Category: Writer’s Life

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When I started writing fiction, I was in the fifth grade. My friends and I were obsessed with an Americanized anime called Robotech that was broadcast on a local UHF station after school. It became kind of like our soap opera and we watched endless hours of VHS recorded episodes before discovering a series of novelizations, which we also devoured. Somewhere in there, three of us decided we were going to write our own robots-vs-aliens stories and we worked for weeks in college ruled notebooks, crafting barely paraphrased prose that we would trade back and forth with each other for notes and critiques.

We quickly abandoned those stories, but I never quite stopped trying to find my way into a story I wanted to tell in long-form prose. In junior high school I tinkered with various speculative fiction genre adaptations, usually abandoning them the second someone pointed out which primary influence I had been inspired by. Then in high school I managed to draft (by hand, naturally) at least 2/3rds of a vampire-erotica novel probably mostly influenced by Anne Rice and hopefully lost to the dustbin of history (and the literal dustbin, because I don’t think anyone has ever asked for horny 90s teenage boy Lestat fanfic even once). I abandoned a dozen other novels after a chapter or two through my early twenties but I did settle on a Pahlaniuk-esque murder mystery/tragedy sometime in the mid aughts that was actively terrible but at least ended up being complete, in that I got to the point where I wrote “THE END” on a final (unsatisfying) page.

I got a bit distracted around the end of that decade when my wife and I decided to start raising a family, and it wasn’t until the early 2010s that I finally decided to pull my latent literary aspirations out into the light of day a little. The story I’ve told a zillion times is that I started feeling like a hypocrite in encouraging my daughter to reach for her dreams when I had never once done anything of the sort. So I started writing some more with the intent to actually share the stories with more than just my closest inner circle. Maybe, I thought, I’d even see about getting some published. It took a little while to get off the ground but then in 2011 I heard about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and decided to take the challenge. I completed the 50K word requirement, and it felt like a pretty big deal.

I skipped NaNoWriMo the following year to focus on revisions for a weird, alt-religious magical realism novel I had started mid-year. But I went back to NaNoWriMo in 2013 and managed to complete it for several years in a row.

The success of that first NaNoWriMo really set the tone for those next few years, energizing me with confidence that I could meet writing goals if I applied myself to the discipline. Aside from getting me to the point where I could complete a second trunk novel in 2012, they established a baseline for my productivity and helped me find part of my voice and develop the techniques I would use to get organized, complete projects, and adapt to challenges. I learned a lot each time I took on and completed the annual challenge and felt they helped to anchor my short fiction work and pursuits of publication the rest of the year. I looked forward each time to starting something new and seeing where I ended up.

Then in 2016, I tried again, but I failed. I missed the 50K word mark by less than 4,000 words. I didn’t try again the next year, or the year after that. I let this website languish, at one point the software broke and it began serving nothing but error pages and I couldn’t even be bothered to fix it.

I don’t recall when I made the connection that I was struggling with writer’s block and impostor syndrome. And look, this whole story is an old and tired tale of middling use to even fellow authors. I’m convinced that writer’s block is fundamentally a collapse of confidence. For an endeavor that is inherently conceited (“ladies and gentlebeings, lo! My WORDS. Marvel at them! Be intrigued by them; be entertained by them; revel in the majesty of my ideas and imagination!”), losing that confidence is a foundational collapse. But it’s also a fairly common collapse, and one might argue that a few clumsy would-be authors with crises of faith in their own questionable abilities slinking back into the silence is a necessary part of the culling process we call publishing.

But either way, at some point I recognized that I wasn’t doing it anymore. I wasn’t writing, I wasn’t submitting, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to be a professional author any longer. The whys behind all of that, though, were complicated and messy. Difficult to distinguish from each other, perhaps because they were all wrapped up together, inextricably. For the record, here is an incomplete list of factors that played a part in me putting down my aspirations of becoming a published author, in no particular order:

