I meant to do this in January, but the year has already been a whirlwind, and I am only now finding time to get it done. In December, I had the thought to try and summarize the work I’ve managed in the last year—and I definitely need the morale boost right about now.

My six months of unemployment is coming to a close, I have a new job, and a new apartment in NYC. I have made several plans for how to not lose steam writing wise, but only time will tell if any of them manage to stick. One thing I can do, for now, is to remind myself how far I’ve come.

I recently watched a YouTube lecture series on fantasy writing by Brandon Sanderson, and while I don’t agree with everything he does, he starts out his first lecture by saying “I’m assuming you want to be a fantasy writer in ten years time,” which I am not exactly the demo for, but close enough. And I really liked that framing. Ten years. It can take that long—or that short. I’m only on year two, maybe three depending on where I plant the flag of when I got serious about writing. I have an achievable goal, and ten years is a realistic timeline to achieve it in. I want this to be the first year I make note of this data, in the belief that it will not be the last time I do so.

Overview

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Let’s talk the overall numbers, then get into specific projects.

In 2024, I wrote 178,073 words, which is about 650 pages of journal entries, drafts, and notes. Some of that is duplicates from multiple rounds of drafts, and it would take me too long to figure out where the duplicates are while also keeping the differences from draft to draft, so I think this is the “overall” stat I’ll be using.

Now let’s look at actual drafts. In my notebook, I tag sheets by whether they are ideas and character concepts, (I call these flash) incomplete drafts, (I call these studies), or completed drafts (just drafts). So let’s count these. For drafts, I’ll count the total completed drafts, with the unique stories in parentheses.

• Flash - 16
• Studies - 14
• Drafts - 28 (6)

It’s easy to feel like ideas go into the notebook and then never see the light of day, and yes, many of the studies I did were either not based on flash, or based on flash from earlier than this year, but quite a few of the idea notes I made to myself ended up becoming studies and even drafts. and the completion rate is also something I’m rather proud of. Of the 20 attempts to write something, I managed to get 6 stories worth working on. Thats a 30% hit rate—not bad!

Editing

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As I may have mentioned in earlier blog posts, I have a coach who has been helping me with taking my rough drafts for stories, and working on them with the goal of acceptance into magazines. My primary market this year has been spec fiction magazines like Clarkesworld, Analog, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, but I have also submitted to the New Yorker, The Drift, and American Short Fiction, as well as smaller genre markets like Apparition Lit.

The majority of my work this year has been not writing stories, but rewriting them. Specifically, Priesthood, Brushstrokes, and Deer (these are the codenames for the stories, which I use in my notebook for keyword tagging). In addition to these three, I have drafts for two stories, codenamed Grandmother and Self-Help, which my coach is excited about working on. The last unique story with a completed draft, codename Salon, I wrote at the end of December, and haven’t had a chance to talk to my coach about, but Dylan liked it! There were a handful of stories that I attempted, but didn’t complete drafts of, and thus don’t have codenames, but I do have interest in returning to some of them at some point.

Regarding the three stories I’ve done rewrites on:

Brushstrokes had 7 rounds of drafts, mostly around getting the story’s word count down, as my coach felt that for a “distant” third person voice, almost fable style, shorter is better.

Priesthood I struggled with for a long time, and had 14 drafts, including 2 full, ground up re-writes, both in the 7k word range. I learned a lot going back and forth with this story, and having someone “in industry” to help was invaluable. At one point, (because I obviously wasn’t getting what he was talking about when he told me what wasn’t working in my many drafts) my coach suggested name dropping him in a submission to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I’d gotten personalized feedback from them before on a submission of my story Every Circle a Point. By making this move, I’d be sacrificing the ability to submit a better version of the story to the magazine (magazines range from explicit refusal to assumed convention that you don’t resubmit a story unsolicited, even if they give you specific feedback) in exchange for an editor’s perspective on what was missing. To both my and my coach’s surprise, I got a response within a week, with a long list of notes from the editor-in-chief of that magazine, Scott Andrews. It only took two drafts after these notes to get to a sell-able story. Compared to the twelve previous drafts, which were various versions of me running straight into a wall and wondering why I stopped moving, my work on the story after getting these notes was extremely productive.

Deer, the last story, came to me during the final rounds on Priesthood, basically fully formed in my mind and only required some minor rewrites for style and grammar. I agonized over commas and paragraph breaks, but other than that the story didn’t change much from its original version. It is also extremely short, and not genre fiction like the rest of the stories I have completed drafts of from 2024. I feel happy with it for what it is, but also don’t think it will have much luck at magazines, and worry it is a little too self indulgent, or else just doesn’t have enough going on. In any case, this story was a beacon in the dark for me, and reminded me what is enjoyable about the process of writing, not just the outcomes.

Submissions

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In 2024, I sent out 13 submissions to magazines. All thirteen being submissions of the three of the four stories that have at least two drafts—the odd one out being Grandmother, because it is still not finalized.

I submitted Brushstrokes to 5 magazines, receiving form rejections each time. Priesthood I submitted 5 times as well, with one personalized rejection, as mentioned before, from Beneath Ceaseless Skies. My submission of this story to Analog Science Fiction & Fact is still pending review, as they have a rather long response timeline. Deer I have submitted 3 times, and only heard back from one magazine, the Drift, from whom I received a form rejection.

I plan to keep submitting Circle, Brushstrokes, and Priesthood if it’s not accepted into Analog. Each of these completed stories, I feel, are better than the last, and I hope to continue that trend as I start the year working on Grandmother, Salon, and Self-Help, which all have potential, and that my coach even remarked ‘if you’d brought me these stories when we decided to work on Priesthood, I would have picked all three of these, and left the other alone.” Which, while doesn’t bode well for Priesthood, is encouraging about the progress of my work to become, at the least, a publishable author.

Here’s to 2025!