2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week eight: Feb. 23 – Mar. 1.
Stats
Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 8
Submissions Total: 8
Rejections: 4
Acceptances: 0
Goals and Results
My goals for last week were:
Submit stories
Submit critiques
Continue writing Out of Towner, or start a new story.
This week was a submissions week. I made two submissions for stories that have already been making the rounds, and another four for my new stories, Taco Cat and Red Eye. Those submissions get me back on track for meeting my goal of 50 submissions this year.
My inspiration for the story Out of Towner has fizzled, so I’ve decided to set it aside. I haven’t started a new story yet, but I’ve been thinking about punk stories, on two different fronts. The first is an idea for a punk magical community in late 1970s New York, and the second is a budding interest in the genre of Solarpunk. I’ll have more to say about that in a future post.
I continued to neglect my Critters critiques, something I’ll need to rectify in the upcoming week.
Next Week
Unfortunately, my wife injured her arm this past week, so I’ll be picking up the chores that require arm mobility and strength, and giving her some extra support for the next few weeks. That will cut into writing time, and I’ll have to make some adjustments to my plans and goals.
For now, my goals next week are carried over from this week:
2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week seven: Feb. 15 – Feb. 22.
Stats
Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 2
Submissions Total: 2
Rejections:4
Acceptances: 0
Goals and Results
The goals I set for last week were:
Finish Red Eyes.
Finish Taco Cat.
Continue writing Out of Towner.
Get a new story in the Critters queue.
This week felt good. I am finished with Red Eyes, and I think I can safely say that this is the most work I’ve had to put into a story to make it work. It’s a relief to be done with it.
Taco Cat Employee Manual v7.1 (a much shorter story) made it through the Critters queue this week, and I received 11 responses—a pretty decent turn-out. It was mostly well-received, and only needed some minor tweaks. Quite a contrast between these two stories. I trimmed it down to an even 1,000 words so I can submit it to most flash fiction listings.
I already had another story, F-TIB, ready for the critters queue, so I sent that off and should get feedback in mid-March.
Finally, I sat and stared at Out of Towner, a story comprised (so far) of a single introductory scene, and felt completely indifferent to it. So that was the one goal I didn’t meet. This week, I’ll have to decide if I can find a spark of excitement in it, or if I should set it aside and pick something else to work on.
Submissions and Rejections
I received a response to the light rewrite that was requested for Incident at Pleasant Hills. Unfortunately, it was a rejection. This was a bummer, but they had very kind words for the story so I can’t really complain.
I submitted one story, Tom, Dick, and Larry, to a themed drabble contest. It has been challenging to find publications interested in drabbles, and they frequently don’t offer payment. (It’s pretty funny, since pro rates on 100 words come out to only $8.) This contest pays and the theme fits the story, so it’s a nice find.
I haven’t yet looked through the listings with Red Eyes or Taco Cat in mind, but I plan to send them out in the upcoming week.
Next Week
My goals for next week are:
Submit stories – at least three
Submit some critiques
Continue writing Out of Towner, or start a new story.
2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week six: Feb. 8 – Feb. 15
Stats
Stories Finished: 1
Submissions Currently Out: 2
Submissions Total: 1
Rejections: 3
Acceptances: 0
Goals and Results
My goals from last week were:
Finish revising Red Eyes.
Start the first draft of a new story.
Although I’ve been generally keeping up with my self-imposed quotas for writing and editing, this week marks the first time where I’ve gotten ahead on both.
I started a new story with a working title of Out of Towner. I hate this title and it will change. I’m not sure how I feel about the story itself. I’ll give it another week to see how it shapes up.
I made a couple of breakthroughs with Red Eyes revisions this week. First, I found a motivation for my main character that connects several aspects of the story and helps to explain why he finds himself in his current predicament. This also gave me a reason to make a change to the ending—not really changing the outcome of the story, but replacing some dialogue between two characters that I always felt was not up to snuff.
