June 30th, 2023 - June 30th, 2024

June 30th, 2024 marks one year since my first short story was published somewhere. I still remember how excited I was to learn of the news. It had been almost two years since I had seriously begun writing short stories and prose again, and it had been many years of writing in general, mainly scripts, without achieving something like this. Getting a piece of my work accepted and published somewhere for everyone to read. And then a year of more successes ensued. I wanted to celebrate my special little one-year anniversary, but also all that’s happened in that span of time. Because I feel it’s really helped me grow as a writer too.

June 30th, 2023: The story was “Titanium, Thorium, and Tungsten” and was published in Sci-Fi Shorts. A plus to this publication is when you submit a story, if they feel it has promise but needs some work, they give you notes and let you revise and resubmit. I received good critiques on this, reusing certain words, a bit of vagueness in certain areas, etc. I improved my story, resubmitted, and was published!

July 14th, 2023: Just two weeks later, and another amazing day for me, rivaling the feeling of my first story getting published. I found out two separate stories of mine would be published in two different publications! I had been submitting a lot, all over the place, so it was a complete coincidence that two stories were getting published on the same date. One story was “The Booth” which was published in Clever Fox Literary Magazine. I was surprised this story was chosen to be published. It wasn’t like many of my stories which I sat down and outlined and storyboarded to various degrees. I had an idea that struck me, and I was overtaken with the idea. I decided to just start writing it. I had it all in my head so I just let it come out naturally. I saw the benefit in sometimes just letting an idea pour out of you and to not always have to worry about planning everything. The other story was “Looting While Dead” which also went to Sci-Fi Shorts. It was the third story I sent to them, the second one they had given me notes and I resubmitted and then they turned it down, but offered helpful critiques. So, when I went back with a third story, I was able to deliver something more refined.

August 11th, 2023: I had previously submitted a story to the 6th Annual Launch Pad Prose Competition, it had made it to the Second Round, but that was it. With that competition, making it to the round after that, the Top 100, that’s when the benefits really kick in. And this time around, when entering a story “Darkness of the Ecuadorian Sunset” to the 7th Annual Launch Pad Prose Competition, I found out that I moved on to the Top 100! They’d now promote my story to agents, managers, and producers on the site, and they’d share a book of loglines of all the Top 100 to people in the industry.

August 20th, 2023: After submitting to Sci-Fi Shorts again, and having another story turned down, I brainstormed other topics for a sci-fi story. I remembered an idea I had for a long story, either a script or a novel. It’s something I know I won’t be able to get to for a long time, but I love the idea, and thought I could take a snippet from that story and flesh it out into a short story. That became “Fury of the Yellow” and was published in Sci-Fi Shorts. It was an interesting exercise, writing a short story under 1,000 words that would exist in something I planned to be… many more words overall. It actually gave me an idea of more of the background for that larger story that I hope to work on some day, and hey, published again! I never tire of that feeling.

September 1st, 2023: That story that moved on to the Top 100 in the 7th Annual Launch Pad Prose Competition, well, now it had moved on to the Top 50! This meant more promotion of my story, and a higher ranking on the Coverfly site, so any agents, managers, or producers looking for projects, they’d see how high my story ranked!

September 3rd, 2023: My fifth story to get published and my fourth one to get published in Sci-Fi Shorts was “Language Barrier.” I had continually been submitting to Sci-Fi Shorts and receiving excellent critiques, something I’ve realized has so much value the more and more that I write. I have had success with this publication, so that’s one reason I continued to submit to them. But the feedback has been so valuable as well. Some of their critiques I would read, then think, “Yeah, that does sound bad.” And then I would realize, “Wow, I do this in a lot of my writing. Time to stop.” So, I have appreciated their notes because I continually keep them in mind when writing. Additionally, the work of creating an entire story in under 1,000 words has just strengthened my writing. And yeah, published again! It’s a great feeling.

September 22nd, 2023: The Top 10 for the 7th Annual Launch Pad Prose Competition was announced in the morning… but my story was not included. But within two hours from the announcement, I received an email from someone working with the competition telling me that someone at a Management and Production Company wanted to meet with me about my story and about the possibility of representation! I took the meeting, of course, and it went great. Nothing came of it, however, I got my first taste of what a meeting like that is like, what people are looking for, what stories of mine they may be interested in. They expressed interest in several other stories of mine which I was able to share with them. I got a real confidence boost in learning that my stories are of interest to others, and some of them have legs, enough legs to pull a meeting at the very least.

