D. A. Hosek

February continued to be a  rappy 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).

2019 was a grim year for me publishing-wise. I had only two acceptances, one each of fiction and poetry, the worst rejection rate since 2012 and for the first time since I sold my first story, I went a year without any income (not even a token sum) for any of my writing.

As the chart below shows, my fiction submissions for the year were up a fair amount. Perhaps they should have been down instead? My acceptance rate was 0.5% (down from 3.6%) and my positive response rate was also down—21% from 27%.

Poetry looks a little better, but only just. The green band at the bottom of the chart showing acceptances is nearly invisible. My acceptance rate was stable at 0.4% but the positive response rate climbed from 8.2% to 17.3%. I’m beginning to feel like I have some idea of how to write a poem.

November started strong but life interfered to slow things down dramatically in the second half of the month. Chapter 17 of the novel came together reasonably quickly, but I had trouble getting into chapter 18 (it’s finally beginning to flow, at least). Meanwhile in short story land, I’ve been working on a new story which is a reworking of an idea that I had as an undergrad in college but I lacked sufficient wisdom to write as anything more than an exercise in extended snark. With any luck the new version that is slowly extruding itself from my subconscious will be actual art. I do worry that, even though the concept is 33 years old, it might seem like it’s overly connected to the current zeitgeist.