In the past couple weeks, I’ve addressed about two pages of bullet point notes, with some content migrating across several scenes. I believe I’ve reached the point where I added and clarified everything I wanted to. Unfortunately, that process added 600-700 words to a fairly long story. I’m refusing to call it done until it gets another one or two editing passes, mainly to trim, trim, trim.
As I finally wrap up this story, it’s really apparent that I’m just not as good at editing as I’d like to be. It’s slow, painful work to slog through. The writing is breezy in comparison. I’ve been able to get away with it, to some extent, by writing shorter stories that don’t have as many complicated, moving parts.
This isn’t a point of shame, but it does reinforce my determination to do a lot of editing this year so I can get better at it.
Critiques
It will be a relief to have Red Eyes done, because I’ve got another story coming down the pipe. Taco Cat Employee Manual v.7.1 went out for critique this week. The Critters week runs Wednesday to Wednesday, so it still has a couple days to go. I’ve gotten seven responses, which is not bad, but I’m hoping to get a few more.
Taco Cat currently stands at 1150 words, and a couple people have noted that it’s probably worth trying to get that down to an even 1000, the common cutoff for flash fiction. I expect the editing pass to be much shorter and less intensive on this one. Soon, I should have two more stories ready to submit.
2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week five: Jan. 31 – Feb. 6.
Stats
Stories Finished: 0
Submissions Currently Out: 2
Submissions Total: 1
Rejections: 3
Acceptances: 0
A New Kind of Rejection
I received one rejection this week. Sort of.
At first I thought it was going to be one of those rejections where the publication is so worried about offending anyone that they don’t even clearly say that the story is rejected. (For the record, these are my least favorite kind of rejection. Don’t treat writers as fragile little babies, even if we occasionally act that way.)
Around the fifth paragraph it became apparent what was actually going on. The publication was unable to keep up with the number of submissions, so they gave up, rejected everything, and changed their format to be flash fiction only.
My submission wasn’t flash, hence the non-rejection rejection.
Goals and Results
The goals I set out for this week were:
Finish or get close to finishing Red Eyes revisions.
Catch up on writing word count.
I have to admit I got distracted this week, but it was productive distraction. I ended up working on several blog posts, which should be a longer-term benefit when I have less work to do for the remainder of my February posting schedule.
I didn’t finish my revisions on Red Eyes, but I did make good progress. I’m now ahead on my self-imposed revision quota for the first time this year. I still have one more week to wrap up Red Eyes before critiques for another story, Taco Cat, start coming in from Critters.
I didn’t quite catch up to my word count quota this week, although I am within spitting distance. Those words were spent on finishing the first draft of the horror story I’ve been working on, currently titled Estate Sale. (I’ll be looking for a more interesting name when I come back to it for revisions.)
2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week four: Jan. 24 – Jan. 30
Stats
Stories Finished: 0
Submissions Currently Out: 2
Submissions Total: 1
Rejections: 2
Acceptances: 0
Goals and Results
The goals I set for this week were:
Clean up another story (F-TIB) for Critters
Revise a story (Red Eyes)
Do just enough new writing to meet my self-imposed quota
My first goal went very smoothly. I usually don’t do a lot of heavy editing on a story initially, unless I get seriously negative feedback from my first readers or I feel like it has big structural problems. This particular story is fairly short—about 2300 words—and feels pretty good after some light cleanup.
My biggest concern isn’t a story structure thing, it’s the fact that one of the two main characters is trans, and their transition is an important plot point. I’m not trans, and I want to do right by the character and by that community. I haven’t worked with a sensitivity reader (formal or informal), but that’s something I might explore for this piece.
Goal number two is a work in progress. I won’t talk too much more about it. I’ve already mentioned that Red Eyes is a fairly long story (6600 words) that does need some structural adjustments, and that’s ongoing. I think this is an interesting example of the editorial process, so I may publish a longer post-mortem when I’m done.