  • Changes at work. Around this time I got promoted at my job, which put me back on an on-call rotation that sucked up some previously free time and demanded more of my mental energy.
  • Life balance. Shortly before I hung up my word processor, I had been spending more time working on my 200 CCs project as an editor and self-publisher than working on writing original fiction. I liked the work, particularly the way it encouraged me to use my creative energies across several different disciplines (reading submissions, collaborating with authors through editing, writing Editor’s columns, typesetting the interiors, graphic/visual design/photography for the website posts and digital print covers, etc). But it was a huge resource drain with a lot of self-imposed deadlines and by the time I curated the print anthology for year one, I was burnt out.
  • The 2016 elections. It sounds kind of silly to me now, looking back with the clarity of hindsight, but the election of a genuinely stupid and mean-spirited pseudo-rich guy with zero qualifications to the most important job in the country had a profound impact on me. For one thing, the election taking place the first week of November torpedoed my effort to complete NaNoWriMo that year. Plus, psychologically, the disappointment I had in many of my fellow citizens for falling for his brand of bigoted populism against their own better interests eroded a lot of faith I had in the will of the people. There was institutional disappointment as well given that I naively believed the system was designed in such a way to prevent such travesties from taking place and that turned out to be pure fantasy. The upending of a lot of my low-level notions about society and governance poisoned a lot of my imaginary conceits as well, to the point where the ideas necessary for nonfiction became muddled and the imagination required for crafting fiction became scrambled.
  • #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, in a roundabout way. Unsurprisingly, as a sexual predator weaseled his way toward the highest office in my country, a correlated pushback began which cast some much welcome light on some of the patterns of behavior that enabled shitty (mostly white) men to do their shitty things. Now, I try extremely hard to be the opposite of a shitty white guy. I can’t help being a guy or being white, and I’m lamentably human which means I’m bound to be shitty from time to time. But it’s very important to me that being awful never becomes part of the core of my being. I listened to a lot of people inside the #MeToo movement and later in similar movements such as BLM which, at their hearts, seemed to be about re-framing conversations to put people’s experiences at the center who hadn’t been centered like that before. I very much liked what those efforts did to elevate historically sidelined points of view but it made me ask a lot of hard questions about my own perspective. Did the world really need one more semi-affluent white penis-bearer’s ideas and opinions floating around out there? Wouldn’t publishing be better if I stepped back and let some minority voices take my spot instead? (The fact that I assumed I had “a spot” in the first place possibly being clear supporting evidence of this thesis.)
  • Depression. There’s not much to say here, but I’ve probably been suffering from undiagnosed mild depression off and on for much longer than I was on a writing hiatus, but around 2017 it got noticeably worse. Some or all of these other factors certainly played a role and depression has a nasty way of feeding itself and becoming a downward spiral.
  • Writer’s block. Possibly the least descriptively named ailment among those who endeavor to create, writer’s block makes it sound like those who have it cannot produce new work. That has not been my experience with it. As I said above, fundamentally being blocked is lacking the necessary confidence in your output to do anything with it besides bemoan its inadequacy. That doesn’t mean you can’t create, it’s just that the effort to do so feels wasted because the output does not meet your own self-imposed standards. Sometimes, as in my case, if this goes on long enough you might stop making that effort. Which I guess technically could be indistinguishable from being incapable of producing anything, but it feels important to draw the distinction that in most cases you could, it’s just that if you did it wouldn’t matter because you’d self-reject it anyway. For me, writer’s block grew out of a lot of the above factors: “I don’t have ample time to make this good; I don’t understand the world anymore; whatever I have to say could be said better and should be said instead by someone else; I don’t have much value to begin with, why should my writing?” And suddenly everything I write is trash so might as well just give it up and go back to playing video games.
  • General frustration with my progress, and recognition that my aspiration was possibly untenable. This one is stupid and embarrassing but real so I’ll list it anyway. When I started making a concerted effort to not just write fiction but get it published as well, I sat down and mapped out a ten-year plan with the goal of having a novel published. My thought at the time was that I would focus on short fiction early on, which I would use to hone my writing skills and give myself the chance to tinker with ideas and voices and perhaps make a small name for myself in certain genre circles before making my triumphant debut as a novelist. I started this around 2011, so I should have given myself until 2021 to see this plan come to fruition. But around 2017 I realized I was way past the halfway mark and had yet to even crack a professional-rate paying short fiction market. I mean, I came fairly close with Shock Totem publishing The Henson Curse (it wasn’t technically pro rates, but the pay was quite high for a semi-pro market), but the ones I felt would lend me legitimacy like Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Apex, etc weren’t biting at all. This realization that a mini-goal I hadn’t even included as part of my original roadmap was proving elusive shattered whatever confidence I may have had left over. On top of that, I took my fresh disillusionment on a whirlwind tour of “hard truth” exposĂ©s about incomes and expectations for professional authors and had to recognize that I was probably more likely to win the lottery I never play than I was to become one of the teeny, tiny handful of writers who can comfortably support an entire family with their novel-writing. At best I was probably facing a constant struggle either to manage two full-time careers or to supplement a novel-writing career with a bunch of side hustles just to keep going.

