Begin Again. And Be Kind.

So when I first started to write, I wondered if I would ever be good enough to publish anything. Like being a professional basketball player, olympic athlete, or rock star, nothing seemed guaranteed. I tested well in school, but had had… problems in the real world. (Author heroically resists an over-share. Succeeds for now.)

What I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was that once I sold that first professional story…? I’d be off to the races. Nothing would stop me then.

Author stares into the distance. Shakes head. Sighs.

Anyway, I sold that first story in 1993, to a man named Charles Ryan, who ran a professional SF magazine called Aboriginal SF. A name which spoke to the idea that the SF was primordial, pure. not that it was written by Aboriginals. It was the 90s. He was a great guy.

After selling him a story I first-read for him, which was an eye-opener. Read a 1000 manuscripts that seared my brain. I digress.

So I sold that story, and then, off to the races, failed to sell the next half dozen stories to him, or to any bigger markets.

This drove me nuts.

Robert Heinlein had bragged that he sold everything he wrote, from his first short story, which sorta kinda was and wasn’t true… and I’d read the writers life stories of Asimov and Larry Niven and many others and had a timetable in my head for how my career might go, should go, if I was Truly Meant To Do This.

Then, as now, midlist authors were giving up writing and becoming accountants or real estate brokers, and USENET, the ancient social media before the web that almost nobody remembers, was a place where they shared their tales of woe. Which I consumed uncontrollably. I saw this sad story writ large, everywhere, all the time.

Long story short. I never saw the trajectory I wanted, back then. The one I needed. The one that made the struggle of this seem…. sustainable.

My next story, after the first I sold, which I thought was WAY BETTER, everyone hated, for good reason, as it was an impossible to rescue discrimiflip story. I won’t go into it. I am happy it was never published.

Shudder.

Now, remember how I mentioned that I was always actually kinda succeeding? I was selling to national slick magazines at this time. In fact, I had two editors who loved my work who published between them pretty much three quarters of the whole SF ‘semi-pro’ press. Magazines paying a pro rate, or close to it, that hadn’t jumped through some hoops at SFWA yet to be considered pro.

But I was fixated on getting into the officially pro markets, the big old ones, and getting a golden ticket from a few people. Namely, Gardner Dozois, Ellen Datlow, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Stanley Schmidt, Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

So I quit for 18 years. (Tech work at a hundred bucks an hour was my consolation prize… oh. So long ago.)

Then, miraculously, in 2012, no longer distracted by the software sector, I broke through in all the markets, now helmed by new editors, that I had ever thought I needed to go Off To The Races. Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Interzone were buying the 10th, 12th, 15th, stories I’d sent. The first ones, I mean, after the hiatus. My rejections were all in the 90s. Unknown to these editors. Who only read the stuff I’d read, after the aborted high tech career and the parenting interesting children thing.

So…. Am I Off to the races? Yes… and no.

Writing is a long game, life long, and to some degree, it never gets easier for anyone than it is for you right now. Each phase requires a different kind of self-motivation, a new kind of resilience, or belief in yourself, in your work, in the value of this enterprise. Your peer heroes struggle, your hero heroes struggle, the Greats all struggled, this isn’t really easy for some of us. Most of us?

All of us?

I say this not as a giant downer, but as an explanation for something you’re going find, in writing communities, in writers, in publishing, in your peers and in your heroes.

A ton of super smart people with weirdly battered egos. Many, many easily insulted people. Many chips, perched on many shoulders.

What is the practical upshot of all this?

Be kind to everyone. Everyone, in your writing journey. To the editors who reject you. To the ones that buy you. To the people in your writing workshop you envy, for their skill or publication. To the people who are new and making a lot of mistakes. To the people who have done this forever who still don’t seem to have a lot to show for it. To the people who have almost instant success. To the people who make a ton of money. To the people who make no money. To the people who struggle to get the time to do this. To the people with nothing but time.

This is a weirdly easy and weirdly hard thing to do.

And when everything you have done, all your accomplishments and all your work feels empty or hollow remember that every day you begin again, like that first day you started, not knowing what would happen, what could happen, on the page or to the pages you wrote.

You’re alive. You can write. The words form in your head without conscious volition and your fingers wiggle and you are somewhere else and also very much there staring at words and wiggling fingers.

Whatever plan you had will fly out the window as you careen wildly, drunkenly, down your path. Keep going. Improvise. Wing it. Fake it till you make it. Dream. Despair. Dream again.

Be a hermit. Come out of the cave and awkwardly interact with other writers. Be kind! Be kind! If people seem mean to you, remember, Weirdly Bruised Egos!

Keep writing. Be Kind. Your successes will glow briefly and whatever doubt you had will return and let that go, because you know, you always wrote with doubt.  You don’t really have to believe in yourself. Or your work. Just do it and let the doubts slip around you, let the pain of expectations never met fade. So you were never a rock start and never will be one? Join the club. Oh, you had friends who became rock stars? Good on them.

Be open to your work. Let it flow through you. Let it be what it is. Not for you to know how good it really is. Oh, but try to make it better!

Write. Write. Write some more. The blank page is infinite. Inviting.

Be kind to yourself… and let yourself write.