End of the Year Reading and Writing Report

December 2022 Newsletter

Photo by Kenta Kikuchi on Unsplash

Hello! First up, a bit of housekeeping, I am going to make some (slight) changes to the publication schedule of this newsletter in the new year. I will keep these monthly newsletters that you have grown to know (and hopefully love), but I’m going to add in some additional posts from time to time — (longer humor writer Q&As, book and freelance writing content, and perhaps some subscriber discussion threads). This means I will potentially be emailing you 1-2 times a month (maybe 3 if I somehow find myself with tons of time but honestly I don’t see that happening much!)

I’ve realized it’s probably better to break some content up into two emails rather than one super long one and that there may be readers who are more or less interested in some content I’m covering. Substack allows you to customize what emails you will receive so if you only want this monthly email you can unsubscribe from other sections here.

In any event, here is one recent short humor piece that made me laugh because I distinctly remember hating and yet fearing those bad luck chain letters that made the rounds in junior high.

Now onto the real business this month, which is the end-of-the-year wrap-up.

Book wrap-up

Looking for a funny book gift for someone on your list? Might I suggest buying books for one of the authors I’ve talked to for the newsletter? You can find ideas here.

Also, I put together a list of funny books my elementary-aged kids have liked here. Any would make good gifts for the kids in your life.

I am currently holding steady at having read 31 books for the year and am currently in the middle of a few so that number will probably bump a bit, but who is counting? (Besides me).

I am not a super fast reader and so I set a goal of 30 books for the year (low expectations for the win!). Here is the full list of my reads although I honestly may have missed some and am not including ones I’ve read to my kids (we are currently working our way through the School for Good and Evil Series), but those are most of them. Some quick recs:

• If you are looking for a light escapist read: Nora Goes Off Script was my favorite one this year. It’s about a divorced romance channel writer’s relationship with a famous actor who acts in the movie version of her script. I am a sucker for a writer character and I wish I had her writing tea house!

• If you are looking for a celebrity memoir: Dave Grohl’s Storyteller was my favorite. This offered an interesting backstory about his life and rise to fame and I was in high school during Nirvana’s heydey, so I found his description of that time interesting.

• If you are looking for humor writing tips: Poking a Dead Frog was my favorite book on the subject that I read this year. It interviews humor writers and has a lot of interesting insights into the process and has things like an example of a successful packet that TV comedy writers may find helpful.

Writing wrap-up

For the past several years I’ve been doing a wrap-up of my writing submissions and had previously posted them on Medium (you can find last year’s here).

• This year it looks like a sent a total of 58 pitches/submissions, I’m using the term pretty broadly to include new freelance pitches/submissions, reprint pitches, award submissions, and things like podcast pitches. Some of these were also pitching the same piece or idea to more than one place so I didn’t write this many unique pieces or ideas.

• Of those, it looks like I got 11 yes’s. I’ve said this in the past, but this is really subjective because I could probably tweak the number up or down depending on how over my head I was reaching with markets. A good chunk of the rejections (which I am also including counting “non-responses” as) this year were for submitting some reprints to regional parenting magazines. I have some writer friends who are very successful at this and so I tried it a bit but my motivation to try it more or stay on top of it is currently not very high.

• Popular humor site stats. I think I’m most curious about other humor writer submission stats for McSweeney’s and Shouts so I can report mine to you. I submitted 4 times to McSweeney’s and got 3 rejections (and am waiting on a response for a fourth submission) and I submitted 3 times to Shouts (and got 2 rejections and 1 acceptance) I have definitely had years where I have submitted/been rejected much more too.

• I actually feel like I slowed way down on submitting during the latter part of the year and I think that’s true despite the numbers showing me submitting more than I did last year. But I did not submit a whole lot of shiny new pieces. I’ve definitely been feeling some burnout at times and one way I’ve been trying to manage it is by really limiting the work I do on nights and weekends. Between my teaching day job and parenting, this doesn’t leave a whole lot of hours in the day for other writing, but I also think it’s good to have some of these slower times (shout out to the book Wintering, which I finished early in 2022 that touches on this).

Going into next year I’m looking at thinking about some longer projects and I find it hard to switch very much between shorter and longer pieces because I tend to get too many ideas for short humor pieces and then they take over my mind. But I’ll probably aim to do a mix of both because I can not seem to stop myself from writing short humor and I’ve got a list of essay ideas I’m hoping to work on as time/interest allows too.

That said, for my next bonus newsletter I’m planning to focus on an example successful pitch letter as that is what the people voted for when I last asked (no, I have not forgotten!). But throwing out one more poll to see what is of most interest for the first installment of the pitch example (if they are useful, I can do more).

Other news from me:

• My book was quoted in this piece on Yahoo Parenting by Gail Cornwall and I think her experience is really interesting. I was definitely introverted prior to becoming a parent but can see the need for alone time increasing as people become parents.

• I wrote this Hallmark holiday movie piece for McSweeney’s a few years ago and they re-share it every time this year. That is one thing that is nice about an evergreen seasonal humor piece — it can get a longer life. Of course, even knowing this I sometimes still write things with a short shelf life.

That’s it for me this month. What were some of your favorite funny books or TV shows of the year? I may actually have time to do some more reading/watching in the next few weeks so am open to ideas.