Written This Year
Novels: None completed. Edited Fire in the Belly again, edited King’s Hand. Both of them are out at a couple places now. Put some more words on Wrath: a Love Story but got badly sidelined by other projects.
Novellas: 1
Novellettes: 3
Short Stories: 4
Flash: 1
Paid Film Reviews: 6
Treatments: 4
This is probably the fewest stories I’ve ever written in a single year. Part of this is due to the fact that I was taking screenwriting classes all year, and a lot of my writing time got eaten up by homework. I’ve also got several longer pieces in progress, which means they don’t show up on the tally but I spent a lot of time on them.
Also excited because this is the first time I’ve gotten paid to review films!
Consigned to the trunk of awfulness, never to return: Only one, a shameful “stories that writers who aren’t trans write about trans people” effort.
Best/Favorite story of the year: Favorite is the novelette I just finished writing, Glamazon Versus Deus Ex Machina Man. Best is probably Vaca Muerta and the Hounds of Heck, neither of which I’ve sold yet. But here’s hoping you’ll get to read both of them in the not too distant future.
Magic Spreadsheet wordcount: I have been tracking on the spreadsheet since June 24, 2013.
- Total words written: 967,047; this puts me at 405,000 words written this year. See, I told you I wrote a shitload even if it didn’t translate out to actual finished stories.
- Average words per day: 1,110 (better than last year)
- Days in a row written: 920, so that means for the last two entire years, I have not missed a single day of writing at least 250 words.
Publishing
Queries sent: 40
Rejections received: 25
Pending: 9
Most rejections received: Empty Hallways in Need of Feet has 9 rejections currently, 3 from this year; the former champion, The Long Game, finally got bought by someone! Sometimes I think I should give up on this story, but I just like it too much.
Total earned: $1,133.70, with ~$500 outstanding from various sales at this time. Not nearly as well as I did last year, since I didn’t find another gig like the one I had with Six to Start in 2014.
Published this year:
- Superhero, With Crooked Nails in Protectors 2: Heroes
- A Brief Memo From Your Amygdala, Re: the Horror Movie We Have Just Seen from Daily Science Fiction (8/4/15)
- Only a Crack in a Black Glass Wall in Welcome to the Future
- Turbo Kid: Why this BMX Blood Sparkle Unicorn Apocalypse Will Blow Your Mind (review of Turbo Kid) in Mothership Zeta issue 1
- Ex Machina Review for Strange Horizons
- Avengers: Age of Ultron Review for Strange Horizons
- Jupiter Ascending Review for Strange Horizons
- Zero Theorem Review for Strange Horizons
- [REDACTED]
- [REDACTED]
Slated for 2016:
- A New Hope (review of The Force Awakens) in Mothership Zeta
- Comfort Food in Haunted Futures
- .subroutine///end from Shimmer
- Fire in the Belly from Mothership Zeta
- Silver Fish from Lakeside Circus
- The Long Game from Kaleidotrope
Goals for 2016
- Be as awesome as Poe Dameron.
- Shut up and write
- Do the scary thing ASAP oh shit oh shit
- Edit together an amazeballs anthology from the glorious, jackalope-infested No Shit Anthology slushpile, seriously I love everyone in this bar and there’s still a little less than a week to get your submission in.
- Finish 2 feature length screenplays: Stormcrows and The Heist
- Finish writing Wrath: a Love Story
- Get your screenwriting certificate from UCLA
- Finish up [REDACTED]
- Look for a more regular movie review gig; I’d really like to do more of this
- Still dreaming of having an agent. Forever dreaming. Though at this point I’d be just as happy to cut out the middle man and go directly to a publisher. Maybe I’ll start bothering smaller presses this year.
- Birthday story for TH, got it figured out already and it’s going to be difficult because I’m awful at writing horror.
- Do a couple movie torture fundraisers. Maybe Gods of Egypt? That looks terrible.
Other Stuff
- Went on my first business trip this year for day job. That was interesting. West Virginia is very pretty and I would not want to live there.
- Started playing a first person shooter for the first time ever; Destiny has kind of changed my life.
- Went to my first ever professional writer conference. Still mulling over if I think it was worth the cost outlay. It might just be that I’m total shit at networking.
- Was crew on a short film. It was… sure something. Stressful and difficult and cool. Still miss all of the wonderful people I worked with on that.
- I’ve started running again. I’ve kind of fallen off on the biking just because the roads in Houston scare me way too badly and I have a difficult time waking up early enough to make it for 7AM group ride starts. But running plus the extra walking I’ve been doing thanks to playing Ingress seems to have gone a long way toward fixing my incipient back problems.
- The Force Awakens, man. Talk about changing your life. It’s been a long, long time since I was this excited about a movie.