This month was ridiculously, spectacularly, unbelievably successful. I’ve sold a grand total of eleven short stories, poems, and satirical pieces for my new column at foofaraw. My short film “How to Prepare for Time Travelers in the Workplace” won three more festival awards, bringing its total to five. (Thank you, Milano Indie Movie Awards, Night of Shorts, and Miranda de Ebro Film Fest!) At this point, I’m kind of afraid to pinch myself lest I wake up.

The big pro sale of the month was a very cathartic radical ecojustice story that will appear in the upcoming “Air and Nothingness Press” anthology early next year. (That makes for a total of four pro sales in my portfolio, huzzah! Though I celebrate each and every sale equally, eh.)

Looking back at my writing log, it had taken me roughly eighteen months to get my first eleven sales. If you’d gone back in time and told my younger self that at some point, I’d sell that many stories in a single month, I would’ve called you a damn liar.

…which, naturally, makes me wonder what on earth my life will be like another couple of years down the road.

I attribute my success to two factors. First, I always try to improve my writing. That means devouring writing manuals (I’m currently wrestling with Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook, which is beautiful but dense but useful) and constantly trying new things, never standing still. The other part is, well, my obsession with and addiction to simultaneous submissions (aka simsubs, which would make me a simsubmancer) and themed calls: I have well over a hundred pending submissions at any given time (some of which are for small batches of stories or poems) and I’m getting better and better at that simsub tetris. After a while, you get a pretty good idea (though never a perfect one) as to which of your unsold stories a particular magazine or editor would be interested in the most. (Only the paying publications, mind you.) At this point, I strongly suspect most fiction submission calls get an entry from me (though I don’t quite have a lot of horror or romance stories): it feels like playing the lottery with free tickets. (I also never ever pay to submit my stories: the money should flow to the writer, not the other way around.)

It also helps that I write at least a story per week as part of my self-imposed Bradbury challenge: writing a story per week (sometimes more) for 52 weeks in a row, with daily drafts and rewrites. If you’d like, you can read about my progress over here. (It helps keep me accountable, eh.)

In other words, to quote Anaïs Nin, “Good things happen to those who hustle.”

I’m typing this monthly summary on November third – lazy, I know, but in my defense, my final (tenth!) sale for September landed in my inbox mere minutes before that month ended – on the island of Kodiak, Alaska (my life is very strange), and the first few sales of this new month have already landed, and life is beautiful, and I look forward to writing more, hopefully, during my five-flight, thirty-hour journey from here to Montreal, by way of Phoenix. (Told you my life was strange.)

Happy writing. Happy reading. Happy November, everyone.