With all of this bearing down on me, I did what comes exceedingly natural to me: I buckled. Gave up. Went back to playing video games and goofing off with my kids. And maybe that could have—or should have—been the end of it. I gave it the ol’ college try, did my best, got a few stories out into the world so I had at least a little to show for it, but all’s well that ends well (or well enough), amirite?

I guess since you’re reading this on a resuscitated writing website you kind of know the answer to that already. Because eventually the fact that I had to say I “used to be” a writer started to kind of get annoying. Folks who had been super supportive during my stint publishing to small indie markets would occasionally ask, “gotten anything new published?” Their small, sad headshakes when I had to confess, no, I hadn’t, carried volumes of their own. And there were a few diversions along the way that kept me from feeling like I had ever totally closed the door on the notion. A slow-to-respond magazine picked up one of my later submissions before I stopped sending work out and published it in 2019. A couple of supportive publishers pressed a few of my stories out into end-of-year anthologies or followed up with some sort of encouragement. And, despite feeling like I wouldn’t ever be able to produce anything of marketable value, I couldn’t seem to quite keep myself from dusting off the occasional manuscript or story draft now and then.

Usually those forays ended up in frustration or disgust, but I kept coming back to them, sometimes with grand designs of “getting back into it” but often enough just with a bemused shrug, “I don’t know why I’m bothering, but something is compelling me.”

I thought, perhaps, that 2020 might be the year I really dove back in. Covid lockdown in 2020 was a very odd time for a lot of people and I know lots of folks who leveraged their angst and fear and uncertainty into creative pursuits. I thought I might be the same with writing, but it turned out I leveraged that time to work on and run an online Dungeons & Dragons campaign for my friends. Writing has always been something I indulged for my introverted side, a solitary activity where I can gesture at social connection through occasional peer-review workshops or coffeeshop drafting sessions but is, in effect, a thing I do by myself, for myself. During lockdown, that didn’t hold a lot of appeal for me, certainly not the way affecting silly voices and play-acting dragon slaying did. D&D had elements of writing but the payoff involved a desperately needed social encounter so it took center stage.

And then, once things started to open up again and I was playing D&D more for its own sake and not as a lifeline of human contact, I saw a prompt for an anthology that spoke to me. It made me want to write a story, so I did. I submitted it on a lark and got an acceptance (you can read a bit more detail about that over here). And I started thinking, “you know, maybe I’m not actually done with this writing thing after all.”

I spent the summer writing a new D&D campaign. Again, it’s not the same, but it is fiction writing adjacent and it gave me a setting, a place to play in and toy with. A place to exercise my imagination. And I started thinking. I started wondering if maybe there was something else inside this world I was building for my friends, something that might unlock a door I thought I’d lost the key to a long time ago.

A few months ago I fired up the old NaNoWriMo website and tentatively set up a project for 2023. I toiled away at a fresh novel-length story set in the D&D world I’d created. I worked on it for two weeks before I even let my family know I was participating in NaNoWriMo, and I mostly only did that so I could occasionally ask them for a little peace and quiet to get my daily word count finished without having to make up some weak excuse. And then, on November 30th, for the first time in seven years, I completed the challenge. 50,000 words of a brand-new novel in 30 days.

It’s actually kind of a small step. NaNo was never the most productive writing I did in the years when I was at peak authorial pursuit. Of the four pre-2020 projects where I clocked a minimum of 50K words, two were failed experiments, one was so ambitious I may never find a way to encapsulate it into a single finished book, and one was so ill-defined and dull to work on that I actually achieved my monthly word count by writing some random smut each day instead. The year I failed to complete the task I had actually set out to expand a novella I had already written and was having trouble getting published into a full-fledged novel, so even if I had produced 50,000 new words of writing, I’m not sure it would technically count. The novel I claimed as my triumphant return to writing this past November was barely halfway done, story-wise, even as the requisite word count threshold was reached.

But, I’ve spent time in the subsequent couple of months actually adding to that story, writing a dozen more chapters and finding the path to reach what I hope will be a satisfying conclusion. And in a way, that’s really what the contest has always been about for me: proving that I can not just do it but stick with it. Keep going, even when things aren’t going the way I want them to or when I’m not sure what I’m even doing here.

