History That Never Was

My numbers for 2023:
Stories out at the end of 2022: 83
New Stories Written: 118 (21 short stories, 44 flash or shorter, 53 poems)
Old Stories Making the Rounds: 156
Total Submissions: 761
Total Rejections: 652 (+34 Never Responded, 7 Withdrawn, 2 Returned, 7 Failed)
Total Acceptances: 16 (+5) (+2)
Stories out at the end of 2023: 112

My overall subs were a bit lower than this year, in part due to a lot of travel in 2023, during which I tended to do little writing or submitting. But I did finish more pieces in 2023 than I did in 2022, including twice as many short stories, which is a nice uptick!

Acceptances in 2023 were also lower than in 2022, but I also had a first of having two of my pieces selected to be reprinted in anthologies that the original publishers put out, which are basically solicited reprints, and pretty darn cool! I continued to have a pretty good blend of pro and semi-pro sales, including some REALLY great poetry sales (some of which are not out yet).

From my 2023 goals:

• Combined total of 127 new pieces (16 short stories, 20 flash fiction pieces, 12 microfiction pieces, 4 poems, and 75 TBD)

I came pretty close to my goal again, with more short stories and poems than planned, but fewer overall pieces. This, too, was impacted by travel, as I wrote fewer pieces in the months when we traveled. However, in addition to these new pieces, I also drafted a novelette, a novella, and a non-fiction book. So all told, the word count for the year was pretty darn high, just not quite in the proportions I anticipated.

• Review 16 books

I doubled this, with 32 book reviews in 2023. A handful of those were writing craft/creativity books, but they still count! I also finished Stephen Fry’s book on poetry and started on The Wayward Writer, which is a ton of writing exercises (and those will continue into 2024).

• Publish five collections

This wound up being five plus, as I did the collections I’d planned for, plus an omnibus edition of Unfixed Timelines (which wasn’t any new writing), and I published a Cobalt City novelette that I hadn’t planned on previously. So yeah, that was a LOT of books this year.

Tags: 2023 recap

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Monday, January 8th, 2024 at 6:00 am and is filed under Recap. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.