What About 2015?

leaps and bounds

2015 was my best writing year BY FAR.

*leaps and bounds*

That the year was also extremely challenging on a personal level is just the way it so often happens, isn’t it? There’s a reason we remember Dickens’ best of times/worst of times quote. But if you have to go through hard times, I can recommend having some professional successes to ease the way.

I started 2015 with a goal to sub as many stories as often as I could. I ended up with over twice as many as 2014 which was more than double any previous year.

I slacked off on subbing in these last months of the year because of the aforementioned personal challenges and also this weird thing that started happening: acceptances. Four in four months, plus the publication of a story that had been accepted in 2014.

magic

What is this magic that’s been visited upon me? Two are pro sales! I will be happy about this forever. Not constantly happy of course, but happy that it happened this way. It feels like my hard work has paid off and that’s not a feeling I’m familiar with.

I joined SFCanada and think that I’ll be eligible to join SFWA in the new year. These were goals that seemed years away at the beginning of 2015.

Maybe I should have learned a lot from this about my “place” in the writing world or the publishing world or whether what I write is relevant to anyone else or that I can now expect a ?% return on my hard work…but no. None of that. I take nothing from the slew (yes, for me, 4 is a slew) of acceptances except that I worked hard and then I got lucky. It isn’t likely to repeat itself in that way and that’s okay because it already happened. “They” can’t take it away from me and *I* can’t take it away from myself because it changed me. I feel myself moving forward with a calm, new sense of okay-ness about my writing even while knowing that of course there will be doubts and devastation and doldrums. But at a different level than before.

However, I did learn more about my writing process:

Looking forward to 2016: to setting new goals and knocking them down.

#processing #publications #happy #NewYear #tips #pro #fiction #Writing #shortstories