So, listen:
Yeah, no, I did not blog for a hot minute. Because I figured I had nothing to really talk about. I still don’t think I have anything to talk about. But I figured, you know, let’s write an update post.
Some things have happened since my last blog!
- I sold short stories to Cossmass Infinites, PodCastle, Air and Nothingness Press, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex Magazine, and the Human Monsters anthology from Dark Matter/Night Worms.
- I sold my first reprint – of Yellow and Pink, the story I won Writers of the Future with – to the Storyteller Series Podcast.
- I became a first reader for Diabolical Plots.
- I finally went to the Writers of the Future workshop.
- I went to my first WorldCon and met some seriously cool people.
- I went back to Superstars Writing Seminars, and it was just as fantastic as it was the first time.
- One of my short stories, “Pull” over at PodCastle, got on the 2021 Locus Recommended Reading list.
- I got accepted into the Odyssey workshop (starting in November of this year).
- And I became the assistant editor at the Storyteller Series Podcast.
That…sounds like a lot when you list it all out like that. For what it’s worth, my cat cares absolutely nothing for any of this. She’s currently stretched out on my lap, happily shredding my pants while I stretch over her to type this.
Oh, yeah – I also wrote a book! I’m in the middle of querying it at the moment. I’ve gotten a couple of lovely personal rejections, a bunch of forms, and my first partial request so far, for which I’m crossing my fingers. I love this weird little thing. I hope someone else loves it as much as I do.
So what’s the point of this blog post? Well, I felt like a bit of a narcissist listing all those things out. But it’s an update post. These are updates. And beyond that, sometimes you forget, while you’re in the weeds editing this new short story and writing this flash piece and you’re terrified they’re both going to turn out awful (no, that’s not suspiciously specific, why do you say that), how many cool things have been happening to you in the interim.
I’m realizing that the list above is what people are seeing on my social media. On Twitter, on Facebook, wherever, that’s what they see, and I don’t put out much of the interim bits where I’m pulling my hair out because oh my god I’m on draft ten of this story and I still haven’t gotten the worldbuilding right. That’s what everyone else sees, and that’s the stuff I’m forgetting because there is so. Much. Interim. And I can’t escape it.
So maybe the point of this blog post is: go sit down and write up everything you’ve accomplished. My list is from the past two years (wow, yeah, it’s been two years since I wrote a blog post. I’d say I’m sorry, but I haven’t written enough blog posts previously for that to make people angry. Yet). Write all of it out. Not just “I’ve sold X stories.” Write out “I sold stories to A, B, C, D…” and look at it all laid out in front of you. Everything you’ve accomplished – work you’ve finished, places you’ve been – and see how long the list gets. See everything that everyone else sees from you on social media. You might be surprised by how much there is!
I’m going to try to blog a bit more moving forward. If there are things you’d like to see posts about, go shout at me on Twitter (which tends to be where I’m most active). And if you read all the way up through here, thanks for reading!
Leah Ning 