WIP Wednesday

Rearview Mirror Edition

Normally, this is my mid-week report to you that covers the three major commitments I’ve made: to write, to edit, and to read. This week, however, I’m going to skip all that and instead take some time to reflect on what’s happened this year.

Image from Sathyaprabha Rakkimuthu via Pexels

Spoiler: it’s actually quite a lot.

Since my WIP Wednesday posts are very much a public diary, I’ve actually got something to go back and read through. There’s a lot in there that I know, but also a lot that I had forgotten.

Let’s start with the Partial List Things that Sam Did:

• Attended LibertyCon in June, my first time as an attending pro and panelist!

• Attended Writer's Cantina in July

• Created the #TeamAndMore website (teamandmore.org)

• Spent many hours updating the list of Open Anthology Calls for #TeamAndMore

• Created the #TeamAndMore group on Facebook

• Created the Alpha Mercs website (alphamercs.com)

• Created my author website (samrobbwrites.com)

• Helped edit a book for a non-profit

• Helped organize two fund raisers for a non-profit

• Complete switch of teams at the Day Job

• My youngest graduated from high school and went off to college

• My wife and I went on a two-week missions trip to Tanzania

Whoof. I’d forgotten about a lot of that, and I didn’t list any of the minor stuff that took less than a day.

Moving on, let’s look at the state of the Substack. This year I’ve published 168 new posts, resulting in 10k+ page views. I’ve more than doubled my list of subscribers (52 to 106). Not surprising, my Meme Monday posts look to be the most popular. Which makes sense; everybody likes memes, right?

Two of my big goals, set at the beginning of February, were to have two stories published and my first draft of my novel Sigils done by LibertyCon at the end of June. That actually went really well.

You can read my post from when I finished Sigils for all the gory details, but I started with scene analysis and ended up with 128k words written just before LibertyCon. In the following months, I hired a developmental editor (Alice Sudlow) to go through the draft with me and tell me where I needed to work on it. tl;dr - a lot of places, but at least now I had a better idea of what I was doing.

On the short story front, I hit my goal of having a couple of stories published by LibertyCon. All told this year, I’ve gotten contracts for:

• "Callback" (Postcards from Mars)

• "On-Site Support" (Fanta-Fly Postcards)

• “Pard” (Space Cowboys 2)

• "Down Among the Dead Men" (Pinup Noir)

• “Emily Grace’s Paladin” (Single Servings of Liberty)

• "Harrold of the Gods" (Zombies Need Brains Presents, May 2024)

• "My My, Hey Hey" (Five Second Rule Case Files, coming soon!)

“Harrold” has a special place in my heart, as it’s my first pro-rate sale. There are a handful of other stories that got written this year, but still haven’t earned their keep:

• "Carry Job" was intended for ZNB’s Dragonesque anthology; that got rejected, but I’ve been shopping it around and think it will find a home sooner or later.

• “Blue as Sky, Black as Sin” was a rewrite of an exiting novella for the Cannon Publishing High Caliber contest. It’s one of 24 entrants there, though, so I don’t expect to hear anything back from them for a while. I also know a few of the other entrants - there’s some stiff competition there!

• "Rescuing the Past” is a story for a charity anthology that I wrote in less than a week. I really like the way it turned out, but I’m still waiting to hear about that one.

• Three Rounds of Hell (formerly An Understanding) is a novel outline I’ve been working on. This would be a prequel for Sigils. I rather like the premise and the characters. I would like to get to this in the coming year.

I thought my short stories - and especially the sale of “Harrold” - would be the capstone of the year. Then

Cedar Sanderson

and I fell into a book.

Doing Inktober with Cedar and then putting out One October Night was tremendous fun, and as I told her today - sometimes I just stop and giggle because “BOOK!” I suspect that accidentally writing a book is a lot more common than people let on, but it was really a really wonderful experience, if a bit time consuming!

That’s about it… wait. Am I forgetting something?

Oh, right. The anthology.

Working with the Alpha Mercs, I announced an open call for an anthology, Stories in the Key of Tull. This is going to be an anthology of stories inspired by the music of Jethro Tull. I have been a fan of the group for 40 years now, and there’s a surprising number of Tull aficionados in the SF/Fantasy writing community. What can I say? I mean, the folks at Raconteur just make it look so easy to do!

I’m pretty sure I’ll be singing a different tune by March, but we’ll see :)

Man. Looking back on that, it’s a heck of a lot - and I’m not even getting into the reading and critiques I’ve done. I’ve finished a novel, plotted another, published a book, sold a bunch of short stories, planned an anthology. Even if I just keep up the pace, the coming year is going to be a blast!

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