Writing goals for 2024

Well, January may almost be over, but it’s not too late to post some writing goals for 2024. I hope!

I’ve been focusing on getting some novel manuscripts written, revised, and/or polished in recent years, and I let short fiction submissions fall by the wayside. Which is too bad, considering there are a number that I never found homes for.

So, in the interests of getting short stories out there, I decided to do a few things. One: write new stories. Two: revise old stories that were never published. Three: send out previously published stories to markets that take reprints. In other words: submit, submit, submit!

Werewolf figure from American Werewolf in London prowls over two short stories by David Jón Fuller
A werewolf figure from An American Werewolf in London prowls over two new short stories.

It was fun to log back in the Submission Grinder for the first time in ages, and start logging new submissions. Having written a couple of new stories at the tail end of 2023, and another at the beginning of 2024, I decided to aim high. My goal for 2024? Twelve new publication credits, either first publication or reprint. I’m not fussy! There are a lot of great magazines and anthologies out there, and I want my work in as many of them as I can manage.

I had kind of forgotten how much work it can be to find just the right market or submissions call for a particular story, and then making sure your submission package matches all the requirements. And then: the obsessive checking of email, Moksha, or Submission Grinder to see if there are any new responses. Spoiler alert: having a lot of stories out on sub does not mean an avalanche of writing correspondence.

However, I have a number of secondary markets lined up for each story I sent out, so the inevitable rejections aren’t so terrible — I can just send the story out to the next possible home. And new submission calls, special issues, and anthologies crop up all the time. I figured that to get to a dozen new publication credits this year, I would need to keep at least that many stories out on submission at all times. Right now I’ve got 14. I also have a few more unpublished stories I still like that could use an overhaul. So with a few more drafts apiece, I’ll get those ready to send out as well.

Of course, the goal is to get to zero submissions, meaning every story has found a home somewhere. Maybe I’ll get there! Then again, I plan to keep writing new stories. We’ll see where we are by December 31…

Up and Coming: free stories!  Download while you can

Up and ComingSo, I am a bit late on writing a this-is-some-stuff-I-wrote-that’s-eligible-for-awards post, but that was on purpose: I was waiting for Up And Coming: Works by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors to be available.  And it is, now. For FREE. You can download it until March 31.

By the way, if you just want to read a huge collection of short stories and don’t care about awards, this is the anthology for you.  There are more than 200 stories in it, written by writers who are in either their first or second year of eligibility for Campbell Award for Best New Writer, which is typically awarded at the same time as the Hugo Awards, though it’s not technically one  of the Hugo Awards. Up and Coming is one million words of prose in a single book. That’s like 10 doorstopper-length fantasy or sci-fi epics right there. And it’s free, to make it easier for potential Campbell voters track down work by eligible writers.

Updating my bookshelf: 2013 in writing

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I’m going to admit: this is slightly embarrassing, but you have to start somewhere. For a long time, the only books I could claim to have stories published in came out when I was in high school.

Don’t get me wrong: at 15, finding out my assassin-droid short story “My Function is to Kill” was going to be published in Creative Minds ’88 made my year.  The anthology of student writing was published annually by the school division my high school was in, and it was a real cross-section of what a lot of us were going through and how that came out in our writing. (Er, well, I don’t know what an assassin droid says about my high-school experience, but I thought it was cool.)