The last two months have been pretty busy from a personal view, with my oldest starting kindergarten, my second-oldest starting pre-school, and all of the usual stuff that takes place when the school year gets back into swing. On the writing front, I’ve mostly just been in the “do the daily minimum” / survival mode.
But we’re all hanging in there and it’s the first day of my favorite month of the year, so the next two months will be more awesome then anything you could imagine 🙂
Here’s a quick summary of what I’ve been up to…
Short Stories
I’ve really been slacking on the short stories as of late, but mostly because I’ve been working on other stuff. The sad part is I really enjoy writing and submitting short stories, but right now they are lower on the priority list than other stuff.
With that said, I am still submitting any unpublished stuff I have. Here are my submission stats for the last two months:
- Number of submissions: 2 (Yes. Two.)
- Number of rejections: 1 (Form letter)
- Number of acceptances: 2 (!!!!!)
- Number still pending: 3
So even though I haven’t been submitting too much, I scored a couple of acceptances, which always helps stroke the ego and keeps me writing.
Theme of Absence
As we continue to grow, submissions are coming in at the highest rate since I started the site. That’s great news, but it also means I’ve got a ton catching up to do in the unread pile. As the number of submissions continues to increase, so do the quality, so I have unfortunately had to reject a number of quality submissions, which is also difficult.
The acceptance rate is currently 24.7%, and we are still open to submissions, so if you’ve got any unpublished short stories lying around, be sure to consider Theme of Absence.
And speaking up short stories, the third annual Halloween Horror Flash Fiction contest is still open for submissions for another ten days. I’ve received almost double the amount of submissions as last year as well, which is cool.
Podcast
The Write Good Books Podcast has been a blast so far. We just posted our 45th episode, so # 50 is not too far away. This biggest news this month was that I set up a Patreon site for the podcast. Patrons will have access to a special feed for discussion boards, be named as a supporter, of even have us critique a work. If you’d like to support the site for as little as 50 cents an episode, check out our Patreon site.
WIP Novel
Here is where I actually made the most progress in the last two months. Scrivener has really helped with the pre-writing, outlining, and worldbuilding, but now it’s time to get real and get writing. So that’s what I’m doing. Trying to actually get book # 1 written of a trilogy. I just have to keep reminding myself. It only takes 300 words a day to write a 100,000 word book in a year. So that’s my plan. Get book # 1 finished before October 1, 2018. (Actually the real goal is to have it done and pitch-ready by next year’s RMWF and NWG conferences. We shall see.)
Other stuff
Not too much else to report. I’m hoping to arrange a couple of appearances later this year. I’ll have more details on that as soon as I know. And I’ll also be attending the 2017 Greater Nebraska Writers Conference in Aurora, Nebraska later this month. If you’re a writer in Nebraska, hope to see you there!
And that is it for now. I hope you had a great September, and feel free to share some of your writing accomplishments in the comments section too.
