A Look Back, and A Look Forward
2023's in the rearview...
It’s only taken me a month to get this review done! In all seriousness, 2023 has been a great year, albeit with some challenges.
How Did I Do?
At the beginning of 2023 I set a goal for myself of 100,000 edited words for the year. That works out to 8,333 words a month, or about 1,900 a week. That’s a doable pace for me and I was confident I could hit that, or get pretty close. Sadly, I didn’t quite get there for the year as a whole.
For 2023 I got 63,840 edited, clean words down on paper (or I guess electrons?). As you can see above I exceeded my 8.3k/month goal three times, with one month above 10k. Unfortunately I had two pretty bad months and several mediocre months. This is net words, however, so anything I edit out goes in as a negative number.
April and December 2023 were rough in particular, both because my day job was crazy busy and I end up doing work in the evenings instead of writing. I am self-employed, so the amount I work on my day job has a direct impact on how much I get paid. Add to that the fact I work in a cyclical industry and I basically need to make hay while the sun shines.
But I managed to squeeze in some great writing in the margins!
The log above doesn’t include my Substack writing, which started the beginning of November. I’m using Substack to support my writing and communicate with readers, so it’s not a lot of writing, but it is some. I’m up to sixteen whole subscribers now! Not much, but it’s something I am proud of.
My most popular post to date is the one I did called Bluey’s Guide to Story Structure that got a whopping 46 views, mostly due to people from Twitter following links I posted there. Hashtags do work sometimes!
Even though my Bluey article is an outlier, I still get 25-30 unique views per article. That’s not that many, but I’m here for the long term to build an audience over time and I still celebrate every new subscriber!
The Good News
From the table above you can see that 2023 was my best writing year ever! It beats out 2021, when I was writing what would become To Have and To Hold, by about 5k words. I’m pretty happy about that. Progress is progress, after all!
In 2023 I had two short stories published. The first titled Tides of Malta (the title is a bit of a joke) is set during an alternate version of the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome.
The main character named Nikias is the captain of a trireme, descendent of Sicilians driven out by Rome’s conquest of Sicily, and occasional smuggler who takes the odd job for Hasdrubal Barca, the brother of the famed Carthaginian General Hannibal. This is a story I wrote as I started to feel out an alternate history universe where Carthage gives Rome more of a run for its money (more on that below). You can find this story in the anthology Falcons of Malta by Raconteur Press.
The second story is a mech Sci-Fi story titled Laugh or Cry set in a future after humanity defeated an invasion of Earth by an alien race called the Kugh with a little help from some friendly aliens. Now the armies of Earth have a new mission: liberating other planets taken by the Kugh. You can find this story in the anthology Clash of Steel by Bayonet Books. I was honored to be included in this anthology with some great names like Craig Martelle, Rick Partlow, and Blaine Lee Pardoe.
On top of what was published, I completed and submitted three more short stories to anthologies. One story to Raconteur Press’ Giant! Freaking! Robots! open call, one to the Three Ravens Publishing Assault Team open call, and one to the Chris Kennedy Publishing Paladins of Valor contest. I got a rejection from CKP, but then turned around and submitted that story to the Three Ravens Publishing Magic and Mischief open call.
The biggest single chunk of writing in did in 2023 was a 23,000 word novella for a shared world project I’m doing with my writing group. This story accounts for the three great months I had in July, August, and part of September. I put it out for those guys to read and got some great comments back. I’m in the middle of a revision on that and it should be ready for publishing sometime mid-2024.
Looking Ahead
First things first, I have just signed a contract with Three Ravens Publishing for a follow-up story to Laugh or Cry! Mentioned above for the Assault Team open call, this story includes most of the same characters put in a totally different, very unfamiliar situation. While tackling a do-or-die objective, they’re confronted with a challenge that completely changes the mission. Titled Critical Objectives, it’ll be out sometime in the first half of 2024.
I’ve just finished the second draft of the next short story in that series for the Three Ravens Contested Landing open call anthology. Tentatively titled Good Works, it occurs in the same time period as Critical Objectives but in a different location and from the POV of another character from Laugh or Cry. I got feedback from the AlphaMercs just a couple days ago and I’m very excited about this one!
I’ve been steadily making progress on the alternate history universe I’m calling the Lions of Hamilcar. This includes Tides of Malta and I have a novel trilogy roughly outlined for this universe. I’ve got to make some decisions on structure and how to lay things out in the timeline here, but I have about ten thousand words down on paper for the first novel and I hope to get that well underway this year.
The last big thing I’m working on is a shared space opera universe with the AlphaMercs. My contribution is a novella inspired by the adventures of an incredible man named Robert Smalls. Born a slave in the 1800s, he escaped along with his family and those of his crewmates when they stole a ship from Charleston Harbor during the Civil War. A really fascinating person, I used him as a model for my main character.
The universe involves far-future humanity, alien races, political intrigue, and a race of enslaved machines called Servos…
Thank You
2023 was a great year, and 2024 is starting off great as well. I am really happy with the direction of my writing career, and I have all of my readers and supporters to thank for that.
For all of you who’ve bought and read my stories, I can’t thank you enough. I truly wouldn’t be here without you.
Here’s to the year ahead!
Dang, Zane. Y'all were quietly busting bottom last year. 👏 And all y'all will enjoy these stories that Zane mentioned, IMHO. I was blessed to be one of those alpha readers, and I had a blast. However, I had to force myself to do my job spotting problems in the story. 😁 I'd go several pages, remind myself why I was reading the story, read them again, and realize that Zane writes amazingly clean drafts. I really need to master that ability, too. 🙇♂️