hasn’t been released yet. It’s supposed to be issued this month. In the meantime, the full numbers for 4Q23 are below.

• Words written = 3,475
• Submissions = 20
• Rejections = 19
• Acceptances = 0
• Shortlists = 0
• Publications = 1
• Rewrites = 0
• Withdrawals = 0

Those quarterly numbers are pretty ‘eh,’ except in one regard.

The submissions and rejections got me to my 2023 goals. That’s great but not the exception to my “eh” year.

The words written were terrible, so that wasn’t the exception. For the last several years, I’ve done NaNoWriMo, which has contributed a bunch of words to the fourth quarter. Not this year. I had a more significant project to finish.

Those 3500ish words represent one new 2300 word horror story, a few additional words to an existing story, and the first chapter of a new piece that I’m not sure where it is headed. All I know is it’s in the vein of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so it’s solidly sci fi comedy. I just finished that series, and it’s firmly wormed itself into my brain.

The sole publication is what redeemed this quarter because that was my first short story collection, We’re Here to Help Ourselves… Short Tales of Time, Space, Aliens, and Paperwork. More on that below. I debated counting that as 14 publications since the collection includes 14 short stories. In the end, I felt that was cheating and simply counted the collection as one publication… one super, awesome, fantastic publication!

Now, let’s look at how 2023 went down.

• Words written = 11,168
• Submissions = 106
• Rejections = 111
• Acceptances = 6
• Shortlists = 1
• Publications = 5
• Rewrites = 0
• Withdrawals = 1

Again, the words written are terrible. That is my lowest in a year since I started tracking my writing. That is no where near the 36k goal I set. The number of submissions and rejections hit the mark. I aimed for 100 of both and made it. Looking back, I don’t see that I set a goal for number of acceptances, but presumably I would have gone with four. I met that, thankfully.

I was so/so on my larger goals. I made it through one editing pass in the final manuscript in my middle grade near future sci fi trilogy. I didn’t make it through another draft of the entire trilogy. However, I started something better. I joined a critique group that is working its way through those manuscripts. A goal for 2024 is to have the critique group finish reviewing all three (it’s already finished the first), and then I will do a massive edit of all three incorporating the collected comments.

More importantly, I published my first short story collection. That was the overarching goal for the entire year, and it took almost the entire year. I started the process in February and published around Thanksgiving. That was a lot of work, but I also had a lot of help.

Time to figure out what to aim for in 2024. Let’s start big. I’d like to publish a second short story collection. I already have the theme: humor and horror. I also already have about 40k words worth of stories to include. I’d like that to be 50k though, so the collection has some heft. I guess my first goal really should be to write another 10k words worth of material. Maybe that’s where this new story I’m working on will go.

Speaking of words, I’ll set those at 36k again for the year. Why not? I don’t plan to work on anything too long, so I would think 3k words a month is doable. Of course, I said that last year too.

I’ll also set my usual goal of 100 submissions and 100 rejections. I’ve consistently reached that goal, but this year may be more difficult. I took a lot of stories out of circulation with my first collection, and I’ll take even more out if I proceed with a second collection. Maybe that will motivate me to write more. More writing = more stories = more submissions.

That’s my 2024 in a nut shell. How did your writing adventure progress last year?

NaNoWriMo Fail but Still Winning

For the past five years, I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month and provided an update afterward. The first two years I worked on the same novel. That one has kind of died. I realized that I don’t have time currently to conduct the research necessary to do that manuscript justice. At the moment, it’s novella length. I may plug a few holes and leave it there. I actually pulled out the first chapter of that work as a standalone short story and submitted it to an anthology with a very specific theme that fit. The editor rejected it but said he liked it. He had simply decided to take the anthology in a even more specific direction that my story didn’t fit as well in.

Each of the next three years I wrote a manuscript in what turned out to be a middle grade near future sci fi trilogy. The critique group I joined this year just finished reviewing the first in that trilogy and provided a lot of valuable feedback. I’m hoping the group will get through the second and third manuscripts in 2024. That will put me in a good position to revise all three and get them edited and published in 2025.

For NaNoWriMo this year I intended to start a new, possibly YA sci fi trilogy. I already have the general idea for each of the three books. The plan was, beforehand, to map out the plot of the first one using one of the generally accepted story structures. That didn’t happen. Also, NaNoWriMo didn’t happen. I wrote a total of zero words in November.

I like NaNoWriMo. I like the structure and motivation it provides. It has been a useful and fruitful experience. It just wasn’t happening this year.