I can’t say I’ve fixed my worries that maybe I don’t need to add my voice to the chorus of speculative fiction writers, most of whom bring to the table things I can’t possibly bring (underrepresented perspectives, unique voices, novel lived experiences) and things I’m not sure I’ll ever achieve (strong stylistic vision, fresh ideas, economic prose). I definitely haven’t stopped feeling like an impostor nor am I cured of depression or my disillusionment with geopolitical realities.

But, for now, I’m writing again and I’m not putting any pressure on it this time. I’m back to doing it for me, for the joy I can find in it, and for the hope that someday, maybe, a handful of others might find a little joy in it as well.

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Trying something a bit different with this post. This was pitched and provided by Sarah Jones to be of interest to ironSoap.com readers on her subject of expertise, sleep health. If you enjoy this article, please leave a comment below and I can look into providing more guest features like this.

Many writers plunge through the depths of the nighttime darkness trying to finish writing their novel. In order to complete a word count for the day or a chapter or two, sleep often times becomes the one thing we give up as we chase our goals. But should you?

The Effects of No Sleep

Productivity and creative thinking are directly affected by sleep, or lack thereof. Our mental performance as writers is challenged by the amount of sleep we receive each day. Harvard Med has studies that show that lack of sleep stunts our creative thinking and our mental performance and quick-thinking cognitive abilities. In short, no sleep means dull and thoughtless writing.

Lack of sleep has negative effects on our creative processes as well as our mood and our health. No sleep often creates a foul mood as fatigue and sleepiness set in. During hours of sleep at night, our bodies recuperate and systems restore themselves. Not getting enough sleep challenges our health, mood, and cognitive abilities and can stunt the writing process instead of flourishing creativity.

When to Write, When to Sleep

The challenge we writers have is to make time for everything. Sleep is a must, as is carving time for writing our novel. Both can be achieved by practicing some techniques for a healthier and more restful experience.

Designate your writing times. Often times writers procrastinate and avoid writing, even if we have a novel to finish. You can either bully yourself and charge through to accomplish your writing, or listen to the passive procrastinator that doesn’t “feel” like writing today. A writer writes! Push through and treat it as a job and get that word count in so you can sleep tonight. Accomplishing daily goals in your writing will ease stress and anxiety and allow for a restful evening.

The Magic of Yoga Nidra

If you are getting a good amount of sleep at night, but still feel tired, consider trying yogic sleep. Yogic sleep or Yoga Nidra is a technique used that attains a “restorative sleep,” otherwise a sleep where you are completely relaxed and rested but are still fully aware during the process. Yogic sleep may take some practice, but once it is completed successfully, the benefits of a rested mind and body will help you finish your novel.

To try Yogic sleep, we first must engage in breathing exercises to steady our breathing and lower our heart rate and blood pressure.  The next step is to create a resolve, or attempt to manifest a factor that we wish to have in our lives such as peace or courage. The next steps involve separating the mind form the body, embrace the awareness of any feelings and emotions, and then to visualize as the process concludes. It is said that 45 minutes of this type of restorative sleep equates to approximately 3 hours of regular sleep, the benefits of sleep can be achieved in a much shorter period.

Yogic sleep is an excellent option for our bodies and minds to rest and recuperate without the hours and hours of sleep that we have avoided. Breathing exercises, organizing and planning, and getting proper exercise are also researched and proven elements that help de-stress our lives and increase productivity.

We need sleep to think, and we need our thinking to write. Shoving hours of sleepless writing into a novel will get you closer to completion, but may make for a massive editing headache. Sleep and rest increase our brain activity, which is the heart and soul of a writer’s world, so don’t stay up too late tonight, because you need your rest.

Sarah is the Editor of Sleepy Deep. Feeling the repercussions of being an irregular sleeper for far too long, she decided to do something about it. She learned why sleep is so important and how to maximize it, and is now helping others who are struggling to find their right sleep routine.

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counting III (cc)
Martin Fisch via Creative Commons

Word counts: a phrase that strikes utter apathy in the hearts of people everywhere. Well, most people. If you’re a writer or editor, you probably care (at least some) about word counts. They are a rough measure of the size of a piece of writing, and in shorter works (journal articles, short fiction, etc) they can be a measure of effort for use in paying writers. Typically book-length work is paid based on unit sales and/or other complicated algorithms so it matters less how many words something is once it reaches that scope. Now, determining what lengths qualify as “novel” versus, say, “novella” is a whole other discussion, but let’s focus on the fact that word counts are used to determine relative size and values for works that tend to be collected or anthologized.

