Last year I submitted 100 manuscripts to various markets in fantasy, science fiction, and horror. This year I plan to do the same. I’ll collect more rejections, to be sure, but I’m certain there will be at least one acceptance.

Rejections, of course, are part and parcel of being a writer. 99.99% of writers experience rejections of their fiction (John Scalzi, who apparently has been paid for every piece of fiction that he’s written, is, of course, an outlier). Wise woman Mur Lafferty, however, points out that working writers always experience rejections, and it is, in fact, the mark of a working writer. That certainly helped me last year when I was collecting rejection letters left and right, and has helped inure me to the process. I have built up callouses. They still hurt, a little, but not nearly as much.

My other major writing goal for the year is to write a short story every week. I’ve done it before; in 2007/2008, I wrote or revised 53 short stories, and some of them were awfully good (one of them, “Trying to Stay Dead”, was even published in a paying market). Some of them were eye-bleedingly bad. Most were just okay. I tried again in 2013, but didn’t get nearly as far, though one story, “And the Devil Will Drag You Under”, became the basis of the novel I’m working on with the same title. Ray Bradbury originally suggested this exercise back in the day, and said that it was impossible to write 52 bad short stories in a row, and in my experience that is true.

The two goals — 100 submissions and 52 stories —are tied together. I mean, after 100 from 2021, I’m sort of running out of stories to submit, so it’s time to create some more. My first story, which I have planned on completing by Sunday the 9th of January, is a science fiction horror story called “Stay Away”, and takes place in a colony on the moon of a distant planet.

I won’t be sharing these stories, either on my blog or via my mostly defunct mailing list. This is because if I shared them anywhere (save for a password-protected post on my blog, I suppose), many markets wouldn’t accept them; they would consider them reprints, and there are plenty of markets that don’t accept those. But if you ask me very nicely, I might share them with you privately.

So watch out! 2022 is going to be a heck of a year, writing-wise. Things might get stressful, especially when school starts up again on January 24 and I try to keep up with my writing, but I’m sure I’ll be able to handle it.