But all was not lost! I instead focused on publishing my first short story collection, We’re Here to Help… Ourselves: Short Tales of Time, Space, Aliens, and Paperwork. I enjoyed that experience too. I had the help of several great people to guide me along and the support of the Northern Virginia Writers Club. I’m thinking about releasing another collection in 2024. I certainly have the stories, and releasing another collection will keep my publishing momentum going while the critique group works on my middle grade trilogy.

That was my 2023 NaNoWriMo.  How’d yours go?

Sci Fi Short Story Collection Book Launch

At long last, my collection of short stories, We’re Here to Help… Ourselves, is available in paperback and preorders for the ebook version, which will release December 2! (I managed to fix most (but not all) of the formatting issues.)

Publishing this collection was my most significant writing goal this year, and I’m pleased to have checked it off.  It took almost the entire year.  First, I had to compile the entire manuscript.  The collection has 14 short stories, but originally it had 16.  After presenting my first several possible title choices to the Norther Virginia Writers Club, one astute member (Darius Jones) suggested cutting the only two horror stories in the collection. (Everything else is sci fi.) That finalized the collection, but I still had to draft the introduction, acknowledgments, author blurb, and back matter. If I was going to have a professional editor work on this project, I wanted everything edited.

On March 4, I contracted with an editor. I had worked with this editor last year when I coordinated the 15^th Anniversary Anthology of the Northern Virginia Writers Club. I knew the quality of his editing and how to work with this editor, so he seemed to be a logical choice. He worked a lot faster than I did. He sent me edits in sections, but I didn’t have time to review anything until he was finished with the entire manuscript.

Once the words were right, I worked on the other components of the interior. I bought an off the shelf format. It made life much simpler. I simply cut and paste my Word doc into this format. It took care of fonts, space, breaks, etc. Next, I bought a pack of divider designs on Etsy. I found one in a collection of maybe one hundred that looked sci fi-ish. Like with the text format, I simply copied the design I picked and inserted it in many of my stories as a divider between sections rather than use the ole three ellipses. I also bought a pack of 10 ISBNs.

Then it was time to stop avoiding the cover, and time was running out. I first intended to hire a designer but got cold feet. I was short on time and wasn’t confident that I could accurately describe what I was looking for in a cover. Luckily, at the Virginia Writers Club symposium this year, I attended a presentation on how to use the graphic design software Canva. At first, I attempted to create my own design. Realizing my limitations, I licensed a preexisting design. I next asked another Northern Virginia Writers Club member (and president), Michelle McBeth and her husband if they would tweak it. Both had experience with designing the covers for Michelle’s sci fi series. It was a fun process going back and forth tweaking details, and they knew what they were doing. The result was amazing. I love the cover.

The final step was figuring out Kindle Direct Publishing. It’s a three-step process, most of which is straight forward, consisting of entering information and making selections. However, formatting is a nightmare. You upload your manuscript, and KPD re-formats it to how it wants to. Invariably, some things change, some weird things. I went through seven additional versions of my manuscript fixing formatting issues. Some I caught using the KDP digital previewer; others where only caught after I ordered two separate printed proofs. Ordering those was another suggestion of Michelle’s, and a good one.

There you have it. A culmination of a year’s worth of work is now out there. Would I do it again? Yep. I have plenty of short stories and am already thinking about what the next collection should contain.

Cover Reveal

It’s finally here! My first collection of short stories will be available in paperback this Saturday, November 25 through Amazon. The ebook should follow a few days later if I can fix a couple of formatting issues. Here is the synopsis on the back:

Science fiction tropes—you know them and you love them. They are the building blocks of sci fi stories, both past and present, and this collection of 14 short stories has them all. Dive in as a xenoanthropologist is stranded on a world with two alien races. Join a generation ship, soon to be populated with clones, on its journey to a new world. Learn how humanity may react to an alien invasion—and the resulting paperwork—and follow one family as they contend with time travel, bio-nanites, and the implications of an unnaturally long life.

3Q23 Update and Book Launch Forthcoming

The third quarter of 2023 has run its course, and there is good news and bad news. Read on for both, but first, let’s look at the writing statistics.

• Words written = 350
• Submissions = 20
• Rejections = 25
• Acceptances = 1
• Shortlists = 0
• Publications = 1
• Rewrites = 0
• Withdrawals = 0

The amount of writing I did last quarter was terrible. That’s the bad news. My only solace is that I did other writing activities. Those 350 words went to a story that I wrote the prior quarter. I joined a critique group, which kindly critiqued that same story immediately. Now, I need to incorporate those critiques. The same critique group also started reviewing the first book in my middle grade trilogy. I hope the critique group will work through all three of those manuscripts.

