D. A. Hosek

Something has changed. I’m not necessarily having the progress I’d ideally like, but I’m doing much better at getting the words onto the page. Still a lot of flat stretches in the graph, but the vertical bits are more vertical than they’ve been for months.

The submittable queue has drained from 8 down to 5. Only one submission over a year old now. One press, upon being contacted this month realized they’d mislaid my submission and promptly rejected me. Another told me they’ve had a staff change and it’ll “take some time” to hear from them. I’m intending to be more proactive in contacting the other presses in August.

June was yet another mediocre month, although I did at least finish a draft of chapter 21. Now the only problem is getting myself willing to do a critical read of that chapter and start rewriting.

The submittable queue continues to trickle its way to empty, dropping from 10 down to 8. I have two submissions that are a year or more older now. I suspect that Storyscape Journal may have gone defunct in the wake of the COVID lockdown, but I have no firm confirmation of that yet.

See that graph on the right? Looks pretty good at least for the end of the month, eh? Until you look at the vertical scale and see that I wrote less than 700 words the whole month. But at least things are starting to pick up and maybe June will be better.

As for clearing out the submittable queue, I got three more rejections this month which brought it from 13 down to 10. I have a “received” submission that’s due to celebrate a birthday June 27th if nothing changes.

April started off with some promise but quickly leveled off.  There were only nine days that I wrote anything at all. On the good news front, I’ve settled Catan numerous times.

My Submittable queue continues to drain, a little bit faster than last month, so now I’m down from 17 to 13 submissions. Half of this though was my submissions for the Nelson Algren prize being silently moved to closed.

Here’s hoping for some real progress in May.

So you’d think that with quarantine I’d be more productive as a writer. You’d think wrong. I made good progress on revising the last chapter I wrote in the first half of the month, but the new chapter has been coming a few words at a time.

My Submittable queue has drained much more slowly this month, going down just a little bit from 20 to 17, but I also got an acceptance for a poem during the quarantine period. 

February continued to be a crappy month for me personally, although, unlike January, I actually made some progress on the novel. Chapter 19 is finished and Chapter 20 is nearly done with its first draft. I even managed to write a paragraph on a short story.

My Submittable queue continues to drain, with its total down to 20 from 31 and the end of January. A couple of bright spots included the story that was accepted last month getting another acceptance from a journal that I had thought was going to go no response with the piece and a personal rejection for that same story from The New Yorker. I guess that story might be OK.

January was a crappy month. I did very little writing on the novel. I started a new project which I’ve since discarded as self-indulgent garbage. The lone bright spot was an acceptance for a story and the slow decline of the size of my submittable queue (down from 53 to 31). I can only hope that February comes out better because there’s not much room for things to get worse.

2019 was a disappointing year on many fronts, so I figure 2020 can’t help but be better.

My goals for the year

1. Finish a complete draft of We, The Rescued. 
2. Rewrite and revise to get it in a state where I can have some other eyes read it.
3. Cut way back on submissions. I’m not going to submit anything until my submittable queue (which currently has 53 submissions in it) has completely drained and then I’m going to be far more deliberate on submissions going forward (I have a couple chapters from the novel which could stand alone as stories, but I’m going to let them ripen a while, along with any stories I happen to finish this year).

As with last year’s resolutions, I’ll check back in with status reports each month.

I had two goals for the year and failed on them both.

I aimed to finish the full draft of We, The Rescued. 

This entailed writing some 50,000 words over the course of the year. I made steady progress (as the graph above shows), but not steady enough and I had more than a few stuck moments which kept me from getting past some 30,000 words for the year. 

I also aimed to get a story a month finished and into submissions. Didn’t even come close, although I did get all my stories which had been previously rejected and were hanging about revised and into submissions but just one new story went out and that didn’t get picked up (although it was (a) a long shot for publication because of its length and (2) got some positive responses anyway).