The Year of A Working Writer (2011)
Number of Works Written: 45 short stories, 11 novellas (Some will be revised into novels.)
Total Number of Works Sent out: 59
Number of Stories Sent Out To Pasture, Unpublished in the Current Marketplace: 0
(2 are getting very close to this point.)
Number of Publishers Sent to: 103
Number of Rejection Slips: 210
Number of Works Published: 1 (“No Woman, No Plaything” in Kaleidotrope)
(It went out to 5 publishers over 7 months before getting published.)
Most Rejected Work: “The Hatched Chick” (9 times)
(The direct sequel to “The World in His Throat”, go figure)
This has been a a good year. As I had hoped my publications seem to happen every other year, but I did publish a short story this year. I had a lot of time to write. I finished half of the 74 Stories Project. I learned a lot writing a short story a week (following the advice of Ray Bradbury) and I hope to finish the project within the next 2 years. I joined Codex Writers Group. It's been tremendously helpful for my craft, I've met wonderful people who are fine craftsmen and -women (who know science fiction and all its sub-genres very well), and reading its critique pile is the greatest science fiction magazine on the planet. I always wish I had more time to participate in Codex but my day job began to interfere about a month after I joined and will continue to do so for much of next year.
I also bought (or was given) three typewriters including a Remington model I did not yet have. I wrote a novella during NaNoWriMo on one of those machines and I am currently expanding that novella into a novel. This year I began sending more literary short stories to literary magazines: this resulted in a few "never send us this kind of things again" rejections slips but it also resulted in some slips that were full of warm encouragement even as they said 'not quite'.
My goals for next year include filling out my collection of early Remington typewriters, replacing the drawband on one favorite model (without losing the coiled mainspring which lets the machine to run without electricity), making further progress on the 74 Stories Project and keeping up with the 59 works I already have in circulation with publishers. I hope to finish at least one of the works I started this year and make a more pointed search for a literary agent for my 19 novels. (Only a handful are at representation stage but I would have more time to write and revise if I could delegate some work to a literary agent.)
-Lisa Shapter
Read "No Woman, No Plaything" in Kaleidotrope
Posted by Lisa Shapter at 12/27/2011 2:36 PM 
Categories: Kaleidotrope, Short Story, Things We Are Not, My Fiction:The 75th, No Woman No Plaything, The World in his Throat, Queries, NaNoWriMo, M-Brane SF, Publication, National Novel Writing Month, Tracking List, Rejections, Waiting To Be Published, Publishing, Working in the Arts, Science Fiction, Novellas, Typewriters
Tags: Writing Science Fiction Science Fiction Publishers Publication Publishing
Categories: Kaleidotrope, Short Story, Things We Are Not, My Fiction:The 75th, No Woman No Plaything, The World in his Throat, Queries, NaNoWriMo, M-Brane SF, Publication, National Novel Writing Month, Tracking List, Rejections, Waiting To Be Published, Publishing, Working in the Arts, Science Fiction, Novellas, Typewriters
Tags: Writing Science Fiction Science Fiction Publishers Publication Publishing
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