The submissions number is a little low, but I’m well on my way to 100 for the year. I’ve already sent another eight submissions in October and currently sit at 94 for the year. Rejections are at 93 at the moment.

I only received one acceptance in the quarter, and I’m not supposed to announce that one yet on social media. A prior acceptance was scheduled to be published soon, but I can’t find an update on that. I hope that market hasn’t folded. I’ve already been paid for the story, but I’d like to see the anthology published. It sounded like a fun one, and I’d like to read the stories of the other contributors.

Now the good news. I wasn’t sure if the stars would align (read: whether I’d get my act together enough to put all of the pieces in place), but it looks like it will happen. Assuming everything continues to go well, I should publish my first collection of short stories at the November meeting of the Northern Virginia Writers Club. The manuscript is compiled, edited, and formatted. The front cover is done. The spine and back cover are in process for the paperback version. ISBNs are purchased. Author bio is finalized. The piece just finished was selecting the all important author photo. That may have been the hardest part of the entire process.

More details about the launching of this collection will come in a separate post, really series of posts. I’ve got to promote this thing after all. Stay tuned!

That was my third quarter. How was yours?

2Q23 Update

Wow, is the second quarter done already? That one flew by. There was a spring break trip. There was a last minute Memorial Day weekend trip at a place I found on Airbnb (that I really wanted to be haunted). There was the family’s summer vacation. And I caught COVID in the middle of the quarter just for fun. Let’s see how that all impacted my writing productivity.

• Words written = 6365
• Submissions = 31
• Rejections = 25
• Acceptances = 2
• Shortlists = 1
• Publications = 2
• Rewrites = 0
• Withdrawals = 0

That’s a fairly standard quarter for me. The words written equate to one long short story and small additions to two existing stories. It’s still not a ton of writing, but I’m happy with it.

The submissions (and rejections) are on track for my 100 goal. I shouldn’t have any problem meeting that.

The acceptances and publications are doing better than expected. I’ve already exceeded my acceptances goal for the year. I may need to set that one higher next year. Let’s see if the second half of the year is as fruitful.

I’ve also progressed nicely on my goal to publish a collection of short stories. I have the story content and title nailed down, and I’ve worked with an editor to get the manuscript into tip top shape.

Now I need to format the thing. Conveniently, the speaker for the August meeting of the Northern Virginia Writers Club will discuss book formatting. Once I have it formatted (and therefore have the final dimensions), I plan to put the cover art out for bid. In the interim, I’ll put together the front and back matter and buy some ISBN numbers. I plan to get at least 10 of those to be able to have one each for physical and ebooks for this collection, another short story collection I hope to put together in the future, and the middle grade trilogy that desperately needs editing. I also want to get to that this year, as well as edit the short story I wrote last quarter. Then the later can start making the submission rounds.

I’ve come up with a stretch goal for the year too. For the last three years, I’ve worked on a middle grade novel during each NaNoWriMo. That series is complete, at least the first drafts (see above). I have an idea for another middle grade or possibly YA trilogy.

If you’ve followed this blog, you know I’m a plotter. However, my plotting is not overly detailed. It usually consists of a sentence or two per scene. I map out the scenes this way before I start each November, but not much more.

For the first book in this new trilogy, I’d like to try my hand at a more detailed outline. I recently read The Mercenary Guide to Story Structure by Kevin Ikenberry. He goes through several different types of story structures. There’s the original three act play from Aristotle’s time. There’s the “hero’s journey” structure, described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which we see often in fantasy and sci-fi stories. There’s the well-known seven-point story structure, and then there is an even more detailed structure laid out in Jeffrey Alan Schecter’s My Story Can Beat Up Your Story. I’d like to see if I can use the seven-point story structure and map out all of those plot points before starting this November. I’ve never plotted with this much detail. I’ve always simply developed scenes in my head and decided when one or more needed to be added. I’m wondering (hoping?) this approach will make my books longer and more entertaining. Even for middle grade, each of the books in my WIP trilogy are on the short side.

That’s the second quarter of 2023. How’d yours go?

The Next Thing

I have a quick one for you today. My flash story “Polynesian Disbursement” will be published at http://www.gohavok.com on Tuesday, May 23. Set your reminder. It’ll be free to read that day. I’ll also be responding to comments. Please feel free to stop by, give it a gander, and let me know if you have any questions. Normally, I’d go into more details about the story here, but I’m saving that for the commenters that day. Here’s hoping for a quiet time at the day job.