April 5th, 2024: I had written a comedy script a few years ago titled “A Tale of Two Tales” and it was a different way to tell a story. I hoped it would be viewed as unique, but I was a little worried it would be too different. I was worried people wouldn’t understand my intention. And so I hadn’t done anything with it, until a contest came up and I decided I wanted to submit it. I reread my script and it still made me laugh, which is rare for me to read something of mine long afterwards and make myself laugh. I fixed it up slightly and submitted it to the TSL Free Screenplay Contest. On this day, I found out that this contest, which had over 15,000 submissions, announced the Quarterfinalists, which was the top 1,000, and my script had moved on! It gave me confidence that my weird and unique ideas actually did hold the interest of others.

April 13th, 2024: So far, every short story of mine that was published, it was accepted by the first place that I sent it to. I had submitted many other stories to many other publications, seeing them all get turned down. That did, at times, make me feel like my stories that got accepted on the first try were good, and anything that was declined was not good. I didn’t completely think that, I knew that a story getting declined in one place didn’t mean it’d get declined everywhere. However, I didn’t have physical evidence of that, so the idea did sit way in the back of my mind… until this day. A story that I had submitted to three places and that had been turned down three times, I sent off to a fourth place, and it was accepted! “The Origin of Curse Words” was published in Mollusk Lit and it was my first time seeing a story get turned down multiple times, only to eventually be accepted. This let me know, sometimes it is just the wrong story for a publication, or it could be the wrong time, or it could be that it just missed the cut because the competition was too good… and sometimes it just takes finding the right place at the right time. I was proud of my story and I was glad a publication finally saw it how I did.

(And they finally just published Issue 3 the other day!)

May 3rd, 2024: The TSL Free Screenplay Contest announced the Semifinalists, and my script, “A Tale of Two Tales” had moved on again! It was now down to the top 250! This wound up being as far as my script made it, but I was thrilled with the advancements. It also made me feel like I had a great script on my hands that was more than ready to either keep getting submitted to contests, or start getting sent out in hopes of finding representation.

May 27th, 2024: Another short story of mine that I had sent somewhere and was declined was titled “How Things Are Here.” However, I sent it to a second publication, On The High Literary Magazine, and it was accepted! On this day, once it was published, that marked 7 short stories of mine that had been published… and all in the span of one year! This was a story that had a lot of truth to it, a story in which I poured a lot of my past into, but mixed it all up with some fiction and bending of past events for the best results. This particular story getting published, and this story marking 7 stories of mine getting published, it taught me that drawing from my past experiences is often a good idea, and that persistence is always a good idea.

June 28th, 2024: I swear to you, this idea came to me a few weeks ago and I started writing this around June 20th... probably finished it around the 25th. I had no idea this next one was going to happen. That story "Darkness of the Ecuadorian Sunset" which had been submitted to the Launch Pad Prose Competition, I assumed that chapter was over with. But that competition, and everything under Coverfly, is fantastic! They will continue to promote stories that they find to be worth it. And they let me know on this day that they would be including my story, along with some other stories that placed very highly in competitions and ranked highly on their site, in their Summer Reading List that they would be sending out to industry professionals in order to shine another light on the work! This will go out to all the agents, managers, and production companies that they have relationships with! Perhaps this chapter isn't quite finished. In addition to that, they wrote an amazing review of my story which everyone will now see when they navigate to my story on the Coverfly site. It reads like a movie review, it is thrilling. I absolutely did not expect it. I'm so honored to have their generous review of my work.

Looking back, I am really proud of what I’ve accomplished in the past year. But I also realize that I’ve learned so much in the process and that’s all helping me grow as a writer. In many ways, it’s been a tough year. I’ve been extremely busy with my writing and plenty of other things, but I’ve been pushing myself as hard as I can because I know what I want and I know how badly I want it. And when I stop and look back at the year-long road that I’ve traveled, I am admiring my own accomplishments and savoring them. But I don’t want to stop. I want to continue, I want my accomplishments to grow. And the experiences from this past year can only help me.