Happy New Year! So far this year I have been to a wonderful party, out to drinks with brilliant friends, and had nice editors email me about bios for upcoming publications, so I am pretty happy here on January 2, 2016.
It is, of course, now properly Awards Season, so I will just sort of swing this ‘I wrote stuff, if you like it you could nominate it’ list in with the rest of the ‘how I did in 2015’ summing-up.
My thinking on awards: if you like things, you should nominate them! And talk about them with your friends. I’m going to write up a post about what I liked in 2015 soon; there was a lot of great fiction in 2015.
AWARD ELIGIBILITY 2015:
- I am eligible for the Campbell Award this year. This is my first year of eligibility.
- The following short stories are eligible for the Hugo and the Nebula in the Short Story category. I’d especially like you to consider “When The Fall Is All That’s Left”.
- “City of Salt”, Strange Horizons (16 March 2015) (2nd place, Strange Horizons Reader’s Poll)
- “Adjuva”, Lakeside Circus (Year Two, Issue One)
- “When the Fall Is All That’s Left”, Apex Magazine 77
- The following poem is eligible for the Rhysling Short Poem category, if I correctly understand how Rhysling nominations work, which I might not.
- “The Demon Vivienne Explains Volitional Geography”, Through the Gate 8
METRICS:
approximate words (2015): Counting the novelthing, short stories, and fanfiction, about 70,000. This is more words in a year than I have ever written before. I think I need to be at around 150,000 words a year to hit ‘this is a sustainable second career’, but I have yet to figure out how to write twice as fast as I am currently doing while having a dayjob which also involves writing about 70,000 words a year.
submissions: 20 (18 fiction, 2 poetry).
acceptances: 5 (3 new stories, 1 reprint, 1 poem)
2015 goal report: I meant to write 12 new short stories. I wrote three. On the other hand, I sold all three. I meant to finish a novel. I wrote half of a novel. (I’m a little annoyed about this one. But it turns out novels are really hard.) I had no intention of writing poetry, and yet I wrote and sold a poem, and I think I like poetry-writing and am going to do a lot more of it. I had no intention of picking up a reviewing gig, but I’m very glad I did. I joined SFWA! In general: GOOD JOB, ARKADY, YOU DID OKAY. (but you could do better.)
what writing will look like for me in 2016: I’m going to finish this novel, revise it, and submit it to agents. I’d also like to finish at least six short stories, and start a second novel. I’d like to write a poem a month, as an experiment to see if I’m actually a good poet or if I’m good at pretending to be a poet occasionally. I’d like to write 100,000 words in the year. That seems like an ambitious but reasonable set of early-career writer goals. Let’s do the thing. Forward momentum.
Arkady Martine 