It’s that time a year, or rather, it has been that time a year already and I’m just late to the party. Anyways, it’s time for recaps and summaries and lists of how things went throughout the year.
2019 wasn’t exactly the year I had my big break through, finally sold a ton of short stories, and got started on that to-be masterpiece novel. I’m still working on getting my short stories up to a level where they’ll sell regularly, and, thus, a novel is left for some time in the unknown future. Still, though, 2019 was by far the best year in my writing “career” yet. Notably, two big things happened:
- Firstly, I got another short story published in a SFWA pro-paying market.
That brings my publizing record up to three flash fiction pieces, two of them at pro markets. The first pro sale gave me access to the Codex Online writing group, which was awesome and in itself minor leap in this thing I hope will someday become a writing career. The publication I landed this year, though, was perhaps even more impactful on a personal level. Partly because I sold the story to Daily Science Fiction (DSF), which is one of my very favorite magazines. Partly because that second pro sale seemed to, at least somewhat, remove the voice at the back of my head that kept telling me that my first sales were flukes.
I know I still have a long way to go to become a professional writer, the next steps being publishing longer stories and publishing regularly (which might take years). That second pro sale though, it really showed me that I haven’t been wasting my time these last few years, that my writing skills have progressed immensely.
- Secondly, I landed a position as slush reader at Flash Fiction Online. (FFO)
This is aweseome for a number of reasons. Firstly, FFO is another of my very favorite magazines, and it feels wonderful knowing that I’m contributing to the magazine.
Getting a slush reader position is also something I’ve been chasing for a couple of years. I think I finally succeeded partly because FFO is a better match for me than the other magazines I’d applied for. But mostly, I think I succeeded this time because my ability to analyze stories, to determine if and why they work (or not) has improved so much through the last couple of years.
So now I have a writing “job” where I get to read loads of different stories and talk to like-minded people who enjoy reading and writing as much as I do. And I’m learning a ton almost every day by reading all these different stories, critiquing them, and seeing how my critique might differ from that of my colleagues. On top of just landing the position being a huge validation, this seems to be something that can, and probably already is, propelling my writing abilities.
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The rest of 2019 was less momentous in regards to my writing, but there were a few noteworthy elements.
It was the year I finally rounded 365 days of doing writing exercises. It’s an arbitrary goal, but it’s one I set myself a few years back to make sure I kept doing deliberate practice and not just wrote stories for the fun of it.
Though it’s tough finding the balance between work, family life, and writing, 2019 was the year where I managed to structure my life so that I consistently got a decent amount of reading and writing done without sacrificing to much of the other aspects of my life and without writing becoming a stress factor.
Finally, 2019 was also the year I got rid of one of my big distractors. Video games. I’m not much of a gamer, but I did use to spend a couple of hours a week gaming, which I now spend on reading/writing. Except for my Christmas break, I haven’t played video games for a year.
Tracking the time I spent writing/reading was a big factor in helping me become more focused on my practice. The amount of time probably isn’t as important as the quality of the practice, but I definitely had a problem with being too distracted by other things and wasting too much time. So even though the time tracking could be jarring and stressful, it helped a lot.
Starting 2020 I’m going to focus more on the quality of my practice, though, and I’m going to focus more on stories than on writing exercises. I see this as the next logical step since the thing I really need to work on is crafting quality longer-than-flash-fiction stories.
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While the publication at DSF and the slush reading position at FFO are very tangible evidence that I’ve improved as a writer, I think I can also see in my own writing that I’m improving. This isn’t something I’ve been able to see before other than when I compared my recent stories with ones written years ago. And even then, I had a hard time discerning what exactly made me newer stories better.
Now, I think I can see improvement maybe not story-to-story but going back just 2-3 stories. I don’t know how much to put into this, but it does seem to indicate that I’m improving at a more rapid pace than I’ve done for the last couple of years, which is very motivating.
The thing that strikes me the most as I’m recaping all this is that things are definitely going in the right direction. Sure, I’m not publishing a lot, but I’m putting more hours into dedicated practice than ever before and I really do seem to be improving a lot. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve been this optimistic about this whole becoming-a-professional-writer thing for years.
I hope my lucky streak will continue in 2020 and that the rest of your are having as much success with your own endeavours.
Toby Backman 