Short Fiction and Novel Numbers for 2024
After (finally) organizing all my short fiction from 2020 to 2024 in one spreadsheet, I forgot to actually upload my numbers from 2024. Ahem. Apologies. Pretend this was posted December 31 or January 1!
It has been a very prolific writing year for me! I like to share stats on things because it always helps to see the progress made. I often feel like a relative nobody; this helps remind me that I’m slowly getting where I want to be with my writing and have taken steps in my career.
SHORT FICTION
Short stories have become beloved to me. I started diving into short fiction back in my mid-twenties, for college. I’ve been writing it (poorly) since I was around 17. Fun fact: I submitted a story to Clarkesworld at 17. It was a bad story, and of course I was rejected within a day, but I had the determination. Over the years, I focused on other things. Had a lot of big life shifts, medical issues, and more that derailed my hopes for starting a writing career.
Then in 2020, like many others, I had time and space to prioritize my writing and craft. I was in a better place mentally, physically—better support system, better healthcare, better relationships, all of it. So I dove into short stories and novel writing, to get where I had always wanted to be.
Now I can happily say I am well on the writing career road. Well, the beginning of it, anyway.
I got my first short story acceptance and publication in 2023. In 2024 I had two original pieces published plus a reprint of “Emotional Resonance” in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024! That’s a pretty huge deal, especially since “Emotional Resonance” was the second story I ever got accepted and published.
That also absolutely skewed my internal expectations for my work. I kept pushing myself to be a “somebody” and get more and more publications—and faster.
So my brain is the worst when it comes to goalposting. It took the better part of the year to allow myself to bask and truly accept big achievements without immediately pushing to “now do more, do better, and do it faster”.
Total Stats
Submissions: 52
Rejections: 46
Pending: 4
Acceptances: 2
Publications: 3 (2 original, 1 reprint)
You could do the math and give a % acceptance rate on this (which is about 3.8%)—but there have been some good conversations on Bluesky from Ann Leckie and the Clarkesworld account about how that math is actually not the right math, or accurate. And I agree. The variables for an acceptance are so unknowable. For me, personally, I ultimately learned to be happy with any acceptances at all rather than comparing myself (as badly) to my peers or authors I admire. I was scared only (“only”) two acceptances this year meant I was, in fact, secretly a terrible writer. But no! I could’ve gotten zero acceptances this year and still been an amazing writer.
The acceptance rate doesn’t inherently define your writing quality! That’s a slippery slope to a bad headspace. The elements and variables involved in getting short story acceptances are bizarre, unknowable, and impossible to account for. Just keep writing.
NOVEL PROGRESS
I wrote 82,535 words of a first draft. I put writing this off, hoping I would finish my novel rewrite by New Year’s Eve. AND I DID! YAY! The final rewrite total was 93,243 words, putting my total words written this year on this novel at 175,778 words. That’s so many.
Ideally, I’ll be done with major revisions and the third draft by February and have beta reader feedback incorporated and refined by March/April. It’d be great to finally start querying agents with this novel, I’ve worked so hard on it for the last four years. But if it flops in the query trenches, I’ll be stressed but I am planning to work on a few novellas as well as a high fantasy novel next year while I query this book. Always keep writing!
2025 WRITING GOALS
Finish novel and start querying
Write more microfic and flash fic
Have fun more and stop being so hard on myself
Draft at least one of the four novellas in my brain
Start high fantasy novel
Enjoy Worldcon Seattle in August!
[redacted secret project goals that I can’t wait to talk about later in the year]
THE TAKEAWAY
I find putting numbers helps solidify what I did in a year. Given I was also juggling returning to college and still being a chronically pained and fatigued gremlin? This is an impressive amount of writing. And, after organizing all my short fiction in one spreadsheet, I can say 2024 is the year I let myself finish stories both novel and short fiction in length. Being kind to myself instead of dismissing my ideas as trite and tropey. In some of my 2021-2022 short fiction notes, all I would put was “this idea is too boring” when most times it wasn’t, I just hadn’t given it enough time to solidify into something more than a base concept.
So if you take anything away from my experiences, I hope you let yourself finish your ideas. Let yourself write, give yourself that compassion and curiosity and joy. Here’s to that in 2025.
