It’s time for my public self-abasement, also known as my annual year-in-review post. Pardon me while I don sackcloth and ashes . . .
The Raw Data
New Fiction: 41350 words
Other Verbiage: 44300 words
Total New Words: 85654 words
Rewrites: 92172 words
Submissions: 35, including novel queries
Rejections: 34, including withdrawn manuscripts
Sales: 2
Publications: 8 (including 4 movie reviews in Fantasy)
Conventions Attended: OSFest, NASFiC, Dragon*Con, Nuke-Con, MileHiCon
Assessment
The word for 2010, boys and girls, seems to be failure. Consider my goals for the year.
1. Write at least 100K of new fiction. Epic fail.
2. At least 100K in rewrites. Close, but not quite. Minor fail.
3. Get the website up. Some progress was made, but . . . no. Fail.
4. Improve submission statistics, including novel queries. Stayed at about the same level as 2009. In other words, fail.
5. Continue critiquing. This I did. Rather a lot, actually. A big chunk of that Other Verbiage total came from critiquing.
6. Continue weekly progress reports. Done.
That’s two goals out of six. 33%. Fail.
Of these, I feel worst about #1. Regular readers might recall that I had a lot of trouble deciding which novel project I wanted to work on. I had a couple of choices, both of them science fiction, both expansions of earlier short work, but I didn’t feel too strongly about either one of them. Then in August, I jotted this little pearl of wisdom: "[R]eally, why in the hell should I write another science fiction novel at this time? The SF novel market, quite frankly, sucks. Hard. I’d be much better off with some kind of fantasy story–but I don’t have any novel-length fantasy percolating at the moment."
With this thought in mind, I set that novel project aside, in the vague hope that . . . what? A fantasy novel might take its place? I’m not sure.
And what did I end up writing? A 40K SF story. If the SF novel market sucks, the novella market blows.
Brilliant, Rotundo. Just brilliant.
I suppose I can console myself with the notion that From Earth I Have Arisen is technically a novel, so I can at least claim that I’ve managed to continue my streak of writing a novel a year. It’s even possible that, for all the trouble it’s given me, the story is good. And it’s definitely better than nothing. So there’s that.
And hey, did I mention I was in a movie? Also, I was a film critic at Fantasy for a few months, until they stopped doing film reviews.
But . . . yeah. For the most part, I really screwed myself in 2010. Took a step backward. Not exactly gonna set the world on fire at this pace.
But hope springs eternal, even in this cold, dark heart of mine. So . . .
Goals for 2011
1. Write at least 100K of new fiction.
2. Write at least 100K in rewrites.
3. Get the website up.
4. Improve submission statistics, including novel queries.
5. Continue critiquing.
6. Continue weekly progress reports.
Alert readers will note that these are the same goals I had for 2010. "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
If it was good enough for Samuel Beckett, it’s good enough for me. Here I come, 2011. Ready or not.