Goal three was an abject failure. I barely wrote anything new this week. That doesn’t bother me, since I’m making progress on my revisions and that’s what I need to do to get more stories ready for submission. My word count goals are very reasonable, and I can still easily make up those words in a few hours of solid work.
Looking Back on the First Month
It’s hard to believe that January is over. One month down, eleven to go. I’m happy to report that I feel like I’ve struck a good equilibrium with my goals. I don’t feel overwhelmed, but I am getting things done.
So far, that isn’t reflected much in the stats at the top of these posts. I’ve been working on several stories, but haven’t yet pushed one over the line to be ready for submission. If we go by my goals for the year, I should be finishing one story per month. So I will necessarily have to ramp that up.
The number of submissions is also slightly low, if we go by the raw math of splitting 50 submissions over 12 months. This flows from completing stories, so it makes sense. Naturally, as I finish more stories I will be able to submit more, so I expect this to ramp up throughout the year.
My final goal for the year was orthogonal to writing short fiction: essentially keeping the blog active by posting 100 times. Conveniently, this works out to roughly two posts per week. So far I’ve remained comfortably on track.
I was struck by multiple ideas for the blog this week, which was a small distraction from writing fiction, but a welcome one. I was able to build up a small backlog of posts over my holiday vacation, and I’m happy to be able to maintain a healthy buffer for those inevitable times when the well of ideas runs dry. It’s a nice way to keep the writing muscles in shape while taking a break from fiction, and a good excuse to think about and discuss process.
Next Week
For the upcoming week, my goals are:
Finish or get close to finishing Red Eyes revisions.
Catch up on writing word count.
Taco Cat Employee Manual still has roughly two weeks in the Critters queue before I start to get feedback, and I now have F-TIB ready to submit for critique immediately after that. Red Eyes progress has been slow, so I’m mostly clearing my week to work on that. I’d really like to have it done by the time the critiques start rolling in so I can move on to addressing those.
Catching up on word count is a secondary goal, and one that will be fairly easy to achieve if I get in the right mood for it, but I’ll be happy to let it slide if I can make significant progress on revisions instead.
2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week three: Jan. 17 – Jan. 23.
Stats
Stories Finished: 0
Submissions Currently Out: 2
Submissions Total: 1
Rejections: 2
Acceptances: 0
Keeping up the Pace
These first few weeks of the year have been about setting up a scaffold for the work yet to come. I’m now feeling like I’m in a comfortable place.
Each week I have some “standard” work: completing a Critters critique, meeting my first draft writing quota and my revision quota, and writing something for the blog. I like having some checklist items that I can work on without too much thought at the end of a long day. Beyond that, I can choose my own adventure.
I’m also getting back into the habit of scouring Duotrope’s upcoming themed submissions calendar. This is something I like to do pretty regularly when I’m writing short stories. Occasionally, a theme will inspire an idea for a new story, and if I already happen to have a story that fits a theme, those are great places to submit.
I didn’t find anything in the near future, but there were a couple themes opening in the next month or two that fit the stories I’m already shopping around.
Goals and Results
My goals from last week were to submit a story to Critters, revise another story, and keep up with my self-imposed quotas.
First, I spent some time cleaning up my newest and shortest story in progress, Taco Cat Employee Manual v7.1. As is typical, these are pretty light revisions based on feedback from my in-house beta readers (my wife and daughter) and anything that stands out to me after letting the story sit for a week or two. With that done, I sent it off to the Critters queue, and it should go out for feedback in early February. I’ll be curious to see how many responses it gets as a flash fiction piece that will only count for half credit.
In addition to those revisions, I dug into Red Eyes, a much longer story with a laundry list of improvements that need to be made. I made some progress, but there’s a long way to go.
