The first quarter of 2023 is in the bag. It didn’t start well with my continued recovered from COVID, but it got better–at least health-wise. Let’s see what the numbers say.

• Words written = 978
• Submissions = 35
• Rejections = 39
• Acceptances = 3
• Shortlists = 0
• Publications = 1
• Rewrites = 0
• Withdrawals = 1

The number of submissions and rejections are pretty standard. Both have me on track to crack 100 by year’s end. Most of those submissions were made in January and February. March was much slower, but by then I had gotten plenty out there. Early on, I was on pace to break my rejection record, but those slowed in March as well. I ended up with only my third most rejections in a quarter.

On the down side, I had my lowest amount of writing since I started tracking such things. I like the one flash piece I wrote. It’s a campfire tale I told to my oldest daughter’s Girl Scout troop. They weren’t impressed, but I liked it enough to write it down and start submitting it. Hopefully, an editor somewhere will be more impressed.

On the plus side, I had three acceptances. That’s almost to my 2023 goal. One of those acceptances was published right at the end of the quarter. Spring Into SciFi: 2023 with my story “Mutual Destroyers” was released in March. I’ll provide more details in a future Behind the Story blog post, but for now, if you like space opera in the vein of Star Trek: TNG, this story is for you.

The ultra low number of words last quarter wasn’t entirely a result of my slacking. I’ve been spending a lot of time editing. Another of those three acceptances went through three rounds of edits with the publication’s editors–for a flash piece! I also edited the middle grade book I wrote back in November. Now I’m ready to read the entire trilogy together to make sure everything is harmonized. And I just finished editing the story I co-wrote with a friend. A shorter version of that story received its first rejection, so now it’s time to polish the longer version and get that out doing the rounds.

Q2 will be more of the same. I plan to keep my submissions up, but I also plan to be deep into editing my first short story collection. I just got the last edits back from my editor this week. I need to go through those and get this collection ready to self publish. There’s just a few minor details left to work out, like a title and cover. Like I said, minor.

That’s how I began the year. What were your writing triumphs and failures to start the year?