2022 was my best year for writing, hands down. I’m very pleased with everything that I wrote, everything that was accepted, and everything that appeared this year. 2022 was also the beginning of something new for me–self publishing. It’s an endeavor that I hope will continue to grow as I expand my number of titles and continue to push different ways of sharing my writing with the world.
So what were my numbers?
It’s only the 13th of December when I’m writing this, so numbers will grow a little before the end of the year, but in 2022 I wrote 61 stories. 1 was a novella, 7 were short stories, and 53 were flash fiction stories. This is 10 more stories than my previous record of 51 stories in a year. Perhaps the craziest part about this 61 story metric is the fact that I didn’t write any stories from March until September. I had let procrastination get the best of me. It wasn’t until the 100 story challenge that I set for myself that I started writing again on September first and have written the bulk of my year’s stories since then.
I didn’t choose to edit or keep a lot of my stories this year. I have learned a lot about telling a good story and sometimes the ideas I had looked rather stale when I put them down on paper. Still, I had 21 stories accepted for publication (so far) from this years’ stories. Because I wrote most of my stories in the last four months of the year, I expect I’ll see a lot of this years’ stories accepted next year. That’s not a bad thing to my mind, because I had a record high 31 stories publish this year, including a title I put out on Amazon, a few that were original to my self publishing efforts, and several I published on Medium this year. 20 of the 31 were published by markets. I am also anticipating 2 more to appear before the end of the year.
Here are the stories that appeared this year:
- “Past Due,” [SF] originally published in Galaxy’s Edge Magazine.
- “Dry Run,” [SF] originally published in Simultaneous Times Podcast.
- “Plight,” [SF] originally published in Stupefying Stories.
- “The Gunlaw,” [F] originally published in Amazon.
- “Reborn,” [SF] originally published in Flash Point SF.
- “Day 24,” [SF] originally published in Medium.
- “Red Light, Green Light,” [SF] originally published in Medium.
- “Atonement,” [SF] originally published in Medium.
- “Trade Off,” [SF] originally published in Medium.
- “Stay Human,” [SF] originally published in Medium.
- “Hangar 57,” [SF] originally published in Medium.
- “Storage,” [SF] originally published in Medium.
- “Intervention,” [SF] originally published in Wyldblood.
- “Infiltration,” [SF] originally published in Trembling With Fear.
- “Packing Up,” [SF] originally published in 365 Tomorrows.
- “Deletable Love,” [SF] originally published in The Colored Lens.
- “The Smuggler,” [SF] originally published in Stupefying Stories.
- “Any Minute Now,” [SF] originally published in Ctrl Alt Del.
- “The Girl in His Eyes,” [SF] originally published in Ctrl Alt Del.
- “End Program,” [SF] originally published in Stupefying Stories.
- “Download Day,” [SF] originally published in Wyldblood.
- “Rest, So We Can Be Friends,” [SF] originally published in Medusa Tales.
- “Fallout,” [SF] originally published in Ephemeral Voice, Volume 2 (Japanese Translation). Reprinted in Annihilation (Forthcoming).
- “Old Girl,” [SF] originally published in The Colored Lens.
- “Helping Hand,” [SF] originally published in Flash Futures.
- “Harvesters,” [SF] originally published in Flash Futures.
- “Bottom Breather,” [SF] originally published in Flash Futures.
- “Input: Memories,” [SF] originally published in Bullet Points.
- “Only in Death Do We Live,” [H] originally published in Timber Ghost Press.
- “Fragmented,” [SF] originally published in Wyldblood.
- “Replicas,” [SF] originally published in Daily Science Fiction.
These are the stories I anticipate will publish before the end of the year:
- “Inhuman,” [SF] forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction.
- “Salt Over Sand,” [F] forthcoming in Tree and Stone.
Self-publishing was a new effort from me this year. I realized at the beginning of the year that I had more than 40 stories published (now 71!) and I wanted to package them in a collection form. I learned a lot about the various formats and aspects of self-publishing and came out with a few titles this year. I had micro collections, of 5-7 stories that I put together for a cheap price for people to check out my writing, and pulled those micro collections together for a large enough format to publish in paperback, hardcover, and audio. I like this strategy. I put out Flash Futures using this strategy and started my new series Portals.
Here are the self-published collections I put out this year:
- Portals: Sci-fi Flash Fiction (Portals micro collection #1)
- Anomalies (micro drabble collection)
- Flash Futures (Flash Futures #1-3)
- Replicas & Other Small Stories (Flash Futures micro collection #3)
- Rehuman & Other Small Stories (Flash Futures micro collection #2)
These titles are already up for preorder:
- Portals: Sci-fi Flash Fiction (Portals micro collection #2)
- Portals: Sci-fi Flash Fiction (Portals micro collection #3)
I am going to release my next full collection in 2023, which will contain the first 4-5 Portals micro collections. I also am working on a couple of other collections that won’t have micro collection serializations, but will be a direct release. I’ll announce those here as they come together. If you like my writing, want to support my writing, or would like to try my writing, check out the above!
Goals for 2023:
- Write 100 stories, minimum word length of 500 words. I’ve been successful in my first three months of my 100 story challenge, but I would love a triple digit year. I can’t imagine how many stories I could have written this year if I hadn’t been lazy for 6 months! The thing I like about this sort of goal is that 1. It’s completely crazy and 2. Failure just means I wrote a bunch of stories and didn’t quite get there. So, fail to succeed.
- Put out more collections.
- Read 1,000 stories with a critical eye to learn.
Will I succeed in this? I guess we will have to wait until next year to see!
Eric Fomley 