Annus mirabilis is a Latin phrase that means wonderful year, “year of wonders” or “year of miracles”. (This term originally referred to the year 1666, celebrating its non-awfulness even though it had the number of the beast, ‘666’ in it.) My Annus Mirabilis was my 50th. I’d returned to writing a year earlier and had rebuilt a long neglected community, reconnecting with people I’d written with in the 90s, and made a bunch of new friends as well. I’d decided to give short fiction one last shot.
Long story short. I had a great year, and, the world didn’t end. (Coincidence? I think not.)
If you intended to read the story but missed the issue, here it is again. If you’re a friend of mine that doesn’t read SF, you still might want to give it a try. If you’re a young writer wondering what a breakthrough story might look like, check it out. This worked for me.
Oh, and big confession time, I wrote this story for myself, had fun writing it, and never thought it would sell.
Amazon Book Description
(Amazon) Publication Date: March 11, 2014
My first of six sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in 2013. It’s one of my favorites. What’s it about? Well.
When the Aliens make a visitation request, you get the day off work, which is nice. Most people go about their lives normally, after the interview. A few disappear. And a few try to make a few bucks, hawking new religions on the interwebs. Joel isn’t entirely sure which group he’ll fall into, but one thing’s for sure…
He could use the day off. He’s got a ton of laundry do to.
So, I’m off the stands again, the new issue of Asimov’s is out, and as always, there’s a sense of sadness there.
The question above haunts me. Seriously. As a younger person, I lived for years, literally years, secure in the knowledge that I was an artist, and then a writer, and that I would make art, or write–tomorrow. I knew that every now and then I made things. Every now and then, the mood struck. Making art, creating something new, seemed to be a now or then kind of thing, and certainly when one has a full-time (or even a part-time) job, that’s the way it almost has to be, because a Job is ab every workday thing and it’s hard to have many parallel every workday things going on without going nuts.
But even in my twenties and thirties, it wore on me, and there were periods of time when I gave up on the idea of being a writer or an artist for years at a time, while I was a entrepreneur. One of the great things about being a self-employed entrepreneur is that there are always things to do, some you enjoy and some you hate, and you try to let the needs of the enterprise inform you on which thing you should be doing. The entrepreneur knows she’s on her own. Entrepeneurs don’t have muses. They have deadlines, payrolls, angry demanding clients, the possibility of great success and the greater likelihood of humiliating defeat.
It gets you going and keeps you going. Until it blows up in your face and it’s over and you wonder if you should do it again, knowing the new things you know.
My entrepreneurial activity of course never made me rich, and since that was what it was supposed to do, it was, in one sense, a failure. It was also a wonderful way to learn about the world. When you have your head down digging a trench, someone else’s trench, you get good at trench digging but you never get a big picture sense of business, of capitalism, of employers and employment. It’s like being an adolescent, being a child, being a student without ever having tried to be a teacher, parent, owner. It’s easy to see how stupid management is. When you don’t do that work, ever.
Step into the role of the other; the employer, the teacher, the job-creator, the parent, and Oh My. The circle becomes complete. The student is now the master. The employee now the employer. The worker now the owner. And you learn something.
You’re lousy at everything! And who do have to blame for that now, eh?
Only you!
You are half-assed. At everything. How in the name of God does one get one’s entire ass in gear?
Optimism, Great Expectations, belief that you can do something, is always the first step, isn’t it? The sense that you can do this thing. That has to be in the mix somewhere. Where does that come from, one wonders? Your parents telling you as a child that you can do anything you set your mind to? Doing well on standardized tests in high-school? Being able to make friends and make money in other contexts? Where does that confidence come from?
That optimism and belief in one’s self runs headlong into one’s critical sensibility early on. That wonderful Ira Glass quote above, about how hard the first five or ten years of creative effort can be, when one’s creator isn’t as powerful as one’s internal critic.
That Ira Glass poster can keep you going for for awhile. Then maybe you find a bit of your voice and have a bit of success and, well, you find yourself at the bottom of a new heap of people. Like that transition from Middle School to high school, when you go from being the biggest kid in the school to the smallest and most insignificant. Then high-school to college. Then college to work.
