D. A. Hosek

This will be the year that I finally get a full draft written of We, The Rescued. I currently have 25,000 words written, so it shouldn’t be beyond reason to write another 50K or so.

Also, I want to clear out my backlog of half-finished stories and story ideas. My goal is to get a story a month into submittable shape that isn’t something that I’ve taken to a full draft and previously submitted. Hopefully the long story (which hasn’t decided if it wants to be a novella or just a long short) won’t act as a big logjam towards this goal.

I intend to check in here once a month to reflect on progress towards the goal.

After a few years of trying, I’ve finally hit my goal of 200 rejections (and then some). This meant that I got a lot more submissions out. The year started strong with a short story acceptance each month from January through April (plus a poem accepted somewhere in there), but then things went quiet for most of the summer before I got a couple more acceptances in the fall.

My positive response rate dropped somewhat, from 36% to 27% and my acceptance rate also declined from 4.2% to 3.6%.

My poetry numbers confirm that I don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to writing poetry and I exist as living proof that a blind monkey throwing darts is bound to hit the target once in a while.

For those craving numbers, my acceptance rate for 2017 was 0.4% (up from 0% last year!) and my positive response rate was 8.2% up from 3.4% last year, although both numbers are down from 2016 which remains the acme of my poetry career.