Week in Review: November 20 - 27, 2022

Rejection slips, short stories, friendly wagers, fun challenges in 2023

Happy belated Thanksgiving to the US readers who celebrated last week. It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these, but let’s dive right into it.

Rejection:

Two rejections notes from two magazines hit my inbox.

Rejection slip#1

Market: Clarkesworld Magazine

Rejection slip #2

Market: The Dread Machine

The beauty of this journey is to show you, dear reader, the ups and “downs”. I use quotation marks because rejection is not really a bad thing; just a bump in the road to the long-term goal.

What is the long term goal? Yes, making a living as a fiction writer is a part of it, but it is ultimately to build a body of work. As long as I'm still writing, still producing fiction, and having a little fun, then that is a win. In truth, I want to be prolific. That's the name of the game.

Reading

I finished Showdown by Louis L'amour. While I enjoy much of his work, this story was pretty forgettable. Overall, 3/5.

I moved on to some Roger Zelazny short stories in his collection The Last Defender of Camelot. In the introduction, Zelazny discusses his early commitment to himself to become a professional writer and his serious dedication to the craft. Never read Zelazny before, but these fun, short reads are an excellent primer to his work.

With the holiday season now upon us, I’m making sure to stay focused and build in a contingency plan for the obvious family affairs and Christmas parties. I’m planning out the rest of the year to see just how many more stories I can write and submit to markets before the end of 2022.

A Gentlemen’s Wager

Three of my friends and I are in the middle of friendly competition. In the next week, each person will craft an original ghost story. Each writer submits $25 into a pot along with their story for blind judging. The winner with the best story receives a cash prize and the right to trash talk the losers until 2023. Just a little holiday fun.

Plans for the future

Looking to ramp up my output, both for my fiction and this newsletter as 2022 comes to an end. If there’s one thing I’ve learned during this little journey of writing and publishing. it is that time is extremely precious and to spend it streaming subpar shows, social media crap, the political drama of the day, and social games that should have ended in high school would a total waste.

I want to write, publish, and challenge myself to build that body of work now while I still have the energy and time to devote to it. I want to see how far I can go with all this.

Should be good fun!

‘Til next time