Every arrival is stunning. Oh. Here again? Wow. I suck. Again? I’m just this guy who made a cut and now it’s time to prove myself, all over again?
I’m 50. I’m 20 years in, though as I’ve mentioned, 20 years of now and then; who knows how many real years that is. Five? Ten? Basically, I need a new Ira Glass quote to keep me going for this bit of the struggle. I’m afraid I’m going to have to write that new inspirational quote myself, this time.
This post is no good for my professional career or persona. But somehow I want to share this part of this process too, for anyone who might care, for anyone it might help. Because you think you might arrive, someday,and it sure looks like some other people arrive, I could name names, but why bother,
But for you? No. You may succeed but you’ll never arrive. Maybe that’s just how it is, doing this thing, what it feels like on the inside.
Enjoy it right now or you never will. Every moment is as good as it gets.
So the March issue of Asimovs will soon be off the stands, completing the 90 day span in which my stories have been pushed out to 25,000 readers or so, mostly as paper. Newsstand sales make up less than 10% of that number, but they do occur, as this photo conclusivelly proves. Knowing that an issue exists, on the stands, with my name in it, my story in it, has been wonderful.
I walk from magazine stand to magazine stand and I look at them, on the rack. I’ve spent at least one day for each issue doing this. I guess this should be embarrassing. But it isn’t.
Small upticks in circulation at Asimovs and Analog, combining paper and digital sales suggest that on the whole that e-readers aren’t simply cannibalizing print sales but are broadening the genre short fiction readership. Good new for those of us writing it! The end of the fiction magazine has been somewhat delayed, which is a good thing.
Still, short fiction nowadays is mostly a training ground, a place to find a voice and learn a craft and find a community. It is also of course a destination, a thing-in-itself, worthy, like poetry or fine art, of serious attention and respect. As with fine art and poetry a handful of rock-stars even make a kind of living mostly doing it.
But writers making a living write at longer lengths. My first novella sale to Asimovs in 2013 represents my first step down that path, away from short fiction, towards the novel. It is time to get cracking. I’m healthy, I have the time and the support, and for the first time in my life, I can safely say, I seem to be able to to this at a professional level. Sheila Williams and Gordon Van Gelder are people I respect. These are magazines I respect.
When I have read them over the years, I’ve never really felt, ever, “why is this in here?” Some stories are more to my tastes than others, but in every story I’ve read, I’ve caught some spark, some flash of quality, some thing that made me think, yeah, OK, I see why they bought this.
Now I have no choice but have a similar feeling about my own work. I’m in this game.
I may not be to everyone’s taste. I’m probably a tiny footnote in the grand history of the genre. But my ticket has been stamped. I am on my way. If I am ever to do this thing the time is now.
I read the magazines and reach out to my fellow writers, my TOC mates (writers who share a table-of-contents) and I walk the icy streets of Boston and Cambridge, looking at my issues on the rack, reminding myself, that my time is now. I’m a late bloomer. Maybe that’s OK. Keep moving. Make your mark.
I invite my fellow writers, young and old, to reach out to each other. Write notes to the writers you have loved your whole life, and tell them so. Write notes to your TOC mates. Do workshops and conventions. Bring yourself to this thing. I left fiction for twenty years and now I’m back and it is still here, still real, still important, as meaningful as you yourself make it.
So I’ve made my word goals the last three weeks, and find myself falling into a new pattern; writing sessions are longer and more immersive; the hangover, of being in that place, in that world, are longer, too. Editing is a task done to relax; it’s easier than new words and it is like doing the laundry or cleaning or cooking; something that must be done so you take as much joy in the doing of it as you can.
I like having a few days of words in the bank, being a bit ahead; it makes me feel less panicked, that I’ll fall behind and give up.
7500 words is a long shot story per week; which makes my current goal akin to the Kris Rusches 90’s era “dare to be bad” challenge. If you’ll check that link, you’ll see the phrase is properly attributed to Nina Kiriki Hoffman, though Kris and Dean Smith popularized the concept.