The work I put into those two stories just about got me caught up on my revisions quota. Most of my writing quota was knocked out by working on a little horror story I’m calling Estate Sale, which I did partly while waiting at the DMV on a Friday afternoon. Once again, having a story in progress on my phone has paid off, even if I have to type with my thumbs. (Yeah, I probably could have brought the laptop. But I didn’t want to.)
Next Week
My first goal for next week is to work on Red Eyes revisions. I’m going to try to get the story done in the next two weeks. My second goal is to do some light cleanup on one of my stories that’s still in need of critique. That way, I will have Red Eyes ready to submit to publications by the time the Critters feedback for Taco Cat comes rolling in. I can immediately submit the next piece to Critters and work on the Taco Cat revisions while it works its way through the queue. Like a short story assembly line.
2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
This is week two: Jan. 10 – Jan. 16.
Stats
Stories Finished: 0
Submissions Currently Out: 2
Submissions Total: 0
Rejections: 2
Acceptances: 0
Finding a Groove
I’m still getting back into the rhythm of short story writing, but it’s less daunting than it was in 2024. I’ve done this before, and now it’s just a matter of doing it better.
I’m going to have a standard block of stats at the top of these posts. I haven’t decided exactly what those will be yet. I’ll finalize it when I feel more settled into a process.
Last week, I thought about splitting out the weekly stats from the yearly stats, but now I’m second-guessing that. The numbers just don’t change very much from week to week, and I don’t think it would be very interesting. Last week I also included a “stories in progress” count, but it’s hard to decide what that means. I have quite a few half-finished stories and first drafts in need of revision. Whether a story is “in progress” mostly comes down to whether I’m spending time thinking about it or actively rearranging the words.
What really matters is stories that are done done, and stories submitted to publishers. So I’m sticking to that for now.
This is also an appropriate time to note that for some people (like myself), there’s an allure to this kind of unnecessary bookkeeping. It can make you feel productive. It can also be an excuse to procrastinate by poking around the outskirts of writing-related activities without getting the core work done.
Goals and Results
Last week, I said that I had three goals.
#1 – The Rewrite
One of my stories had come back from the publisher with a rewrite request. The story centers on two characters who are friends, and it lightly hints at a bit more than that. The problem was that I submitted to a themed issue around relationships. The rewrite request, logically enough, suggested that I put the hinted relationship clearly on the page.
I have to admit, I had a hard time getting started on that rewrite. I’m not sure if it was because I had to dive back into a story that I’ve considered “done” for a while, or some other mental block. However, when I actually sat down to do it, the rewrite was fairly straightforward. It was easy to identify a handful of places that needed to change.
The story is better now. It makes sense: the characters have stronger feelings toward each other, and that only increases the tension when they find themselves at odds. Even if the publisher ends up rejecting the rewritten story, this is a good result. Their suggestion helped me improve it in a way that I wouldn’t have gotten to on my own.
#2 – Critiques
I knew going into the new year that I was going to be doing another year of short stories. While I continued doing some writing in 2025, I had not done any critiques on Critters. So I reset my count around the start of the year, but I had to complete three critiques to get caught up to the point where I could submit my own work to the queue.
I completed my three critiques across two weekly batches—Critters runs on a Wednesday to Wednesday schedule—and then discovered that I only got 2.5 credits. Now half-credits are normal for critiques of stories under 2000 words, as a way to encourage people to look at the longer stories. But the story was well over 2000. So I completed one more just to ensure I was fully caught up, and sent a message to Andrew Burt, who runs the site.
Burt responded very quickly and fixed the issue. So now I’ve got credit to spare. (That guy should be canonized a Saint of the Writing Internet for the time, energy, and money he has dedicated to that site over the years!)
Critters is a standard part of my process when I’m writing short stories. Now that I’m caught up, I’ll be doing roughly a critique per week for the rest of the year, and I always run my stories through Critters in the rewrite process.
