It’s new year’s day, 2022, and I thought it’d be nice to have a little look back over my writing during the past year.

Last year - as in 2020 - my goal was to shoot for one hundred rejections. Here’s how my submissions stacked up:

As you can see, I didn’t quite make it to a hundred rejections. I did manage over a hundred submissions, though, and was delighted to have ten acceptances (or, as a pessimist would have it, “failed rejections”).

There’s a list below of all the things I had published this year, although the astute might note that there are not ten of them. Things rarely line up neatly; stories might have been accepted in 2020 but published in 2021, or accepted in 2021 but not yet actually published.

So, what are the goals for 2022?

I appreciate that the basic rules of goal-setting require constant escalation, but I’m sticking with my “one hundred rejections”. Submitting stories takes time - and a quite surprising amount of it. I have finally reached an uneasy truce with M$ Word, whereby Word will format the stories in the way I want most of the time. But combing through submission calls, reading sample stories, checking guidelines, matching pieces to markets… it is, for me, an absolute timesink. If I up my submissions goal, I fear I will spend even more time on these writing-adjacent activities and even less on the actual writing.

What I hope to improve in the coming year is both the quantity of stories I finish, and the quality of the submissions I make. For various reasons, my writing output has definitely tailed off in the latter half of this year. An attempt to kick-start it in November by writing every day produced, sadly, a load of old drivel.

But do you know the good thing about drivel? It exists, as words on a page, and is better than blank pages. I’m going to try to return to the write-every-day discipline this January, and apply Neil Gaiman’s well-known advice to finish things. Surely, over the course of a few months, some of the things will consent to be stories.

My hope is then that more stories leads to a better pool from which to select submissions, and that by developing my submission strategy I can match stories to markets better and hit a good acceptance rate in 2022. I actually think that ~10% is quite a decent rate, but honesty compels me to admit that a (not yet published) drabble anthology accepting three pieces I sent them has somewhat inflated this year’s rate!)

A submission strategy?

Until recently, my approach to submitting stories has been to finish editing a piece, then look around for places to send it. Unfortunately, many markets (and especially the markets that pay pro-rates) open to submissions for only a very short period of time every year. Without planning, I will find that one of my dream markets has sprung its annual submissions window, and I have nothing to send. Or I have a piece I would love to send, but it is under consideration elsewhere. Or that the window has just closed, and I missed it altogether.

This year, I intend to dedicate a little more time to tracking when markets open and close, and plan accordingly to make sure I have suitable pieces to send them. Although I rarely find specific submission calls useful (I am quite spectacularly bad at writing to themed prompts), I would also like to keep an eye out in case they furnish inspiration - or on the off-chance I have something ready to go that will fit nicely.

I still believe that submitting stories is a lot like buying raffle tickets - the more you do it, the better your chances. But it is not exactly like buying raffle tickets, there is more than just chance at play. I need to find the happy middle ground between a tiny-number of hyper-tailored submissions, and a wide-angle scatter-cannon of stories.

Tune in next year to see if the “2022 Publications” list is longer!

2021 Publications

Smiles, a flash horror story (published by Flash Fiction Online).

Desire Lines, a short poem inspired by COVID (published by Briefly Write).

The Failed, a short story that I struggle to categorise (published by Interstellar Literary).

Jeremy Sleeps, a short horror story of insomnia and identity (published by Electric Spec).

The Last Girl, a fantasy story (published by Kzine, available for purchase on Amazon or free on Kindle Unlimited) [content warning for rape and murder].

The Lady of Time, a sci-fi novella (published by The Colored Lens, available for purchase on Amazon or free on Kindle Unlimited).

The Christmas Elf, a Christmas story (published in Skullgate Media’s Winter Wonders anthology, available for purchase as an e-book from SmashWords and various other retailers, or in physical paperback form from Amazon).

The Fight, a very short Christmas story (selected as overall winner of the Weird Christmas Flash Fiction Contest).