The (Writing) year in Review

It's New Year's Eve, I should probably do this right?

I once again met, and exceeded, my goal of completing a piece of writing each month, which makes me think maybe I should add to my writing resolutions in some way. Maybe go for two? (and give myself a pass on that in NaNoWriMo months?)

I completed 22 things this year. Two of them were book two and three in the trilogy that Learn to Howl begins, so now I just need to go through Learn to Howl (at least) once more with feeling™, and then make it publication ready. I've made a significant change in the setting, from Somewhere in North Carolina to, instead, Somewhere in the Pine Barrens. Story wise, it still fits/works/makes sense, and from an author standpoint it makes sense because, y'know, I'm from New Jersey. I'm not from the Pine Barrens, but *spoilers* there's only so long the characters stay there. So I'm looking forward to that.

Some of the stories I've counted as completed this year are pretty comprehensive rewrites of stories I wrote prior to this year, and it's given them good new life, so I've got high hopes for their submissions success in the coming days.

Some people on Twitter are talking about like, their total wordcounts and stuff, but I don't typically worry about that unless it comes to submissions (whether a story is too short or too long) or novels (where there is a generally accepted length for a genre). So I'm not going to go open all 22 of those files and tally it up because, well, I don't want to. It's a lot. It's at least 150k because of three months of NaNoWriMo, and then the other additional stories.

Which brings us to my submissions (and rejections) and publications!

I had three stories accepted this year. First was Daddy's Girl in Syntax & Salt, which is also on the Nebula Reading List (the actual Nebula Ballot will be released I'm not sure when, and the actual voting is from March 1-March 30). The second story was "Aground, Upon the Sand", also in Syntax & Salt, winning their Fall Flash Fiction contest!

And hey you should go read Syntax & Salt, who in the coming years have a plan to do things like improve the rates they pay their authors, have an editor dedicated to making sure their authors stories are nominated for awards, that kind of awesome thing.

My third story acceptance is "A Thing With Feathers", coming out literally tomorrow (January 1!) in issue 4.3 of Mythic Delirium. The whole issue is available for Kindle here for $2.99, but if you don't want to do that, my particular story will be on their website in February.

In total, I submitted 173 pieces in 2017. Of those, there are still 19 submissions I'm still waiting on (even though 1 of them will probably not reply, if other writers' experiences are anything to go on). I received 106 form rejections and 53 personal rejections, which is almost three times the amount of personals I've received in prior years.

So next year, I hope to get more acceptances, publish my werewolf trilogy, and write at least as much as I did this year! I might also get that Patreon started (though I guess with the recent Patreon drama I'm glad I held off on that a bit?) If you'd be interested in being one of my patrons and maybe have any kind of specific "gee I'd really love it if Jen did X and I'd totally pay a dollar or whatever a month for it" let me know!