#3 – More Revision
My final goal was to find more time for revisions. At the end of 2025 I found myself in the unusual (for me) position of having three short story first drafts written and waiting for edits. I want to start the year by polishing up those stories. If I’m going to hit my goal of 50 submissions this year, I need more stories to submit.
So far, I’m finding the writing spreadsheet helpful for this. My writing goal is an average of 100 words of new writing per day, and 10 minutes of revision time. The spreadsheet tracks that and tells me how ahead or behind I am for the year so far. As of Week 2, I’m about an hour and a half behind on my revisions, but seeing that number does actually work as a motivator, and I’m catching up.
Thanks to that rewrite request and Critters critiques, I found myself naturally in a revising state of mind. However, I didn’t revise one of those 2025 stories. I revised a completely new story. Which brings me to…
Taco Cat
I wrote yet another story. I exacerbated my too-many-first-drafts problem. But it’s okay. I’m pretty happy about it.
I mentioned in Week 1 that I was going to keep a story in progress stashed on my phone, so I could write in little bits of down time throughout the day. The result was that I wrote an 1100-word flash fiction piece over the course of the week. It’s currently titled Taco Cat Employee Manual 7.1, and it’s a strange little story in the form of a hacked fast food employee manual from a cyberpunk dystopian future.
So even though it still feels a little weird to write fiction on my phone, it feels like a resounding success two weeks in. It’s a great alternative to social media or mindless mobile games. I’ve already started a new phone story and put a few hundred words into that one.
Revising on the tiny screen, however, does not feel so good. My revision process involves copying and pasting, making notes and referring back to those notes repeatedly. I end up changing things that can thread throughout a story. None of this works very well on the small screen. I’m going to keep trying to figure out ways to make it work, even if that ends up being something like jotting ideas and notes during the day and doing the brunt of the editing work in front of the computer at night and on the weekends.
Goals for Next Week
Submit a story to Critters
Revise a story—Red Eyes
Do just enough new writing
Critters limits the number of stories that go out to the group each week, to ensure that they all get a decent number of critiques. Usually, it takes a couple of weeks for a story to percolate up through the queue. So this week I want to do some cursory cleanup on one of my stories—probably Taco Cat—and submit it to Critters for additional feedback. It’ll likely go out in early February.
Next, I’m going to work on revisions for a story that went through Critters over a year ago: Red Eyes. Unfortunately, I think these edits are going to be significant and complicated, and it’s a long story.
Finally, I plan to do just enough new writing to keep up with the very modest quota I set for myself in my spreadsheet. The bottleneck in my process is clearly revision at this point, but hey, writing new things is fun.
2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
Jan. 1 – Jan. 9
Due to the new year, I had to incorporate a partial week here at the start. This “week” was nine days.
Stories in Progress – 2
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 3
Yearly Totals
Submissions: 0
Rejections: 1
Acceptances: 0
Starting the Year
It’s always hard to get back into the swing of things after a vacation. Tacking on some New Year’s resolutions doesn’t help. Just when I would prefer to slow-roll into the new year, I’ve got to do all that stuff 2025-me promised? What a drag.
Firstly, I set up a writing spreadsheet. It’s not as detailed as some I’ve tried in the past, which will hopefully make it easier to keep up to date. For now, I’m tracking my daily words and rough minutes of revision time, aiming to write a minimum of about 100 words per day on average. I know that’s not a lot, but it’s a minimum, and at this point I’m just getting in my reps.
To aid in this, I made a plan to always have a short story in progress on my phone. This gives me the opportunity to jot down a few words when I might otherwise waste time. I’d guess writing on a phone sounds awful to most authors, but I’ve found that e-books and audio-books on my phone have greatly increased my capacity for reading. Why not try the same thing with my writing? There are usually a few times during the day when I have a spare few minutes, and the phone is always in my pocket. Besides, it’s not too onerous when I’m only jotting down a hundred words at a time.
