What Was 2012 The Writing?

The goal of 2012 was to simply repeat the goal of 2011, which was to get at least one story published. Didn't really matter if it was a short story or a novel, so long as I was able to get something published.

Thus, 2012 started with a continuation of that particular goal that was reached in June 2011. I was still doing the querying/submitting game when the calender turned the page to January 2012 and although I had gotten nary a nibble with my queries, I still kept at it.

By early January that perseverance paid off in the form of a very informative semi-rejection letter, details of which can be found here. After soliciting a few opinions from people that I respected, I dove back in and took a scalpel to my story.

In early February, I achieved my goal of getting one story published when I was offered a contract for my adult fantasy novel:


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A slew of other things were accomplished with this book, which includes:

1} Book cover in April.
2} Fantastic editing job in July.
3} Fantastic book trailer in the late summer.
4} And finally, the release in October of the e-book version.

But lest you think I was resting on my laurels, I wasn't.

While I was busy waiting for the glacier sprocket that is publishing to complete its required rotations, I decided to turn my attention back to one of my recent incompletes that I had started in late 2011 to keep myself occupied. I sat down at my computer, opened it up and basically forced myself to write it out to the end, which I did about one week later. I wrote a very ending and stuck the completed novella into my slush pile of ignorance.

A few months after I had finished that, I decided to act on a story idea that was bouncing around in my head and for the next four months I worked on this personal pet project of mine. I say "personal" because from the moment I wrote the opening sentence "It was time to go", there was no way this novella would see the light of day. It was in a genre that I have some reservations about and I wrote this more as a stress release than anything else.

The only reason why I put that little project to the side was that I was eager to work on something that I would have a realistic chance of getting published. So around the early fall, I went through my slush pile of ignorance and found two partials that I deemed worthy of my attention.

I blew off the dust bunnies and flipped through the pages of each to refamiliarize myself. However, once I did, I was faced with the thorny problem on how to decide on which one I should do. So I wrote a series of posts with the end result of being that you the reader would actually get to decide on which novel I should work on next.

But as you well know, sometimes the best laid plans can go kablooie, which is what happened here. Why kablooie? Because while I was deciding on what partial to work on, I was also doing a little networking on Facebook as well. One medium sized conversation later, and I switched priorities, from deciding which of two partials to work on to polishing up a novella so that I could dive head first into the shallow end of the query pool.

On the short story front, nothing much of note happened beyond having some writer's vanity project go belly up when I submitted one little piece of quirky horror project in January that got accepted, having that same piece of quirky horror rejected outright by another and at yet a 3rd, have the editor thoroughly enjoy the piece but felt it was too macabre (cannibalism) for his zine.

I did have someone take a look at it and they offered some solid advice on it, which when things calm down again, I will act upon.

So the end result of my writing endeavors for 2012 were:

1} 2 acceptances.
2} 4 rejections (1 belly-up, 1 thoroughly like but no, and 2 outright).
3} 1 published.
3} And lest we forget the contractual obligation that I will touch upon a future post, 19 book reviews.

And we have one more item on the agenda: This past Sunday's post/contest.

After writing down all the names of the commenters and assiging them a number, I proceeded to take a scientific survey by asking all the people visiting my house yesterday and asking them to choose a number from 1 to 6.

The winner of a free copy of my commercial debut novel is David Cranmer! David, I'll be shooting you an e-mail later today for the mailing particulars. Congrabulations to all who commented, and please keep in mind that the print version of my book will be dropping sometime this month should you want to purchase it. If you can't wait that long, please check out Solstice or Amazon for the e-book version.