December Results (I love a productive month):
- Short Story drafted
- Children’s PB drafted
- Short Stories revised – 2
- Submissions – 9 (rejections – 8 )
===========================================================
2010 Achievements
With a focus goal of endurance, 2010 was my strongest writing year. The results speak for themselves.
- Main Goal: Endurance — I wrote every single month this year; even the busy ones. The longest time that went without writing was two weeks, and those usually revolved around family issues.
- Shadow of Blood 1st Draft — revived this, though didn’t get more than a few thousand words in.
- Children’s Stories: 2 — these weren’t on my goals this year, but I’ve been researching and reading children’s fiction with the intent of writing it. Muse decided it was time to start writing.
- Short Story Writing: 8 — planned for 6 but things went well, obviously. (3 came from the FMwriters Story A Day May)
- Short Story Edits: 24 — this was the year of revising and learning how to revise short stories effectively. I planned on 15 edits and managed 24 revisions of 8 different stories. Which means: I’m revising less times – I used to revise a story 8 or 10 times before I felt it was ‘ready’.
- Short Story Submissions: 40/20 — new policy of revolving door submissions.
- New Submissions: 7
- Rejections: 35
- Critiques: 28 — combination of FMWriters, and OWW including novel crits
- Book Reading: 17 — the most I’ve read in a year since having my kids.
- Prep VP application — actually, 2: 2010 was not accepted; and already sent my application in for the 2011 workshop
- Rejections: 35
- Award: WOTF HM for Fading Light
- Award: WOTF Semifinalist for Etherea In Her Veins
- Stories in Submission: 7
Vast improvements from 2009. What changed? I decided to put myself out there, and to do that, I was responsible for getting the stories done right. The revision-after-revision of this year taught me efficiency, it taught me where my problem areas were. Of course, while I’m fixing the ones I know about, others are cropping up. All in all, I’m thrilled with what I’ve done.
===========================================================
Being thrilled with what I’ve done is one thing; repeating it is another. I’m aiming to push further. I amped up my goals for 2011. I think I might have planned for too much, but as always, these are subject to change as life and writing actually occur.
2011 Goals
- Main Goal: Intensity
- Novel Project: revision (Forgotten Star, 115k)
- Novel Project: first draft (37k left for Shadow of Blood)
- Short Story Writing: 14
- Picture Book Writing: 12
- Short Story Edits: 14
- Picture Book Revisions: 12
- New Submissions: 26
- Short Story Submissions: 50
- Crits: 50
- Book Reading: 24 (2 monthly)
- FM SAD Writing Challenge (May)
- Write1Sub1 Monthly (x2, for 26 stories)
Let’s get to it. Happy Writing!
DAWN BONANNO 
Good luck with your goals! I’m still formulating mine. How are you planning to do picture books? Are you an artist as well, or do you just plan to work on the story and collaborate with a friend or publisher-assigned artist?
Hope your 2011 is starting off well!
In my research, I’m finding that unless you are an artist yourself, then you submit the story (regular ms format), and the publisher finds the artist. That’s the usual way.
I’m still working on the agent vs publisher. It’s a lot to research and I’m trying to balance the research and the actual writing. I joined Verla Kay and Absolute Write and they have some good information there. (Which I happen to be trying to organize for myself and for my community FMWriters).
I have a list of many books to borrow from the library, too. There’s a whole different world out there, outside of F&SF. 🙂
My husband and I wrote a children’s Christmas book–aimed mostly at grade-schoolers–that’s definitely too long for a picture book but we’d like a few pictures in it. We’d like the pictures to be reminiscent of the Rankin/Bass TV specials. We wrote it several years ago but have yet to seriously pursue publishing it, and the “daunting” aspect of all the research is part of the problem. Now that I’ve gotten better at keeping my ficiton submitted over the past year, the time is probably ripe. But it’s still scary since I know nothing about that part of the industry. Kudos to you for attempting it!