Secondly, I reset my critique ratio on Critters. For those who aren’t familiar, Critters has a system that requires submitting about three critiques a month to be allowed to submit your own stories for critique. I haven’t done any critiques for the better part of a year, so I requested a reset. This wipes out my deeply negative ratio, putting my count at only -1. I plan to submit a couple critiques this upcoming week so I can put a story written in 2025 into the queue for feedback.
Submissions and Responses
I have a few submissions still out from late 2025. One of those came back this week as the first form rejection of 2026. Nothing too exciting there.
I also got something of a soft rejection. I had submitted a story with admittedly very light romance elements to a themed contest, and they responded with the suggestion that I resubmit with the relationship angle more front-and-center. The wording was ambiguous as to whether that was just politeness or significant interest, but I’ll likely give it a shot and resend.
Goals for Next Week
My to-do list is already longer than I’d like, and I’m working on being realistic about the time I have and what I can get done. It’s a balancing act between self-honesty and pushing myself to be a little more productive.
Top of the list is that story rewrite, since that’s the most time-sensitive. Next is catching up on critiques, as that will facilitate revisions. Getting “finished” stories polished is my fastest track to having more to submit, and that’s key if I want to meet my goals for the year. Lastly, I’d like to work on ways to fit more revision time into my week. This might mean putting some new story writing time on the back-burner, so I’m not simply wracking up more and more stories that aren’t ready for submission.
In 2026, I’m once again focusing on short stories, so this seems like a perfect time to revive a series of six posts I did in 2024, all focused on short stories.
In this series, I cover why short stories are important to read and write, how they’re generally categorized by publishers, and how to revise and submit for publication. Finally, I wrapped it all up with a comparison of the two most popular websites for tracking your submissions: Duotrope and Submission Grinder.
My “State of the Blog” posts are something I’ve been doing since the start of Words Deferred. Back when I was posting more frequently, I’d write these every six months. In 2024, I decided to switch to a yearly cadence—and now I dropped the ball and I’m two months late.
Noteworthy numbers in the past year include the all-time view count hitting 20,000, and highest daily views hitting 213.
The 2024 Slump
Words Deferred has never been “big,” but the stats showed steady growth from 2020-2023. During that first couple years I posted quite a lot, aided by projects like Razor Mountain and journaling through NaNoWriMo, where my fiction writing time and blogging were tightly intertwined. I was also trying a lot of different ideas, still figuring out what exactly I wanted this website to be.
In 2024, I embarked on my Year of Short Stories, where I focused on writing, editing, and submitting short stories. That was a great experience, radically increasing my comfort level with all aspects of writing and submitting work, and I also got some of my work published, which is nice.
That project set me up for one weekly post documenting my progress and submissions. My other posts were less frequent, and ultimately the blog was quieter than previous years. The Year of Short Stories was a project that took most of my writing time and energy, and since I was planning to submit the stories I was writing, I couldn’t use those as content. I also suspect that my weekly updates were less likely to draw in readers from week to week in the same way that something like Razor Mountain’s ongoing story might.
Whatever factors contributed, 2024 was the first year since the start of the blog where I saw the metrics go down—a roughly 30% drop from 2023. I generally try not to pay too much attention to the numbers (outside of these retrospective posts), but I’ll admit that a drop like that is a little disheartening. It begs the question, “have I already peaked?” It’s a lot easier to ignore the relatively low view counts when they’re at least going up every year.
2025: The Year of…Nothing in Particular?
As 2025 rolled around, I found myself once again at the crossroads where I’d finished another writing/blogging project, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. Over the years, I’ve learned that I work most effectively when I have some big project like this to focus on. I think it also makes for good bloggery when there’s a big project to talk about week after week. Documenting those writing projects helps me get through them, and hopefully provides something interesting to post. When I don’t have a long-term focus, I tend to flail around and procrastinate.
Going into this year, I was burned out on short stories. For lack of a better idea, I decided to try tackling a different project each month. What were those projects going to be? I didn’t really know.
