Goals
So, on Tuesday of this week, I had my absolutely last class as an undergraduate. That means that I have a little bit more free time now. I’m taking it somewhat easy this summer. Easy meaning that I’m working less than full time and only undertaking two major volunteer projects.
Now, I’m always doing some kind of writing project. If I don’t, something in me will make me start one. That’s what happened when The Angriest Rice Cooker started. And when I took on another big writing project as the main part of my school work this year, The Angriest Rice Cooker got pushed aside. But now that big writing project is over unless/until I can con a publisher into being interested. So at the end of April I started a new kind of project: writing a lot of short stories.
I’ve been doing that for about five weeks now. What I shoot for, based on the recommendation of an old writing teacher, is one story per week, or if I ever get bitten by the novel bug one chapter per week. That’s in advanced draft mode, but before soliciting feedback. Then in future weeks I keep working on old stories while hacking out the new ones. I’ve done OK. I’ve got four stories to the point where I am ready to get them critiqued, and two of those I’ve even already submitted. I’ve submitted three queries for my book project. So last night I started thinking about what my long term goals are for writing.
Next September through July I’m going to be doing a full time AmeriCorps position while I apply to graduate schools. Assuming all goes well, I’ll enter graduate school in the fall of 2008. At that point, I don’t think I’ll have time to put significant effort into writing. So I think I’m going to make it my goal to write at least 52 short stories in that period, starting five weeks ago. This will give me time to take some weeks to do more revisions, while still giving me a sizable enough reserve of stories that I can keep up efforts to get them published even once I don’t have time to generate as much new material. Which leads me to me second goal, which isn’t limited by the same time. My goal is to make at least 150 separate submissions of short fiction work to markets. That means that each story will get submitted to about three places on average. There will almost surely be some stories I don’t try to submit at all, and others that I keep hacking away at. Obviously, this math falls apart if the stories start getting accepted at the first or second places that see them. But I think that’s a problem that I can live with.
I’m posting this here because I’m a lot more likely to meet goals that I’ve publicly declared. I also plan on adding a little meter to the sidebar of the Angriest Rice Cooker in the World site to keep track of my efforts towards this goal.
Ok, off to finish story number five.
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