I have been told that it is in poor taste to talk about our small daily victories or losses when it comes to selling what we write, because our art should be pure and ethereal.
But I do not give a damn about such silly posturing, and today one of my stories bounced back, together with a nice rejection letter, and one was shortlisted and passed to a second bout of evaluation to see if it will be accepted.
Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.

October has been an intense month (13 stories pitched, picking up from the slack September schedule) in a rather intense year, so I decided to go and check a few numbers in my submissions spreadsheet.
I post them here, in open disregard of everything pure and ethereal.

In the first ten months of 2019 I submitted a total of sixty-nine stories (cue to obvious Bill & Ted reference, 69 dude!)
Of these

• nineteen were accepted
• thirty-five were rejected
• fifteen are still out there fighting for their right to be published

All in all I have submitted over 200.000 words (203.798, if you really want to know).
Not bad, considering this figure does not include my non-fiction articles, two books written as a ghostwriter, a number of ebooks self published (either under my name or under various aliases), my translation work and the contents I put up on my blogs, AND the exclusive contents for my patrons (because, you know, they say it’s good to be my patrons).

Now there’s still two months to go, and I have to close a 60.000-words translation, and then I have one article, four short stories aligned, a 50.000-words novella I will publish under an alias for Christmas, and a novelette written on spec for a high-profile publisher that I need to close by new year’s eve.
Plus anything that comes my way and I can fit in my schedule.
With no consideration for neither purity nor etherealness, I will post a complete summary of all that I wrote in 2019 in the early days of 2020 – hoping next year will be as prolific and as successful as this one.
Or maybe better.