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Goddess of Victory and Peace
John via Creative Commons

I watched the Hugo Awards and the attendant Puppies drama this year from more or less beginning to end without ever feeling the need to comment or engage. I have my opinions, I’m certain no one else cares about them. Mostly, it was pretty good as far as Internet Dramas go. Entertaining, you know? I follow genre awards primarily in the same way Little Leaguers follow the MLB. It’s aspirational, to a degree; maybe a little bit cautionary.

But, as the post-ceremony furor is fading, Eric Flint posts an essay about the divergence between awards and popularity. Whether I agree with his thesis, methods of analysis, or conclusion is beside the point. It was an interesting read in any case. But it lured me into reflective comment because, as a wannabe author in this space, it made me consider the real shape and form of my goals. The past four years have seen me driving (slowly but consistently) toward an end point. Considering that the previous twelve years were spent putting forth zero concerted effort (generously granting that post-college would have been the proper time to pursue my dreams, despite them being articulated aspirations as far back as 1990—21 years before I got my act together), that’s not insignificant.

However, that actual end point is a little more nebulous than I typically care to think about. There are plenty of ways to wave in the direction of a concrete goal. “I want to be a writer.” Or, “I want to be a published writer.” Or, “I want to make money by writing.” If you don’t stare too hard or add too many qualifying criteria to these nebulous statements, I have achieved all of them. But, honestly, to date that’s as far as my specificity has gone.

And I realized that pursuing dreams is all well and good but you have to put some effort into visualizing what success is going to look like. Otherwise, how will I know when I get there? But then, as I unpack this further, I realize there are steps along the way. In the short term I’d like to qualify for an Active Membership in SFWA (whether or not I actually choose to join) through short fiction sales. That means 10,000 words or more of professional-level pay (six cents a word) across at least three different story sales. Beyond that, getting an agent would be a significant milestone. But how do I really say, “dream achieved?”

Is it when I publish my first novel? When I reach the bestseller list? When I win my first major award? Eric Flint points out that popularity and acclaim don’t always go hand-in-hand, so it’s possible choosing one could mean having to live without the other.

I think the conventional wisdom is that awards are nice to have. Relying on them for a measure of success is, perhaps, a foolish yardstick. Luck is a factor, certainly. But then again, a case could be made that relying on measures of popularity like bestseller status is no good, either. Luck plays a part in that, too. And in both cases it might be chasing the dragon. I won a Nebula! But I’m Hugoless (I’m a failure). I’m on the bestseller list! But only at #25 (I’m a failure). It’s easy to think from my current humble position that anything even in the parking lot of these ballparks would be a triumph, but unless it’s clear where I’m trying to go, there will always be another pinnacle I haven’t reached.

It’s tempting to say, “I’ll keep my expectations low, thereby increasing my chances of success.” But that’s not really a dream, then, is it? It’s more of a to-do item. If I want to merely have a book published, I could quickly polish and self-pub one of my existing manuscripts. Bam. Achievement unlocked.

Upon reflection the distinction between goal, measure of success, and dream is the heart of this matter. The goals are the steps, often linear, necessary for progress. I can set a goal of selling three stories to pro markets. I can set a goal of securing an advance for a novel. And, with hard work, I can achieve those goals. It’s not “no problemo” level stuff, but it’s doable. What those are progressing toward is the measure of success. And that should be a big, hairy, audacious sort of end point. It’s almost indistinguishable from the dream. It might even be close enough. But it has to be within my power, more or less. The dream is the stuff that orbits around that point, the kind of thing I can’t really plan for or depend on to justify my efforts. The goals don’t directly feed the dream, even if they (maybe) enable opportunity for it to come true. Awards are the dream. I mean, yeah, a Hugo with my name on it? I don’t mind wasting some time idly fantasizing about such a thing.

But the thing that drives me, the measure I use to determine if I still need to set goals because I’m not yet where I want to be? That has nothing to do with recognition. That one is simple. I’ll be successful when I can support my family with my writing. That’s it. When I can quit my day job and focus full time on writing without any discernible drop in quality of life, that’s when I move out of achievement mode and into maintenance mode.

From that perspective, given Eric Flint’s theory that popularity—particularly, it seems, long-term popularity—does not track with award-based recognition, I’d rather be popular than acclaimed. I’d even be okay with not being mega-popular as long as I can be just popular enough to devote all my time to what I love. Sure, it would be lovely to have the critical and commercial crossover success (not to mention the multimedia influence) of a John Scalzi or a Neil Gaiman. But that’s dream country. I’ll take the mid-lister’s unsung 35-year career in a hot minute, no regrets.

