2014 was my second full year of writing fiction. It was good to me. In fact, it exceeded expectations.
My goals were as follows:
1) 60 short story submissions,
2) with two sales, one of those being a professional sale (six cents a word or more), and
3) I also wanted to finish the novel I began, write a novella and (rather vaguely) write a ‘few’ short stories.
The results were:
1) 55 submissions – close enough. I usually start at the top of the market – the most prestigious magazines with the quickest turnaround times – and work my way down. Which is another way of saying everything I have ever written has been rejected by Clarkesworld, and usually within 24 hours.
2) Four sales – doubling my target. I started the year off with a bang by winning 1st place in quarter one of the Writers of the Future 
competition. Aside from the thousand dollar first prize, plus another payment upon publication, I’m particularly pleased that the win includes an all-expenses paid trip to LA to participate in a week-long writer’s workshop with the other winners. As I live in Vietnam I have no opportunity to attend workshops locally, and there is no community of speculative fiction writers here (English speaking, anyway. Ho Chi Minh City has a small Vietnamese geek community, but I’ve yet to find one in Ha Noi).
I also found two sales to the venerable Interzone, the UK’s longest running speculative fiction magazine. The physical copy of the magazine is aesthetically sublime – they have excellent artwork and great design standards. It’s also a magazine that has published some of the big names of the genre. Very pleased to get my tales in those pages.
I also sold the second story I ever wrote, ‘The Line’, to new Australian magazine Grimdark. Grimdark is a new market with a lot of hustle willing to pay writers 6 cents a word. All power to them.
3) I did finish the novel. I also pitched it to two publishers at the Canberra Speculative Fiction Conference in Canberra in October (the ‘pitch’ is a five-minute spiel to a publisher, trying to convince them to read your manuscript). That was rather stressful, especially as I ran my pitch by some experienced authors in a workshop the day before and they made it clear how terrible it was. I tried to to fix it (mainly in vain) and can barely remember the incoherent mess I spouted to the publishers the following day. But apparently it was good enough, as they both agreed to look at the manuscript.
I wrote two novellas, the first of which (approx. 20k words) has been drafted, re-drafted, beta read, edited and sent out to a number of publishers for consideration. The second novella (approx. 50k words) is a rough beast still in rough draft. I hope longer novella goes somewhere – it’s a rather ambitious satire of the mega-rich in a future America. Imagine Animal Farm, but with billionaires.
And I wrote six short stories. Shorts are good for improving your writing quickly, and are creatively satisfying in and of themselves. I go on about the wonders of the short story in a previous article here.
I also received 33 rejections, one submission never had a response, three I withdrew, and 14 are pending.
Rejections usually evoke a sting of disappointment, an expletive directed at the offending publication, followed by a shrug of the shoulders as I consider the next market for the story. All in about the time it took you to read that sentence. The short fiction market is ultra-competitive, with legions of first-class writers vying over a handful of slots in the major magazines. Rejection is not worth taking personally.
Overall, I’m happy with the approach I took to writing this year. I slogged it out, trying to hit a minimum of 500 words per day. Hale or ill, up or down, or trapped under a heavy object, I’d hit the word count six days a week. This left me with around 160,000 good words for the year.
While it is difficult to be objective, I can safely say that the quality of my writing improved dramatically over the year. After I completed the first draft of my novel, for example, I went back to the start to begin editing the whole thing. I couldn’t help but wince. The first few chapters were chock-full of rookie errors and took a substantial amount of re-writing and re-fitting to get right.
At the end of my second full year writing fiction, I don’t know if it will be my last or if I’ve got decades of writing to come. I certainly hope it is the latter. But I will say this: it has been, above all things, a pleasure. And a privilege: having the freedom to take on the intellectual and cultural life of a writer – whether you do it part time or full time – is an extremely rare one.
As Orwell noted, writers are by definition narcissists. Pretty hard not to be, when a pre-condition for being a writer is the conviction that the whole world needs to know what lurks inside your head. So it’s no surprise to see writers bemoaning their lot on social media or in articles; the lot of the tortured artist, desperate to have their genius recognised. No surprise, but a constant irritation all the same.
Any writer who complains about the life: deadlines or pressure or reviews or writer’s block or whatever the supposed bete noire of their writerly existence, lacks a little of what you would call perspective.
The money is terrible and the career prospects atrocious, of course, and writers are perfectly entitled to complain about that.
But everything else is a pleasure: reading widely, researching the subject matter of your story, and sitting down to the keyboard each day and unfurling your imagination onto the page.
For year three I’m planning three novellas and six short stories. My target – the power of Castle Grayskull willing – is to make fifty submissions, sell four short stories, and sell one longer work (either a novella or a novel).
Touch wood. 