Goals - how am I doing?

Someone on Twitter recently invited people to share how they were doing with their year's goals.  So I sat down to review my own progress.

This year I focused on setting short story goals.  Inspired by Ray Bradbury's advice to write a short story a week, I set myself the goal of writing 50 new stories this year. I also set myself the ambitious target of making 100 short story submissions during the year.  Looking at my submissions record, I see that so far I've written 21 new short stories this year.  And I've made 23 new submissions. 

So what went wrong?  Well, while I kept up the discipline of writing a new short story a week for five months, some of the finished products weren't very good. I used up my strongest ideas first, and I wasn't generating new good ones fast enough.  Some weeks I was forced to work on a weaker idea, resulting in weak stories.  And some ideas I had a struggle to develop into full stories when I started asking 'what if?'.  My imagination wasn't keeping up with the targets.

I reminded myself that Ray Bradbury's advice was aimed at getting writers to produce lots of work to learn and hone their craft.  But I've been doing that for decades.  I've written around 500 short stories now, and over 20 novels, so I've had lots of practice.  So I decided it was time for me to focus on quality not quantity.  So I spent some time doing market analysis, reading published stories and picking them apart.  Which showed me that I was starting too slow.  Many published stories had the hook in the first line.

Which brings me to submissions.  I set my target on the assumption that I'd continue to receive rejections on the same timescale as last year.  Those ranged from a couple of hours to a month before the rejection came in.  But an interesting thing happened after I rewrote several stories.  The time on submission lengthened.  A lot.  I currently have 13 stories still on submission, most of which have been with the magazine for over four months, two for over a year.  This development screwed my assumed turnaround rate massively.

So I've abandoned the 100 submissions target.  I'm hoping that the longer time on submission means that some of my stories have got further than the slush reader.  Maybe I'm getting close to a breakthrough at last.