History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

January 2016 recap

By the numbers:
Stories out at the beginning of the month: 16
Acceptances received: 1
Rejections received: 13
Stories withdrawn: 0
Resubmissions: 14
New Submissions: 1
Stories out at the end of the month: 18

Hard to believe that a month has already passed! I’m still putting 2015 on plenty of stuff, but I’m finally starting to remember what year it is!

January was a pretty good start to the year. I got one acceptance in January: Disturbed Digest will be reprinting “A Dark Place” (originally published on Fictionvale) in their June 2016 issue. I have a couple of stories being held for consideration by editors, so fingers crossed on those!

I finished a new story (“small”), and it’s started making the rounds. I was also able to pull an old previously published story back into circulation, since a new market opened that seems like a good fit for it. And I’ve got another couple of stories (“slaughter” and “laundry”) in first drafts, with plans to get slaughter out out in the next couple of weeks, and laundry out later. Today, I’ll be starting another story (“deathsight”), just as soon as I get an outline figured out for it. I’ve had the basic gist of this one in my head for a while, but I need to get it on paper.

Speaking of paper, February and March are going to be an interesting challenge in terms of writing. Jeremy and I are going to Europe for two weeks in late February-early March, and I’m not taking my laptop with me. I will probably not even take the tablet, and the main functions of my phone will be to check the weather, check maps, and take pictures (though I’ll take a real camera too). But I am planning on finding a notebook with really nice paper (hopefully I’ve already got one in my stash of office supplies) and a good pen, and spending some time on the flight and the various trains we are taking to get some longhand writing in. I’m not sure exactly what I will be working on, and it could very well be more journaling than fiction. But I want to be unplugged for this trip, for sure. This means that I’ll just recap February and March together at the end of March.

In addition to all the short story news, I’m also planning on cracking open one of my novel manuscripts (pirates) next week, and going through notes from my beta readers. One of said beta readers is finishing up their reading this week, so I’m awaiting those notes before I get started. If all goes well, I hope to have that all tidied up by the end of March. Then it will likely go on to a paid editor, since I’m leaning pretty strongly toward self-publishing this one.

And speaking of novels and publishing, I’m still trying to find an agent for my middle reader steampunk novella, though I’m beginning to consider self-publishing that one as well. However, while I was reading a related story to my niece (who is 6, and stopped me to ask me what words meant frequently), I realized my writing style is probably a bit heavy for the age group that might be reading middle reader books. So I may need to take another pass at that one to simplify the language, and perhaps some of the structure. But that’s a project for some other time, since I’m pretty loaded down with short story writing at the moment!

 


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