2024 By The Numbers
My 2023 By The Numbers post was among my most popular of the year, so let's take a look at 2024, the first year for which I have full data on my late-in-life writing career.
Short Stories
39 Short story submissions
33 Short story rejections
6 Short story acceptances
3 Short stories published
I'm counting "As You See The World" as a 2024 publication, even though the cover date is January/February 2025. You can see status of all my completed short stories -- published, pending, and in submission -- on my Stories Page. Also published this year was "No One Will Believe You" and "Thursday Affair."
Those 39 submissions don't mean I submitted 38 different stories ... it counts my total submissions of several stories completed this year, and a couple from years prior that are still seeking homes.
"Agua Fantasma" has been acquired by Pulp Asylum, and will be published in February 2025.
"Errands" (2.75 hrs, on top of 8 the year prior) was acquired by Michael Bracken's Mickey Finn 21st Century Noir, and will appear in Volume 6 of that series in December 2025.
"Destiny" (2.5 hrs) and "Shamus & Buster" were both purchased by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, but no publication date has been set.
"A Finger For Frodo" dates to late 2022. I put a bit more than an hour into it this year, tinkering with market-specific changes before sending it out, multiple times. Severed fingers are crossed for long-overdue good news on this one. You never give up on a lost cat.
"Law of the Jungle" (19.75 hrs) is a gonzo noir that is not quite complete, but near as damnit. I'm strategizing about where to first submit it.
"Sol, You're Gonna Miss It!" (6.5 hrs) is my first science fiction story, still knocking on doors.
"Strangers On A Train On A Train" (17.75 hrs) was written with an eye toward submitting simultaneously to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and a since-cancelled train-specific anthology. I think I will let it ride at AHMM, where I should receive a decision in October of 2025. Submitting to that market is like throwing a boomerang at Pluto.
"The Devil Downsized" (10.5 hrs) is a flash fiction fable, maybe a fantasy story. Call it a Twilight Zone story. In submission.
"The Price of Eveyrthing" was a story I started in 2023, and likely will not complete in its present form. I spent only 2.5 hours on it this past year. I may rescue the premise for another story but so far this one just hasn't sparked as I hoped.
"Whitey's Elephant" (11.25 hrs) is in submission at Ellery Queen and it's been there long enough I've allowed myself some good thoughts.
I've recorded 5.25 hours for "Ideas," which is a catch-all for projects that haven't evolved to the writing stage yet. Everything above was an "idea" at some point, with those hours rolled into the completed project for my year-end accounting.
And there were a couple shots in the dark this year in terms of writing into very narrow markets with stories for Woman's World and Shotgun Honey, neither of which were purchased. Given their unique and specific formats it is unlikely these stories will find another market, but that's what the file cabinet is for. Seven hours of work here.
Novels
My published work has all been short stories, but I identify as a novelist, for whatever that is worth, and that's where the bulk of my writing effort is spent.
3 Novel submissions
1 Novel rejection
73 Agent queries sent
37 Negative agent replies
3 Positive agent replies
All of the above was for Gumshoe Frankenstein, and alas, neither of those postive replies resulted in offers of representation. I will continue trying to find a home for Gumshoe Frankenstein in 2025, shifting my attention from agents to those small and mid-sized publishers accepting unagented manuscripts.
Hours worked per novel
155 Gumshoe Frankenstein
61 Free To Play
The hours on Gumshoe Frankenstein were to complete a thorough re-write of B.K.P.I., pushing the overall hours for this project well north of 300, dating back to when I started the book in 2017. It is now "done" at 68K words and I don't plan to return to it unless under specific orders of an editor that will result in publication.
Free To Play is a novel about childhood friends falling out with each other when their mobile game makes them overnight millionaires. I started work on it on October 1st with an eye toward completing a 75K word first draft by December 20th. I made my word goal but I'm not done with a first draft -- the story is running long, and I've adjusted my target to 125K words, which I should hit in February of 2025. It is a genuinely sloppy first draft and I expect much of my work next year will be in revising this manuscript.
No hours went into Things The Crows Brought this year, which earned 136 hours in 2023. I set Crows aside to complete the revisions that yielded Gumshoe Frankenstein, leaving Crows at approximately the half-way point of the first draft. When it came time to return to Crows I found I had more enthusiasm for Free To Play (which shares some characters and locations with Crows). I do wish to return to this project. It's not dead, only sleeping.
Everything else
Biz Dev 73.5
Blog & Social Media 35.75
Biz Dev is most everything that isn't writing -- correspondence, submissions, lectures & learning, market research. Not included is the time I spent traveling to New York and back for the Edgars. This number is a little more than twice as much as I recorded for 2023, but that's about right considering that my numbers from last year are only accurate from the middle of the year. Overall I don't mind this number too much.
Blog & Social Media is also down from last year's 43, which included all sorts of start-up costs for this blog and getting my Twitter rotation rolling again. Much as I enjoy communicating here, I consider it a good thing my commitment is going down in this category.
Bottom Line
All-in, I was at 417 hours for the year. This is less than the 450 I recorded over 284 days in 2023, and it surprises me that my seat time went down. I put this down to more precisely timing my sessions, taking weekends off (resulting in about 30 fewer days worked), and putting my attention on words written rather than hours worked. Most of my work since October on Free To Play came in hour-long bursts, which was frequently enough for the day. Overall I spent my writing time more efficiently and more productively in 2024, regardless of hours recorded.
I’d like to see my short story time increase at the expense of “everything else,” and I’d like to see my efforts in writing novels enjoy some publication success, but overall I can’t much complain about this breakdown.
I made a little money this year -- $3.98 an hour, compared to last year's .33 per hour -- largely due to my grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation. Still nothing to write home about (though I suppose I just did). Thanks to the wonder of small numbers, this does represent a 1106% increase over 2023. Yay me! At this rate, I'll be pushing fifty bucks an hour by next year. (Ha!).
Thanks for reading.