2025 Writing Goals Bingo
This post is a little late in the month, but I thought I’d share my writing goals for the coming year, which are admittedly ambitious, and then show you a fun way to track writing goals in general. The main thrust of those goals is putting a greater emphasis on both writing and submitting short stories. This doesn’t mean I’ll stop working on or querying long-form fiction, but in the last couple of years, that’s been almost my entire focus (along with a lot of freelance work), and I want to get back to what is, honestly, my first literary love. So what does a greater emphasis on short stories look like? Let me show you!
As I said, my goals are ambitious, so let me outline them here along with a brief explanation for each.
- Write one new story per week. I know what you’re thinking. Sounds nuts, right? Well, it is ambitious, but I’ve got a about 1,500 story seeds just chilling on my hard drive in the form of microfiction, not to mention a dozen stories I’ve started but yet to finish (yeah, I’m counting those), so all the ingredients for this bonkers literary confection are there. Not to mention, I already participate in a bi-weekly flash-fiction writing exercise, which’ll net me an easy 20 stories. I’m gonna write a lot of flash, like I always do, but I want to concentrate on longer pieces as well. So far, I’m doing pretty well, and I’ve managed four stories in four weeks. Three of them were full-fledged short stories, with word counts of 3,500, 7,200, and 5,200. The fourth is a flash piece, but I feel pretty damn good about banging out 17,000 words of new stories in my first month. Two of the new ones are already out on submission, too, which brings me to my next goal.
- Send 150 story submissions. Another ambitious goal, but not quite as ambitious as 52 new stories. I have, in the past, submitted as many as 119 subs in a single year, so this isn’t a gigantic stretch, especially if I throw 50+ new stories into the mix. I do plan to sim-sub more to pump those numbers up a little, but since I’m a bit of a Boy Scout when it comes to following submission guidelines, I’m gonna have to rely more on just having a fuck-ton of new stories to submit. This works out to about 14 submissions a month. So far, in January I’ve sent ten, but I’m gonna do another round of subs this weekend that should put me over the hump.
- Get 24 acceptances. Now we’re getting into goals that are not completely within my control. My record for acceptances in a single year is 19, and an increase to 24 is certainly possible, especially if I can hit my submissions goal. My overall acceptance percentage is about 14%, so if I send 150 submissions, I’d end up with 21 acceptances (theoretically). That means I’m gonna need to hit a 16% acceptance rate for the year. This also isn’t as wild as it might seem. The year I send those 119 submissions, I did indeed achieve a 16% acceptance rate, and I’ve been as high as 21% in a year. Again, much of this is out of my hands, but I can always improve things like submission targeting to increase my chances a bit. All these things considered, I need to get two acceptances per month. I’ve got one for January so far, but this month I’m kind of laying the ground work for what will hopefully be a productive spring and summer.
- Make 12 pro sales. Another goal that’s largely out of my hands, but doable, I think. There are a handful of markets that pay pro rates that I generally do well with, so I might be able to net as many as half a dozen pro sales from them. That still means I’m gonna need to crack some new markets, too. Luckily, I’ve already done that, and my first sale of the year was to a big pro market I’ve never published with before, so I’m off to a good start.
- Get 100 rejections. If I hit my submission goal, this one is all but guaranteed, as more than 50 acceptances is, well, to put it bluntly, ridiculous. If I hit that aforementioned 16% acceptance rate, then I’m looking at around 126 rejections.
Okay, so there are my goals, and where and why I’ve set them, but how am I gonna track them? That’s the fun part. I’m gonna play Writing Goal Bingo! Check it out.
Yep, there are all my goals broken down into 25 incremental steps, then mixed up so I can play a silly game with my ambitions. What I plan to do is update you every month on my progress and hopefully start filling in squares on the bingo card. Again, I know these goals are VERY ambitious, but I figure even if I only get halfway there, it’s still a pretty good year.
A quick shout out to Lex Chamberlin, one of my fellow Radon Journal authors, who came up with the writing goals bingo card in the first place and shared it with all of us on the Radon Discord server. I have yoinked it for my own uses with their permission. 🙂
So there you have it; my writing goals for 2025. What are your writing goals for the year? Tell me about in the comments, and if you want to play along, go ahead create your own writing goal bingo card. If you don’t have any graphic design skillz, don’t worry. I used an easy-peasy free bingo card generator you can find right here.
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Challenges are the great motivator. Go big or go home. I look forward to hearing how your year goes. My personal goals for 2025 are to self publish my second short story collection and to incorporate the critiques of my critique group into the three middle grade manuscripts that are collected dust on my hard drive, so those can continue moving towards being published.