Dean explains it better than I will:
The base of the phrase for me is this: It takes a lot more courage to write and mail something than it does to not write, or write and not mail. And by putting out your work to editors, and/or readers, you are risking the chance that readers and editors might not like it, that it might be bad. So you are daring to be bad.
Where I have used this phrase over the years is to try to help writers who are stuck in rewriting whirlpools, never thinking anything was good enough to mail, so thus never making any real progress toward selling their work. At some point, if you write first draft or ten drafts, you have to take a chance and mail your work if you want readers to read it. At that point you must “Dare to be Bad.”
Of course, there are no real repercussions of mailing a story that fails. No editor reads anything that doesn’t work and no editor will remember your name if your story doesn’t work. Most of us (editors) have trouble remembering the names of the authors and the stories we have bought over the years, let alone the stories we glanced at and form rejected.
And there are no real risks in putting a story up on Amazon and Pubit and Smashwords yourself. If the story sucks, if your sample is bad, or your cover sucks, or your blurb wouldn’t draw flys, no one will read it or buy it or remember you. No real risk to you. Sure, no sales, but no real risk either.
But alas, new writers (and I was no exception) are all afraid of mailing our work to editors or putting it out for readers to read. New writers think that some editor with an empty desk like we see in the movies will pull up the manuscript, read every word, realize it sucks, and then put the new writer’s name on a blacklist and send thugs with guns to the new writer’s house to kill their cats. Or worse.
The reality is that no one notices, which I suppose for some people is worse. But there are no real risks.
– See more at: http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/?p=2494#sthash.Scl36HYG.dpuf
Dean is concerned about people endlessly rewriting and not submitting, which is a problem I got over somewhere down the line. Though Bog knows, it took me a decade.
1500 new words a day is the equivalent of making up a 7 or 8 minute kids bedtime story every night from scratch. Put this way, it sounds easy-peasy.
This also works out to writing Moby Dick every five months, with a few weeks editing time thrown in for good measure. Obviously, this is impossible.
I sit between those two statements now feeling strange; it’s pretty easy; it’s impossibly hard.
At any rate, it’s time to turn on Self Control, the app I use to block social media, mail and blogging, and make new words.
Pecking out my first few stories while a sophomore in college.
“I don’t really get the genre thing,” My friend Steven Solomon said to me, about my writing, once. Stephen is an artist, who has a day job usually, but he’s a real artist, not a commercial artist or graphic designer or an illustrator, things I have been and at one time wanted to be.[/caption]
Of course, he does those things, too—but he’s an artist; by which I mean, he takes what he does seriously. It’s an attitude thing.
He isn’t stuck up or too good for pop culture; his encyclopedic knowledge of comic books, of Jack Kirby and Superman, is breathtaking. But he doesn’t see himself as confined to, limited by, any kind of commercial limitation for his work; he’s not a category; he’s not a shelf in a bookstore; he’s bigger than a genre.
Steven Solomon was on my mind at Clarion, when talking to Michael Swanwick, about his book Vacuum Flowers, and Gibson’s book Neuromancer. I’d loved both books, and held them in more or less equal esteem, and said so to Swanwick, imagining this might be endearing.
Swanwick winced, as if I’d offered him a shot glass full of urine.
“I had written a book, ‘in the tradition.’ Bill wrote one outside of it.” he said, finally.
Have I mentioned that I feel like I have been a disappointment to my Clarion instructors?
Swanwick also mentioned that by appropriating the term Turing Police for my own, well, Turing Police, in my first published story, I’d looted Gibson in a thoroughly uncool way. I had a stupid defense, about genre people sort of building on each other’s work, which was just plain wrong; Swanwick was right. It was OK to have Turning police, people doing what they do; calling them that was unforgivable.
I was wrong. Sorry, Mr. Gibson. I suck.
Which leads us back to genre, ‘in the tradition,’ being derivative, and making art out of crap, which is what Michael Swanwick said genre artists, at their best, do.
I always wanted to be visual artist or a writer, what a business partner of mine who abandoned me during the tech bubble called an original content creator; but I couldn’t really imagine myself a fine artist. Or maybe I could, when I was very young, before middle school, and I grew out of it.
