There's battle lines being drawn.
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
Young people speaking their minds
getting so much resistance from behind

Thursday, January 29, 2009

I'll show you mine...

Okay, so here's the stats.

Time spent:
• 3.5 years of farting around
• 8.5 years of getting serious

Stories/Poems (finished to the point of feeling they're ready for publication):
• 4 trunked stories
• 3 stories in submission
• 4 stories needing rewrites
• 4 poems

Rejections:
• 66 rejections to date (2 trunked stories were not tracked, I'm guessing an additional 10+ rejections on top of the 66)

Bragging Rights:
• 1 acceptance
• 3 Finalist placing in the Writers of the Future Contest
• 2 Honorable Mentions in the Writers of the Future Contest

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't keep those kinds of stats, so I have no idea.

So do you, like, count the same story being rejected from 5 different places as 5 rejections? Cause I know people who try a story at 20-25 places before they give up on it.

Steve Buchheit said...

I had to go back over all my story information and count them up. I did the same thing for the "Bragging Rights" side bar, but I didn't count the rejections.

Yes, if 1 story is rejected 5 times I count that as 5 rejections.

My system is keeping an envelope for each story and writing on the outside when and where I submit it. Then I write a note as to how it was rejected (form or personal note). Any hard copy correspondence about the story goes in the envelope (how I was able to determine when and which story did what at the WotF). So to count the rejections it was a matter of counting the entries leaving off things currently in submission.

I was shocked at how few markets I would try a story at. Some of them I know I need to rewrite (or trunk). Once that's done they'll go out again.