History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

2016 in Review

It’s time, once again, to look at what I’ve accomplished on the writing front this year!

My numbers for 2016:
Stories out at the end of 2016: 16
New Stories Written: 9
Old Stories Making the Rounds: 20
Total Submissions: 188
Total Rejections: 170 (+1, +3)
Total Acceptances: 8
Stories out at the end of 2016: 22

So my numbers for 2016 are pretty comparable to 2015, except that with more stories done, I’ve got more stories in circulation at any given time. The +1 under rejections is for a market that returned my story and asked me to resubmit under their new submission guidelines. But the new guidelines turned them into a non-paying market, so I chose to submit it somewhere else. And I withdrew three stories over the course of the year–all were stories I had submitted in 2015, and in almost every case, the market never got back to me, even to respond to me withdrawing the stories. I’ve got 22 stories out now, and I think three of them (at least) are in the final rounds of consideration for acceptance. So fingers crossed on that!

My goal for 2016 was to write 16 new stories. That clearly did not happen, but I did write 9 (almost 30,000 words combined), which is not half bad. I also spent a considerable amount of time working on revisions to a novel, which should be coming out next year. I’ve been holding off on talking much about this, because the release date is still somewhat up in the air, but yeah, a novel. By me. With a local small press. And it’s the first in a series. I’m kind of excited about it. 🙂

My short story acceptances for the year were:

  • “Donning the Helm” was reprinted at 87 Bedford (print and audio) in May 2016.
  • “A Dark Place” was reprinted in Disturbed Digest in June 2016.
  • “Miasma” was reprinted at Liquid Imagination in August 2016.
  • “Army of Me” was published in Untethered: A Magic iPhone Anthology (Cantina Press) in October 2016.
  • “Nochevieja” was published in Cobalt City Christmas: Christmas Harder in November 2016.
  • “One for Every Year” was reprinted at Quickfic in December 2016.
  • “The Recondite Riddle of the Rose Rogue” was reprinted in the 2017 Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide in December 2016.
  • “The Recondite Riddle of the Rose Rogue” (audio) is forthcoming from Gallery of Curiosities.

In addition to the novel clean-up and the stories, I also wrote an epistolary serial novel on Channillo (Camp Haunt, which I plan to eventually rework into a more narrative novel), worked on a tiny piece of paid game writing, and worked with Jeremy to write AustenWorld, which is our preliminary Regency England Apocalypse World hack. I also worked a bit on three other novels, which I’ll work more on in the coming months (or years, in some cases). I released my novella, The Trouble with the Tick Tock Tabby, through DefCon One Publishing (which is our self-publishing imprint). And we edited and published Fitting In: Historical Accounts of Paranormal Subcultures through Mad Scientist Journal and a Kickstarter last spring.

I’ve already planned out my super ambitious 2017, of course. It involves:

  • 10 new short stories
  • rewriting an old piece of micro-fiction into a short story
  • 2 new novels
  • finishing up and editing a third novel
  • starting on edits to one of the new novels
  • writing 5 historical essays to accompany stories in a new collection
  • revising AustenWorld into something we might publish

Again, a huge lot of stuff that I’m planning to work on. One of the 10 new short stories has a first draft already, and 3 more of them are pretty heavily outlined. The rest are a lot less sorted at this point. And I haven’t outlined the two new novels yet, but I may be able to do those at the same time, because they’re the remainder of the series I mentioned above. The other novel just needs a couple more chapters, and then will likely require a substantial overhaul in edits, because I’ve realized that it might want to be a romance novel, which is a whole new world for me. The historical essays are to combine my love of fiction with my love of history–I have a lot of previously published alternate history stories, as well as some that haven’t found a home. So I’m collecting five of those into a collection, but I’ll be adding brief historical essays on the real history of the stories that I’ve told. I think that’ll be a fun and interesting twist. And the bones of AustenWorld look good, but there’s a lot still to be done if we want to publish a game, even if it is a hack of an existing game.

On top of all of this, I’ll keep on submitting stories and hoping to find homes for more of them, keep working on Mad Scientist Journal and our yearly Kickstarter (to launch in February), and work on more articles, readings, and other stuff for Girl Cooties, which is a website I’ve started contributing to.

Wishing all of my readers a happy, healthy, and productive 2017!


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