Another Year Over

 

Well, thank goodness for that – 2021 is officially over. Covid has put so many pressures on everyone and we’re still not out of the woods. In fact, the number of people I know who have contacted the virus recently has spiralled. Thankfully the symptoms don’t seem to be as aggressive as previous strains, but you never know how its going to affect you.

As I suffer from Rheumatoid Arthritis and need to take immune suppressants to control the disease, I have to be very careful about the contact I have with people. So far I’ve been lucky and have managed to steer clear, but now it feels inevitable that at some point everyone of us will test positive. We can only hope that because of the vaccination process, that for the majority, it becomes nothing more serious than a really bad cold.

I’ve always use the period between Christmas and New Year to review my writing goals from the previous January and set new ones for the year ahead, and I try to start the new year fully enthusiastic for my writing life. Usually I manage to achieve all my goals until roughly mid-February, and then I go off on a tangent. Although I only had one short story published last year, I did do a lot of work and I have a couple of big projects which are nearing completion. Hopefully these will bear fruit during 2022.

As ever my goals for losing weight, eating more healthily and exercising more fall by the wayside before the year is very old, but I will set them again for this year and hope that I can put some strategies in place to finally meet them.

During 2021 I fell out of love with short story writing, not because I don’t enjoy writing them anymore, but because I’m struggling to know what to do with them. The short story market has seriously diminished over recent years, especially as some magazines have closed the submission process to writers who haven’t been published by them previously. I’m sure this is because they are inundated with submissions and that shifting through the slush pile it too labour intensive, but it is saddening for those of us who are struggling to get our feet on the rungs of the ladder.

Lockdown has exacerbated the problem and sometimes it has felt as though submitting short stories is like posting them into a black hole. So I was delighted when Yours Fiction accepted one of my stories – The Floods of Change - for publication. And I was even more delighted to see it in print in the November 2021 edition, and even get a strapline on the front cover.

I was also delighted see a new magazine on the market, Seven Days, but disappointed by the news that even in such a short time it has proved not to be viable. It has seriously made me want to take a more direct control of my writing life, and over the last few months I have been doing some research into self-publishing. This is something I will be looking into in greater detail during 2022.

I hope that you are all feeling enthusiastic for your writing life and the beginning of this new year, and most of all that you stay healthy and happy.