Tuesday 7 September 2010

Simon Bestwick's Statistics

My friend Simon Bestwick’s latest blog entry (click here to read it for yourself) is an interesting little essay about him sorting through old stories to hopefully put together a new collection (which’d be very nice). The biggest revelation was that he has written over 190 short stories.

Bloody hell! He has a couple of years publishing headstart on me but even so, my credits pale against his. I checked through my records today and these are the stats:

Including non-genre, I have written 67 short stories.

Of those (including non-genre), I have seen 54 of those published (a not at all bad 81% success rate).

Of the unaccounted for, 4 of those are at a really odd length (in fact, I now realise they’re novelettes) and two are currently ‘circulating’.

Simon talks about the heyday of the British small press and I share the same views - in fact, at the weekend, I found a stash of ‘Sackcloth & Ashes’ and it was very interesting looking through the credits for each issue. I shared space with some very good writers, a lot of whom - I’m pleased to say - are still publishing today. There are many others, of course, whose names I haven’t seen in ten years - what happened to them, do you think? Did they just stop writing, or move into a different genre?

Anyway, between Simon and Gary McMahon - whose work rate should be an example to us all - I feel like a real slouch. But hopefully not for long because, this morning, I started the plan/synopsis for the lost film novella.

I’ll keep you posted as to progress.

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