Quick and Dirty Super Summary of the 2024 Writing Year

There may be a tiny bit of rounding here. I’ve set things up so that I’ll post this sometime on New Year’s Eve but can’t promise I won’t do any writing after that happens.

Word Count: 232,146

Of which 172,549 was non-fiction. The vast majority of that non-fiction word count went into the Memory Project and most of that into Volume 2: High School and Volume 7: Starting Over (nominally the present and we’re somewhere nearing the halfway mark of what I expect this volume to cover).

Not nearly as much Editing as I wanted to do and certainly far less than last year, but 49 stories from Drabble to Novelette length advanced at least one draft, and 23 of them, all flash pieces, made it to final draft status. Flash is where I made the most progress, really. The only flash story waiting for editing is a Drabble I wrote just before Solstice. A 500-ish word piece will probably join that short list tonight or tomorrow, though.

I sent out a whole 13 story submissions this year. Three of them found homes:

“The Last Eclipse” in the Terrific Tomorrows anthology
“Brhirri Surf Rescue” on SFS Stories
“There’s Always Time” in Ruth and Ann’s Guide to Time Travel, Vol II

Of the remaining 11,

1 “we loved it, but the anthology didn’t get funded, sorry”
3 politely-worded rejections
6 assumed rejections – stories that went 90 days past the “we’ll definitely respond by this date/this many days after the deadline” with no response. No grudges held – it’s a big world and sometimes there really is a flood of submissions. Once, I had a story come back with an extremely apologetic note after almost two years.

And I managed to do a cover and interior refresh on exactly three of my indie novels. Worth mentioning, even though I actually wanted to get to all of them. I also wanted to put out several new works.

How happy am I with the year as a whole? Well, considering I spent eight months of that year as a full-time honours Physics student with far too much homework to do, I’m okay with the basic results. Do I wish I’d managed more? Absolutely. And in 2025, I might.

Be well, everyone.