A Few Reflections & Possible Plans for the Coming New Year
Hello Funny People,
Art by Devora Johnson
This bonus post is going to be a bit of a ramble—which I suppose isn't any different than most of my other posts. I have a few things I'm trying to sort out, and as poet W.H. Auden once quipped, "I never know what I think until I see what I've written."
A Few Brief Reflections
2023 is quickly coming to a conclusion, and for the first time in a couple of years, I feel a bit down at year's end. Why exactly I can say. After all, I've had a pretty good year.
In January, my first pro-rated sale story, "Urtext Redux" appeared in print in The Librarian Reshelved anthology. That same month, I officially joined SFWA on the back of that sale. I even got a chance to cast my first vote in the Nebula Awards. (Still think Ai Jiang and Travis Baldree got robbed, but we need not discuss that.) Not a bad start to the year.
Then, of course, I went on to net myself 5 additional sales, some of which I expected (I had a publishing history with Cloaked Press and Wyngraf after all), and some of which were complete surprises. Cracking Flashpoint SF and Androids and Dragons were major coups for me. It was naturally a joy to see so many little stories of mine make it out into the world, especially given that many were stories I had faith in and was determined to see into print. He'll, I even manged to get an R&R, two hold notices for short fiction from markets I'd never submitted to before, and netted a second Silver Honorable Mention from Writers of the Future. And I did all this during a year when I wasn't prioritizing short fiction.
I'd be remiss in not mentioning the longer fiction work. Not only did I get one novel drafted (and have nearly completed the draft of a second), but I revised the one I manged to complete into a form that agents might find more suitable to represent. (Keyword: might. No guarantees, only opportunities. )
Any one of these steps would've been a massive milestone for anyone to accomplish in a single year, let alone to get so many of them done in one.
And yet...
There's Always a "But," Isn't There?
Despite managing all these things, I still have that one annoying little voice in me saying I didn't do enough.
This voice and I are quite familiar with each other. It's been with me ever since I first started school and I'm sure it'll be whispering in my ear on my deathbed.
In defense of the voice of doubt, it has a point.
The main goal I had for this year was to query my first novel hard this year. And I absolutely made a clusterfuck of that. I didn't keep it up the way I should have and after about May of this year, I dropped my efforts completely. Of course, the reason I did was because I thought the book needed one more polish, but by then I'd burned too many "dream agents" and thought it wasn't worth it.
In other words, I let the rejections get to me, and they affected my drive, just like the story rejections did for years until I said fuck it in 2022.
So, What Comes Next?
I can't go back and time and change things. What I can do is decide what to do next. So, here's a few plans.
1) Get back in the query trenches. Revising my first novel reminded me how much I loved the story and the characters, and thus, it's made me hellbent on saying it into print (if I can). My only recourse is to get back into the trenches and keep sending it out until one of two things happens. Either I find an agent, or I burn through my entire list of potential agents and am forced the shelve the project. But I won't be able to.make that jusgement until I commit to my plan of action. So, starting in the new year, I plan to apply the same discipline I did to my short story submitting in 2022. When one rejection comes in, I send out two more submissions. And I keep going, no matter what.
2) Start revising the second novel. A first draft is only the first step in getting a book ready for publication. It's also the hardest step, in my opinion. But once you have a realized manuscript, what comes next is simple revision, which I love doing. With another project ready, I can go through all the agents I've burned again and try again. Of course this process is a slow one for me, but it can be fruitful if I do it the right way.
3) Start reloading the short fiction backlog. Most of the stories I tried to get out there, admittedly, deserved to get rejected, save the handful I kept out there because I knew they were good. However, most of those have been snapped up now, with one or two remaining. So, it's time to start writing again and get more stuff ready to submit. However, with the exceptions of the markets I've already had a history with, I'll mainly be focusing on cracking two (2) specific ones because I think I can, but only if I intensify my efforts in producing fiction they might want. That said, I won't focus on getting projects done for the sake of upcoming calls anymore. I'm going to write what I want, polish it to the best if my ability, and then try to sell it. Also, I've come to realize taking a month or so between novel projects to work on short stories is good for me. (Works for TC Boyle, so why can't it work for me?)
4) Start Another Novel. I'm not sure which IP I'll go with in my backlog list once I've completed the space opera, but that's a decision I'll need to make. I might return to my fantasy world again to draft another entry point tale into it. I might go with one of the handful of standalone fantasy ideas and see if i can make a success of one of them. I might try a completely new genre. I don't know, but I'm looking forward to beginning a new project without the long period of quiet between long projects.
Hopefully, God doesn't laugh at these plans and throws sand into the gears 🤞
— IMC 🙃
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