“Too busy to blog much.” Not only does that cover this past month, but also the year. It may also be a suitable epitaph for my gravestone. Either that, or “Crushed to Death by His To-Be-Read Book Pile.” But I digress.
The major accomplishment of 2016 was finishing my novel (which I blogged about sufficiently.) It’s off to my agent now, and I eagerly await her feedback. As editor, I completed and published three anthologies this year. Funny Fantasy in the spring followed by Humanity 2.0 and Unidentified Funny Objects 5 in the fall. FF was all reprints, H20 half reprints and half originals, and UFO5 all originals. All in all, I edited 27 original stories this year. So it was rather gratifying that eight of them made the Tangent Online 2016 Recommended Reading List.
After two full-length books in 2015, I only had a handful of short stories published this year. They were (chronologically):
Whom He May Devour – Nautilus – 01/07/16
One in a Million – On Spec – vol. 101 – 02/01/16
Future Fragments, Six Seconds Long – Diabolical Plots – 07/01/16
Forty-Seven Dictums of Warfare – Daily Science Fiction – 07/06/16
Dante’s Unfinished Business – Galaxy’s Edge – 09/01/16
A Perfect Medium for Unrequited Love – Nature – 09/15/16
The Poet-Kings and the Word Plague – Daily Science Fiction – 10/03/16
How Gaia and the Guardian Saved the World – Amazing Stories – 10/16/16
Masquerade Night – In a Cat’s Eye anthology – 10/22/16
Noun of Nouns: A Mini Epic – Upside Down, Apex Publications – 12/13/16
Okay, so maybe ten is more than a handful. I ain’t complaining.
I wrote only nine new short stories in 2016, totaling just under 30,000 words but I also added 37,000 words onto my novel (it was probably more once you account for rewrites and revisions, but that’s the word count I ended up with.) for a total of 67,000 new words, which is better than last year. Of the nine new stories I already sold six, and that’s keeping in mind that the last two of them were completed in late November and late December respectively. I sell what I write, which is perhaps the metric I’m most proud of.
According to my spreadsheet I earned $2170 from my short fiction sales in 2016, a smidgen less than last year. I expect this to decline further in 2017 as I spend more time on novels and editing. My overall writing-related income (accounting for royalties, anthology sales, workshops taught, etc.) continues to grow steadily.
I made a total of 123 submissions in 2016 (compared to 155 last year) which resulted in 20 acceptances (one more than last year). Most of these submissions were for reprints. It takes very little time to fling a reprint at a market that considers those, and as my ‘inventory’ grows, there’s almost always a story or two that are a possible fit for a venue seeking submissions.
There are a handful of outstanding submissions and a few lost/never responded ones, but I did rack up around 100 rejections this year. (The numbers don’t quite match up as some of the acceptances and rejections in 2016 are from submissions filed in 2015.) Rejections are always going to be there, and while I enjoyed a nearly 20% win ratio I would’ve been happy with half that. Never let rejections drag you down: just keep submitting until the right story finds the right editor!
2017 goals:
- Sell Eridani’s Crown (my first novel).
- Write and finish my second novel within the 2017 calendar year.
- Sell at least one new anthology to a major publisher.
- Publish UFO6 and Funny Horror.
- Sell or crowdfund my second short story collection, aiming to be published in 2018.
There’s also the matter of completing The Cackle of Cthulhu, the anthology I’ve been working on in late 2016, but it’s literally a few days away from being done, so I’m not including it onto the list of goals.
And now I’m off to work on one or more of those things!
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Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction 
You had a good year. Good job.