Do what brings me joy

Towards the end of 2017 I got involved in a bit of a Twitter storm about short story submissions.  One of the SF magazines published their year-end statistics.  They had something like 2,600 submissions during the year.  Guess how many stories they published? 24.  I suggested that, if they only had 24 slots, they were likely to go for already-published authors, and that newcomers didn't stand a chance.

That wasn't the case with that particular magazine, but the discussion soon snowballed into something much bigger, with dozens of writers pitching in to give their experiences.  That was great for me, as it gave me a chance to assess what my real chances of getting a short story published were.  To do it I'd probably have to make around 300 submissions before I started getting anywhere.  And given that I failed to make my 100 submissions target this year, that was going to take me for ever to do.  And if I was lucky, after all those submissions, I might sell three stories in a year.

I'd been finding the submissions process tedious all year. Every submission needs a different file format, every magazine has different story lengths, some are on-line submissions, some email submissions.  The variations were already driving me crazy with the amount of checking to be done for each submission, so the prospect of doing more work just didn't appeal.

It wasn't fun, and the constant rejections sure weren't fun, especially when I got four on the same day. So I've decided I'm not doing that any more.  I asked myself one key question: what brings me joy?  And the answer to that was working on novels.  The challenge of crafting an in-depth story, getting to know the characters, working out the plot, brings me deep joy.  So that is what I'll be doing in 2018.  I'll be writing a completely new novel as the start of a completely new series. But first I have Starfire to edit.  I need to trim 5,000 words from it before I submit it anywhere. 

So this year if I don't get taken on by an agent with Combined Cognition I'll pitch Starfire instead. And while that's going out I'll get on with writing that completely new novel.

This year I've returned to my definition of success - work created.  If it gets sold, so much the better.  But I've decided I'm not letting the lack of a publication contract get me down this year.  Writers write, regardless of whether anyone wants to publish them, so that's what I'll do.  I'll write what I want to write, in the way I want to write it.