I won’t get there without the goals. And I won’t accomplish those goals without writing. So for now, that’s what I’m doing. And compared to the guy from twelve years ago who dreamed without measure or goals or effort or any of it? I’m closer to success than ever.

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Two Years Before the Mast
Don McCullough via Creative Commons

Today marks the second anniversary of my efforts to become a published writer. I suppose I might mark my progress based on when I began writing in earnest instead, but to be honest the specific date is hazy and anyway lost to memory. But I do know for sure when I sent out my first submission, and that was April 9, 2013. It pre-dates this site, even.

In the past 24 months, I’ve sent out over 200 submissions, totaling well over 800,000 words read by more than 120 different markets. I’ve received somewhere north of 150 rejections. My skin is tougher.

I’ve also received just over a dozen acceptances. Alas, at least one of those will never turn into a publication. But I’m slowly cobbling together a list of published work. I’ve made some money (not a lot! still, some) by selling these works. In the time I’ve spent submitting these stories, I’ve written over 250,000 additional words across a couple of novels and roughly 30 new short pieces. I think—I hope—I’m getting better.

I’ve made some wonderful friends along the way, made some mistakes, learned new things. To those who have read the stories, commented, critiqued, retweeted, signal boosted, even detested the work, I am deeply grateful. The writing would continue regardless, but the sharing of stories is what makes an idle pastime into a thrilling endeavor. Opening my imagination in a way that makes another person feel something, or think, or laugh, or just be entertained, that is the principal joy for me. I am honored and indebted to anyone who has taken time out of their lives to spend with my work.

Of course, nothing in these past two years would have been possible without the support of my family. They have all sacrificed in ways big and small for me to pursue this mad dream I sometimes wish could be discarded but cannot. My wife, who has endured my self-doubt, my existential whinging, my failed experiments, and who has cheered me on and celebrated each small triumph along the way. My children, who inspire me with their imagination and their love. They have all given generously; time, encouragement, understanding, sometimes welcome distraction. I am awash in good fortune.

Onward and upward.

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I'm beginning to see the light
Matthias Ripp via Creative Commons

2014 was quite a ride. For me, anyway. After all, it’s not every year that you have a baby, move to a new town, get a new job, and make the first wobbly baby steps into a dreamed-of venture in the span of twelve months. And let’s be honest, most of that stuff all happened in the span of about three months in the middle of the year. For awhile there, I was just sort of holding on as best I could, trying not to get completely overwhelmed.

But I’m not complaining. 2014 wasn’t a flawless year, of course, but it was more good than bad and, for that, I’m grateful.

On a personal front, things are far more stable than they were a year ago. My second daughter arrived in the spring, making our family feel more complete. I’m gainfully employed with a company I like, working with people I respect in a job I’m pretty good at. We have a place to live in a town that feels like home. My older daughter started school (Kindergarten) and seems to be thriving there. My wife and I celebrated our 15 year anniversary and couldn’t be happier.

As a writer, I feel like my ten year plan is proceeding along at an acceptable pace. I followed up my very first publication just over a year ago with six new short story publications, including my first print pub. I landed my first pro-paying acceptance near the end of the year. One of my stories received an Honorable Mention from the Writers Of The Future contest. I even earned a tiny bit of money from my writing.

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2014 Winner NaNoWriMo
Used with permission from National Novel Writing Month

Well, I managed to finish the NaNoWriMo project—from their 50,000-word guideline perspective anyway—once again at or near the midnight hour. I have been terribly off pace since early in the month and it’s taken a lot of gritted teeth to power through to the finish line. I think, more so than anything else, the challenge this year has been simply that there are other things I would have rather been working on. At no point did this novel ever really capture my imagination and demand to be written down. But as I said going into the month, that’s probably a good thing. Having the luxury of working on the latest inspiration isn’t something it would be wise to come to expect. So I set the goal and I stuck with it, even when it was difficult. Because this year, more so than the other two where I participated, there were times that I really wanted to just call it off. To pack it in and shrug it off. It’s just a silly self-directed contest, after all.

Right?

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Halfway House Cafe BBQ
Andrew Morrell via Creative Commons

Just a quick check in today to update a few things.

