Why Rolling Daily Subs Are Ending

To tell you this, it’s necessary to start with why I was doing daily subs in the first place. Last year was a dark time for a lot of people. I personally had my best year, most acceptances, most publications.

A damn fine year as a writer.

However, I still felt there was room to grow, and challenge myself. I asked my Twitter followers:- “How hard would it be to sub a story, every day for a year?” This turned into the Submission Challenge, the event where I sub at least 1 story every day for a month to a paying market. Yet that original challenge still nagged at me, from the back of my mind.

Could I sub a story every day for a year?

So on September 1st 2020, I started out on what I hoped would be the most challenging 365 days of my life as a writer so far. To submit at least 1 story every day for an entire year to a paying market. I had no clue how possible it was, if there’d even BE markets open on days like Christmas or New Years Eve & New Years Day.

I just started.

And it worked. At first. Until January 4th 2021. When my laptop decided it absolutely had to run the Windows 10 end of life update. I left the thing running for hours but it bricked my operating system, could not boot again and I no longer had the ability to upload stories and the 365 day challenge was effectively over and failed.

125 days, if anyone wanted to know. 4.1064 months or 17.8571 weeks. Thanks, Google.

Anyway, it took me 4 days to get a new PC due to lockdown, but I got back online January 8th 2021 and I’ve been submitting every day since. As of today (20th June 2021) that’s 163 days. Just short of half a year (182.5 days).

This Saturday (26th June 2021) is the 1st day I don’t have a market listed on my wallplanner, so that feels like as good a day as any to end the rolling daily subs. It’s been difficult to maintain, not impossible but incredibly tough both physically & mentally to stay on top of, with the constant hunt to find places to sub to every day.

In total, I’ll have subbed for 265 days, only 100 short of the full year.

I’ll tell you this:- It’s more than possible to sub a story to a paying market every day for a year. This guy will not be achieving that though. I need a short break before the next September Submission Challenge, which will also be the event’s 2nd birthday!

I think 265 days of subs with only 4 days break due to computer issues is more than enough for any one.

I won’t be trying this again. I’ve more than proved my point. If the laptop hadn’t bricked, I could have done it.