New Year’s Eve is finally upon us, so I want to take this opportunity to share my submissions statistics for 2022. In many ways, this was the worst year of my life, but I scored some pretty cool achievements along the way.
2022 Submissions Statistics
This year, I submitted fourteen short stories to 31 markets, and a packet of five poems to a single market, for a total of 48 submissions. An additional three December 2021 submissions to unique markets received rejections after 1 Jan.
My biggest achievement this year was cracking a new market—with a story that went on to receive an award nod. “Those Who Forget and Those Who Perish” is my first published horror story. It appeared in the August/September issue of Seize the Press and was nominated for Tenebrous Press’ inaugural Brave New Weird award. I am eternally grateful to Seize the Press editor Jonny Pickering for supporting me and giving my horse-girls a home, and to Alex Woodroe for giving me my first professional award nomination. You can read the story here.
Another highlight of the year came in the form of a rewrite request for a story I’ve been trying to sell since 2019. It’s the first rewrite request I’ve ever received, and the story was my first attempt at cracking that particular market. The piece was shortlisted once in 2021 and twice in 2022.
Speaking of shortlists, I had four submissions shortlisted this year, all at different markets.
I received 42 rejections in 2022. One 2022 submission never received a response, and one story received a whopping eight rejections. The markets that rejected me most—F&SF, Clarkesworld, and The Dark—sent me three rejections each. My longest wait for a response was 115 days. The quickest response was less than one day. (And before you ask, yes, it was The Dark.)
As of today, I have seven submissions pending.
2022 Writing Statistics
I didn’t get to write as much as I wanted this year—but that’s true pretty much every year.
I started a new novel project in 2022, and I went into NaNoWriMo excited to knock out a huge chunk of it. I had just hit my daily writing stride when I got laid off. After that, my desire to even so much as sit at my computer disappeared. Everything felt so raw. In many ways, it still does.
There’s good news, though! Even though my NaNoWriMo progress got derailed, I’m still super excited to be working on the rough draft of that project, and have been able to get quite a bit done in the last half of December.
On the short-form front, I finished seven new stories and one new poem in 2022. This was the first year I wrote something specifically for an anthology call—Air and Nothingness Press’ The Librarian, which you can purchase here—and I’m immensely proud of the piece, even though it ultimately didn’t make the cut. I also started working on a handful of as-yet-unfinished stories as well, and I’m looking forward to throwing them at some editors in 2023.
Annnnnd that about wraps things up on my end. Please share your own creative milestones and achievements with me in the comments; I’d love to celebrate with you.
Here’s to bigger and better words in 2023!
Image credit: Erwan Hesry on Unsplash