  • Halfway through the NaNoWriMo month and … well, I’m behind. I don’t think it’s yet at the point where all is lost, but I should be at the 25,000 word mark and I’m about 7,000 words off the pace. Now, that’s not something I can’t overcome: I’ve written 3,500-4,000 words in a day plenty of times. But it’s a daunting place to be in. Looking back on last year, I see that I was woefully behind around mid-month then as well and I ended up rallying and coming through with a strong second half. I hope that’s the case again. I’m still struggling to get into this story the way I would like, which worries me because at least last year I was enthusiastic about the problem, even if I was struggling with having been laid off right around the beginning of the month. Most days this time around I feel like it’s a chore to reach the standard 1,667 words. But I’m still plugging away as best I can, hoping I can find some inspiration somewhere and finish strong.
  • A small part of my NaNo struggles also come down to the number of other related tasks I’m dealing with. I’ve been trying to keep this blog more frequently updated, and part of that involves doing some reading for the Short List series that I’m still enthusiastic about. Plus I’m reading a really good book right now and a lot of my friends keep getting really great stories published which are piling up on me. I’ve also been reading chapter books (not picture books) to my oldest daughter at bedtime, which has been fun and I want to write some new reviews of these children’s books based on the new readings and the conversations they spark with her, but finding time is so challenging. Not to mention I’m still trying to check in on the slush reading gig regularly. And, of course, there are non-literary issues to contend with including a baby who’s teething and not sleeping well, illnesses that keep nagging our family, and a renewed effort on my part to fix some of my health issues by eating better and exercising. These are things every person—and particularly every writer, I’m sure—contends with, but sometimes they seem to pile up a little higher and this month feels like one of those periods.
  • On the bright side, some writer friends of mine turned me on to QuarterReads, a new site for writers and readers that operates a little on the microtransaction model that was sort of hot a number of years ago. Basically you drop $10 into the site and that gives you 40 reads at twenty-five cents. The stories are all under 2,000 words and most of the money goes directly to the author. If you like the story, you can tip up to another seventy-five cents. They do read and vet each submission which gives some quality control to the site so you know you’re not getting unfiltered, unedited garbage. And there are some pretty heavy hitters posting work there now, such as Ken Liu, Cat Rambo, and a couple of people I know and can personally vouch for: Alexis A. Hunter and Natalia Theodoridou. Anyway, I think it’s a really interesting model, and I genuinely hope it succeeds. I even have a story up there now, Corkscrew, which you may recall appeared on the Toasted Cake podcast earlier this year. This is the first print version of the story available, so if you missed it first time around, here’s another chance to catch it.
  • Speaking of publications, it seems that October ended my rather unlikely streak of publications. From April through September of this year, I had a new publication come out every month. I have one publication pending, an anthology I’m thrilled to be a part of and can’t wait to see come out. But even my most optimistic hopes for it wouldn’t permit the streak to stay alive; the publishers are putting out an advance review copy (ARC) and only finalized the contributors list in September. Not too much chance of a one-month turnaround there. Still, I’m amazed and humbled by this past year’s small step forward. Six stories this year was more than I could have hoped for, and in the meantime I’ve continued to write and (hopefully!) improve, so I’d like to say this is only the beginning. For those who have supported me by reading or signal boosting—in particular my ever-patient wife who also manages to make time to be my biggest cheerleader—I thank you. I write for me, but I try hard to be better for you.

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NaNoWriMo
Image courtesy of National Novel Writing Month

I’m doing National Novel Writing Month again this year. I started in 2011, where I completed the challenge by rambling 50,000 words of useless nonsense about a reluctant Djinn and … a guy? …Who wishes for his wife’s boobs to be bigger? I think? I’m not sure. It got weird.

Anyway.

I skipped 2012 intentionally, as I had a lot of other projects I wanted to work on and didn’t want the disappointment of failing. Turns out the disappointment of not even trying wasn’t much of an improvement. So I resolved to go for it again last year, and barely squeaked out my 50K on a fantasy/detective hybrid thing. Again, I didn’t outline the plot (though I did a ridiculous amount of world building prep) and it turns out writing a mystery/noir thriller without a very clear idea where the plot is going is Not A Good Idea. So I finished—from a NaNo perspective—but, as with the Djinn story, it didn’t get any further than that. I may revisit the fantasy/noir later; it’s shelved for now.

Now this year I’m back at it. If you’re following along on Twitter you may have noticed me griping late last month about trying to come up with a project idea. I had a few concept seeds that seemed like they might be worth exploring in a longer format, but I had a hard time making them mesh in any cohesive way. I toyed with crime story frameworks, science fiction trappings, angsty YA-lit variants, all sorts of things to make something click. Eventually I settled on a horror/supernatural story and set out trying to outline the thing.

