2010 in Review, work edition

My story "Matthew Says There Was an Earthquake" was picked for 52|250’s quarterly edition, twentysix. Bill and Harold’s previous adventure, the "garden incident," will be published in Bards & Sages Quarterly in a couple weeks or so.

 

Since this year is nearly at an end and I’m somewhat on vacation,  I might as well review 2010 from a work point of view. As I’ve mentioned before, the year started rocky but a couple of things turned it around. This is the upshot:

Model Species:
31 queries sent. 17 rejections. We tweaked the first couple of chapters, both in terms of order and content. I plan on continuing with #2QueryTuesday (my own invention) and #10byThen.

Divine Fire:
Puttered around with it a little. I plan on giving it the 10% cut treatment during the second block of RoW80.

Zeta Iota:

Several false starts. Between 4-10K written.

Pas de Chat:
Decided to put her online. I haven’t done a great job of promoting her. Will turn her into a PDF when all is said and done and see if there’s any monetization possible.

Lucinda at the Window:
Things have not gone very well with Lucinda. She was released at a bad time for StoneGarden and  has somewhat gotten the short shrift (still not available in electronic form, for example). On my side, I haven’t done a good job with promotion. I need to man up and request the rights back/what is owed to me.

Luck for Hire:
Wrote about 12K, not including rewrites. This brings me to my RoW80 plan. Between January 3rd and March 24th (80 days), I am going to add 50K to Luck for Hire, effectively finishing a first draft. More specifically, my goal is 10K every two weeks. This is a hard total. If I write 12,500 in the first two weeks, the total resets the next Monday. At this pace, I should reach 50K+ by March 11th, giving me an extra vacation before RoW80, round 2 begins. That vacation is my carrot. (Sticks and sub-carrots haven’t quite been set…) I’m going to avoid major rewriting, but I intend to right wrong roads I might go down. This will require a good deal of communication between Eric and I. I’ll try to continue to blog updates as well.

Other Works:
Between #FridayFlash, 52|250, and Fictionaut, I have 23 pieces of fiction posted at various places. 13 are brand new, the other 10 were clean-ups and excerpts. (This doesn’t include any Luck related content.) Sold an older short story, "Breakfast in the Garden." I intend to continuing submitting a few finished shorts. I’d like to put together an e-anthology of related pieces during RoW80 breaks. I also have about half a dozen unfinished short stories. I’d like to finish and market at least one of them in 2011.

One thing I’ve struggled with this year is Twitter (and other social networks, like Fictionaut). I like Twitter. I like interacting with other writers and readers. But it wears me out. I often feel like I can be social (and that I *need* to be social to grow an audience) or I can have the energy to write. I don’t have a good answer for this aside from "writing needs to come first" and hope for patience.

So, somewhere in there is my plan for 2011. Ambitious, since I’m pretty lazy. It almost looks like I have irons in the fire. Almost.