For January, I picked an easy one: write a page per day. No problem. I’ve probably done ten NaNoWriMos, at least half of them successful, and this was a much easier version of that. I finished first drafts of two short stories, and even wrote some goofy fan-fiction for a game I was playing at the time, something I’ve never done before.
Then February hit, and I stalled out hard. I had several completed drafts sitting around, and I’d been struggling to find the motivation to revise them. I figured that would be a good goal, but I never really picked out a particular metric to hold myself to.
Then I was sick for a few days. The kids were sick for a few days. School activities started and I ended up being a mentor/coach. We had some family medical issues. Before I knew it, my plans were long-abandoned. I ended up having more than one month in 2025 where I didn’t post anything, and I wasn’t writing much outside the blog either.
It’s never been hard for me to find reasons not to write—hence the name of the site—but the first half of 2025 was chock full of them. Without a big, clear, overarching project to keep me going, I dropped off the map for a while.
Second Wind
Looking back, I didn’t really get my feet under me, writing-wise, until summer. The kids finished school for the year, activities were over, and the medical issues were mostly resolved.
I spiffed up the blog layout ever so slightly, added Recommendations and Support Me pages, and took stock of my recurring post formats. Now that I’m into year five of Words Deferred, I’ve found a few formats that I enjoy writing and can keep coming back to:
The articles I most enjoy writing are still those that dig into the art and craft of writing, from brainstorming to revision to publishing trends. And while I enjoy having a big project to work on throughout the year, I found that I can lean on these recurring series to have something interesting to write about at least once a week, and keep my pen to the paper.
Oddly enough, my number of posts published in 2025 will probably work out similarly to 2024, maybe even a little less, thanks to how little I was writing through June. However, my views have been rising steadily ever since then, and I’m already getting way more eyeballs than 2024. Will I hit beat the 2023 peak? I don’t think so, but it’s looking more possible.
SEO for Dummies
Are there some sort of lessons to be learned about search engines and keywords and maximizing internet points in all this? Probably. The only reason I noticed my views were going up again was because WordPress sent me a little notice to say “Hey, we were surprised to see some people are reading what you wrote.” So I looked at the “Insights” tab on my dashboard, and that only confused me more.
The only app I automatically share posts on is Bluesky. In previous years, I used to share on TwiXter, back before the bots and assholes took over and they shut down the socialist blog-posting APIs in favor of their glorious, free-market, All-American blue checkmarks. So of course it makes sense that WordPress tells me I got about 6,000 shares each on Facebook, X, Reddit and Tumblr, where I never post anything.
I don’t know how this is possible. If you’re sharing my posts on Facebook and Tumblr, please reach out and clear this up for me.
And what exactly is a “share?” Clearly not the same as a “view.” Maybe a “glance?” But then, when people read my articles through the email subscription, that doesn’t count as a view either. Google also sends me monthly search statistics that appear to wildly overestimate just how much traffic they’re sending my way. They use the even more vague term “impressions.” I can only assume an “impression” according to Google means that my website was on page 10 of the search results when someone skimmed the AI overview.
I checked the WP and Google search insights. I seem to be coming up in roughly the same searches as I have been for years. I found out that I’m cited in the Wikipedia article for “Mystery Box.” That’s kind of fun, and apparently counted for 3 whole clicks. Who is clicking that? ChatGPT helpfully sent seven people my way. Why? Maybe they asked it why people hate LOST so much.
In conclusion, the internet is a unfathomable beast. It giveth and it taketh away. None can know its true heart, and those who claim to do so are false prophets.
What’s Next?
I’m itching for another big project. But when I say “big,” that might just mean The Year of Even More Short Stories. Whatever it is, it’ll be intermingled with the usual things, the Read Reports and Story Idea Vaults and random game and TTRPG musings, and maybe even another poem.
Let’s all just try to make it to the end of the year, and then we’ll see where 2026 takes us.
Words Deferred 