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I’ve been submitting my fiction to markets for publication for over a year now. In that time I’ve sent out my work one hundred times. It’s not a massive amount of experience, truth be told. And this isn’t even an advice post, because I probably don’t have any advice worth offering. But I wanted to mark the round-number milestone of my triple-digit submissions by reflecting back on some of the things I learned and achieved along the way.

Submit Button
Johannes P Osterhoff via Creative Commons

Rejections, We’ve Got A Few

While I’ve submitted 100 times, if I waited until I had 100 submissions processed, I wouldn’t be able to post this until probably around year two. Submitting to the slush pile is a slow, tedious process. And I tend to target markets with fast turnarounds, too. But I’ve churned through about 83 submissions and my acceptance percentage is… 8%. Duotrope says this is a higher than average rate for other authors who submit to similar markets, but it doesn’t say how much higher or what that average is. Not really hanging much significance on that.

Most of the rejections I’ve received have been form rejects. You know, “We have to pass, as it unfortunately does not fit our needs at this time.” I have gotten some personal ones and while those are really the kind of rejections you look for as a submitting author, some of them can be bitter pills to swallow. Here’s my favorite from the past year:

“The story itself isn’t very compelling. You don’t really have much of a plot here.”

It helps to remember that, ultimately, each acceptance or rejection is a personal preference. The rejection above, for example, was for Corkscrew, which went on to be accepted by Toasted Cake and quite a few people later told me it had a great story and was very compelling. So, to each his or her own.

I’ve also come to understand the exquisite pain of the shortlist. Several times in the last 100 submissions, I received a notification that my work had made it past a first reader and was being sent up the chain. Once I made it past two rounds of vetting. When this happens and you get an acceptance, the needled anticipation of the shortlist is quickly forgotten in the triumph. But when the reviewing editor or an editorial board receives the work (usually indicating an even longer wait for response) and then chooses to pass, it’s pretty rough. You can’t get an acceptance in some markets without this process. But since submissions are a numbers game anyway, and one you try to steel yourself against optimism while you play, anything that smacks of hope is kind of like the enemy.

I Accept Your Acceptance

I keep a list of statistics on the master spreadsheet I use to track my submissions. Sure, I subscribe to and use Duotrope extensively, but for me the value in that site is their market database, not the tracking feature. Since I have occasionally submitted to markets that aren’t in their database and I was submitting before I subscribed, I need a master list to track everything I’ve done.

Some of the stats I keep on that spreadsheet surprised me. For example, all those submissions I’ve made have only come from 18 “completed” pieces of writing. Which means over a quarter of the finished pieces I’ve tried sending out have been picked up. It sounds impressive until you realize that 13 finished works of short fiction is not much of a backlog. I have writer friends with dozens and dozens of stories they’re trying to find homes for. What this really says to me is that I need to write more.

But getting those acceptances has been wonderfully fulfilling and flattering. The trick is that so far it hasn’t been particularly lucrative. Getting work out where people can see it has been vital to my development as a writer. But the goal is to use those as stepping stones to sharpen my skills to the point where I can crack those pro-paying, high-circulation markets. There may be another dozen or two vanity indies or token-paying niche publications in front of me before I get to that point. I just have to remember it’s a marathon.

Progress Is Moving Forward

However, I can take some solace from the fact that for the most part the stories I’ve finished more recently are noticeably better than the crop I started with when I began submitting last spring. Some of those earlier works, even the ones I thought were my best work ever, have labored into double-digit rejects. A few of them are now undergoing heavy rewrites to bring them up to par with my current work. The things I’m writing now feel more promising than those I was convinced would get my writing career off the ground.

And through the slow and necessarily painful process of trial and error, I’m starting to see some of the weaknesses my writing suffers beneath, and taking steps to correct them. Or unlearn the habits. Or consciously fight to avoid. I’m trying to take bigger risks, let go of my crutches, dig deeper into my characters, and push myself so I’m not satisfied with anything unless it’s as phenomenal as I can make it.

So here’s to the next year and the next 100 submissions. Rejections or acceptances, there’s no way forward except through the gatekeepers. My ultimate goal is to one day submit something so relentlessly awesome an editor with no space left in the current issue has to order extra pages because they can’t imagine not buying and publishing my story as soon as humanly possible.

I won’t rest until I get there.