Accepted, full member of SFWA!

I’m now a full member of SFWA! I was expecting the approval to take longer–I didn’t get the forms submitted until Jan 1 and got the acceptance late Jan 4.

When I started trying to get short stories accepted, all the writers I interacted with marked their success by SFWA-qualifying status (whether they ended up joining or not). The per-word rate had (relatively?) recently gone up to 5 cents/word, and for several years I had as one of my yearly goals to get one SFWA-qualifying sale. Then I did, and my goal became to get two more so I could join. I had several at pro-paying markets–Penumbra was trying to jump through the hoops to get qualified, and that would have vaulted me easily into acceptance–but there were other criteria for a market to be approved, and none of them met those criteria at the time.

By the time I had three pro sales, I realized there was another requirement (whether it was new or something I’d missed)–your word count for those pro sales had to total a minimum of 10,000. One DSF flash story, and fairly short shorts to Strange Horizons and Diabolical Plots did not get me to 10k.

So a couple more DSF stories and another Diabolical Plots story over the next couple of years, and I guessed I must have the 10k minimum met, but then I read the requirements and saw another part (new? something I’d missed?)–there was a minimum payment per story as well, one that would have eliminated some of my DSF stories. If I read it right. I didn’t have it in me to go back and try to figure out whether I still qualified or not. So I just put it out of mind, discovered Codex and got accepted there, anyway, and plugged away.

Then in 2021, a third Diablolical Plots acceptance definitely put me over the top. I decided that once I got the payment for that, I’d apply. Shortly after, an acceptance at the newly-qualifying Zooscape was just an added insurance on top. It came out at the end of 2021, but since I’d already decided to wait for the Diabolical Plots payment to come through, I didn’t do anything right away.

And then…SFWA changed its requirements again. Entirely. This time to a much easier threshold for me. I just had to go through and gather the receipts. Which, you know, took a year to gear myself up to make an effort on (and less than an hour once I decided to actually tackle it).

So I’ve finally achieved the New Year’s goal I put on so many of my (formal/informal) yearly goals. Maybe I can just declare this year’s goals met as well, just as a bonus freebie…