2024 Annual Wrap-Up Post

Somehow, 2024 is over, so here’s my retrospective for the year. If you’re looking for my 2024 Awards Eligibility Post (AKA, everything I wrote or translated that was published in 2024), you can find it here!

This post is broken into the following sections:

• Annual Statistics
• My Progress
• In Praise of Zine Fests
• My Struggles
• In Retrospect: My Goals for 2024
• Looking Ahead: My Goals for 2025

Annual Statistics

In 2024, according to The Grinder, I:

• made 191 submissions (vs. 202 in 2023)
• received 8 acceptances (vs. 10 in 2023)
• received 146 form rejections (vs. 141 in 2023)
• received 25 personal rejections (vs. 26 in 2023)
• ended the year with 1 hold notification

As in 2023, about 70% of the pieces I’ve been shopping around are translations. I’m pretty happy about the ratio of translated vs. my own pieces that I’m shopping around, because I sold several translations this year and it means I’ve done a lot of work on new ones!

My progress

I’m really bad at keeping track of when I write stories, but it looks like I wrote 8 or 9 new short stories this calendar year, a bunch of new poems, and several new speculative fiction translations. (I thought I hadn’t written very much this year, but I was wrong! 😅)

I’m also about 1/3 of the way through translating a humorous book from the 1800s — it’s a passion project, but I’m hoping there’s a publisher out there somewhere who might be interested in picking it up. My research indicates that has never been published in English before (some parts of it are quite tricky, so I completely understand why!).

Speaking of stories that have never been published in English before… my translation of Argentine author Silvina Palmiero’s cozy fantasy “The Word Thief” was recently published in OTHER: the 2024 speculative fiction anthology from Bannister Press! The team at Revista Mordedor, the Uruguayan magazine that originally published Silvina’s story in Spanish, even gave my translation work a very kind shout-out (in Spanish)!
(Since I mentioned one translation published in 2024, I would be remiss if I neglected to mention the others: “SEVEN” by Gisela Lupiañez in Dark Dead Things #3,
“An Interview with the Heroine of the Marianas” by David Mancera in Cosmorama, and
“The Train” by Isis Aquino in Extrasensory Overload: An anthology of speculative excess.)

This year, I got very into making zines, and I have a couple new illustrated zines in the works. I’ve made several zines and chapbooks (some are even illustrated!), and for the first time, I received a fan-mail from someone who stumbled across one of my zines for sale in a local bookstore! 😀

In Praise of Zine Fests

(This section was originally intended to be its own blog post, but I drafted this much back in April and never finished it… so here you go!)

I love how simultaneously overwhelming, welcoming, and inspiring zine fests are. I love the creative energy, I love the community. I love the diversity, the boldness, the sass. Walking into a zine fest feels like diving river on a hot day, like entering a magical realm where everyone is unique, curious about the world, and free to express themselves however they feel. And the zines themselves! They’re overflowing with so many different ideas, so many creative concepts, so many distinct voices coming together to celebrate creativity—be it through comics, art, stories, chapbooks, postcards, a simple sheet of printer paper, anything! Zine fests rock, they’re usually free to attend, and sometimes they’ll even have zine swaps or a freebie box of zines creators donate!

Zines (and zine fests!) are awesome and you should love them, too!

My struggles

2024 has not been kind to me in many ways, and I wanted to (briefly) share some of the health-related things I’ve been dealing with.

I’ve had migraines since middle school, but they’ve gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. Now, I sometimes get hemiplegic migraines, which mimic strokes. They are terrifying to experience when you’ve never had one before, but I’m getting used to them and I (so far) have had the presence of mind to tell the people around me when I feel one coming on.

I needed surgery part-way through the year for an unrelated condition. Thankfully, the surgery went well and my recovery has also gone well.

Lastly: Some of you know I’ve had chronic pain issues for a long time—I’ve been recently diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that explains at least some of the issues I’ve been having. TBD whether it’s behind all of my pain, or if it’s just a piece in a larger puzzle. I’m still in the process of figuring out treatment options, and my energy and pain levels vary wildly. (On the bad days, this whole situation very much reminds me of Mr. Bones’s Wild Ride.) I’m hoping there’s a magic pill that will help me manage my condition(s?) better so I can get back to normal.

In Retrospect: My Goals for 2024

• [COMPLETE] Blog more often. (I technically blogged one or two posts more in 2024 than I did in 2023!)
  
• [INCOMPLETE] Make at least 200 submissions. (Though usually attainable for me, the health setbacks really threw me off.)
  
• [???] Revise at least 5 more of my own short stories. (I realize as I type this that I never established a tracking method for *when* I revise my stories… so I think I completed this goal? But I’m not confident…)
  
• [INCOMPLETE] Revise the novel! (I didn’t revise it, but I *did* reread it and work on edits. There’s a lot of work to do still before I’ll be ready to begin querying it.)
  
• [COMPLETE] Write 3 more stories!
  
• [COMPLETE] Write more poems! (I wrote a lot of them, and some even got published! Erasure poems were my favorite style this year.)
  
• [COMPLETE] Attend 1 spec-fic convention per quarter. (I was an invited guest to RavenCon, but had to drop out because I got sick. I paneled at Balticon, the 2024 SFWA Nebula Conference, and Flights of Foundry, then attended SPX and HispaCon!)
  
• [COMPLETE] Work on growing my translation & editing business, and keep helping writers! (Business has been great this year! Four of my translations got published, another is coming out in January, and I’ve been working with several new clients! :D)

Looking Ahead: My Goals for 2025

• Make at least 200 submissions.
  
• Revise (and begin submitting) at least 3 of my own short stories.
  
• Continue revising the novel!
  
• Translate over 14,000 words of short speculative fiction! (I’m already nearly at 100,000 words of short spec-fic stories translated!)
  
• Write 5 more short stories!
  
• Write more poems!
  
• Attend an average of 1 spec-fic convention per quarter.
  
• Table at at least one event where creators sell their works.
  
• Set up an online store where I can sell my zines, art, and other creations!

THANK YOU!!!

THANK YOU to my family, friends, and colleagues who’ve been there for me this year through the ups and downs. Your patience and the grace you’ve given me truly mean the world.

THANK YOU to my readers, colleagues, editors, and fans who’ve supported my creative work in 2024! A special shout-out to those who’ve spread the word about (or published!) my speculative fiction translations—it truly is a dream to bring Spanish-language stories I love to English-speaking audiences!

As we enter 2025, please don’t forget to seize what joy you can throughout the year!