I did it! Wasn’t sure I was going to manage this year between work, travel, and general chaos, but I have once again managed to successfully complete my Short Story Submission Challenge.
The Numbers
Here are all the numbers, as the above heading would suggest:
- Total submissions: 31
- Days skipped: 7
- Stories/poems submitted: 18
- New stories written: 3.5
- New Poems written: 3
- Acceptances: 2 (plus 1 acceptance from a story submitted in July)
- Holds: 1
- Form Rejections: 10
- Personal Rejections: 3
- Pending Response: 15
- Stories published: 1
The Feels
I feel good about how this challenge went this year. I managed to hit all but one of the submission calls that I wanted to make.
With the acceptances I received this month, I’ve hit five story acceptances for the year, which is more acceptances than I’ve ever received in a year before.
I also like the new things I managed to write this month. It was fun to write some poetry again. Writing poetry was something that brought me a lot of satisfaction throughout high school and my early twenties, but I got out of the habit in recent years. I won’t claim that the poems I wrote this September are any good, but I enjoyed the process of writing them, and I sold one of them (details on that to come)!
I also managed to write some micro fiction (less than 250 words) and some flash fiction (less than 1000 words). I’ve written some flash fiction before, but for the first time, I feel happy with the result. As for the micro piece, I have a feeling that I will want to flesh it out a bit later on, but it is a complete story, and I’m proud of myself for pushing out of my comfort zone to write something so short and sparse. It feels like I’ve reached a new level of ability in terms of telling a story in fewer words, which is something I’ve struggled with.
Overall, I feel really good about my efforts this year. There’s a part of me (the anxious judgmental part) that feels like I could have pushed myself further, like I should have tried to hit that last market on my list like I shouldn’t have skipped so many days. But that voice is relatively quiet compared to the feeling of satisfaction that I have at a job well done.
Thanks for reading!
Leave a Reply