I recall vividly, telling my seventh grade English teacher, Ms. Moore, that I would like to be an artist when I grew up, and she said to me, without missing a beat, that she was sure I’d be a fine graphic artist, and I didn’t really know what she meant, what the difference was, between real art and graphic art, but I knew instinctively that I had been demoted, and I recall feeling insulted.
I also recall feeling brought down to Earth. I mean, how many people really got to be artists?
We didn’t have a lot of art books in the house, or live near any major museums growing up in upstate New York, so Art, Fine Art, was something of a mystery. I knew about the handful of artists that impinged on the mainstream culture of the day. Andy Warhol. Picasso. Salvadore Dali. Peter Max and Leroy Niman. But that was about it.
We had a book of MC Escher prints, though, which fascinated me. I looked at those, over and over again. And once, even read some of the text and found that Escher was a Graphic artist. Which made me feel like, OK, maybe it would be OK to be one of those after all.
Growing up in the 70s in suburbia, art was a rack of posters in a local bookstore; art was album covers and book covers and calendars. Roger Dean and Frank Frazetta and the Brother’s Hildebrandt and the others I started to collect. I bought books full of pulp covers. Fell in love with the scratchboard and pen and ink of Virgil Finley. Art was illustration.
And so I planned on becoming an illustrator.
No teacher ever really liked my writing, I was a B minus writer, but my drawing was better than about 95 percent of those around me. Becoming an illustrator, a graphic artist, seemed like a mature, grown up way to be Creative without starving to death.
So my writing was confined, from my teens through my late twenties, to thinking up premises for SF worlds and characters, and talking about these ideas with my friends.
The mechanics of typing manuscripts was quite simply exhausting to me, in the late seventies. I’m not a natural writer, a good speller, and typing my papers for high-school or college was nightmarish. I was once so absurdly grateful to a woman, a fellow student, for typing my paper I slept with her, even though I shouldn’t have, and honestly, didn’t really want to.
But I digress.
I attended Syracuse University enrolled in VPA, the College of Visual and Performing Arts, and did the freshman art core, which had art history and aesthetics and one of the two great teachers of my life, Larry Bakke, and actually learned what the hell art was, what the hell illustration and commercial art was, what culture was.
Like the goldfish learning about water; your own culture is more or less invisible to you unless you are forced to confront it in some weird way; travel to another culture; instruction by a great teacher.
I got just barely enough education, over the next decade or so, to be able to see what genre was; what science fiction was, as we entered the internet era, the tech bubble, the age of Wired magazine and Boing Boing and the fantasy of the Long Boom.
It all came together for me, somehow, in the white hot end of the tech bubble, and I imagined myself becoming what we called back then, unironically, a Visionary or Thought Leader. My SF career floundered when I didn’t sell my Clarion stories to major markets, and the semipro markets that were buying me winked out of existence. But it didn’t matter, because I was going to get rich on stock options, and then, write novels or make movies or so something even cooler. Possibly involving virtual reality goggles.
I had transcended the genre, see? I was living science fiction. I didn’t need to write it. That ended in a plume of ash on 911, as the tech bubble burst and I gave up on that vision of myself, not all at once, but slowly, over a decade of failed entrepreneurial ventures.
Leaving me… here. A man always in and of his times; a wasted youth in the seventies; a slacker in the late 80s, and a dot.com snake oiler through the millennium. Through it all, the SF paperbacks trailed along, stacked around the edges of my life, mixed with literary stuff and commentary and piles of piles of the New York Times.
Leaving me here, doing the genre thing; again.
But not naively, anymore, I don’t think; I’m not confined by the genre because I grew up in it; it’s part of me, hardwired, natural. I’ve been outside it, too; I’ve had a life, which I bring back to it, some little bit of the world, the part that fits into my weirdly shaped head.
And now I think, maybe I’ll never write Literature.
This is one of those no-brainers, like not showing up late for a job interview reeking of peppermint schnapps and opium. The fact that it’s a no brainer, though, doesn’t mean that people with brains don’t regularly submit typo-riddled work. As a first reader for a national SF magazine in the 90s, I saw a lot of sad manuscripts.
The magazine is gone. My editor, Charlie Ryan, disliked people making fun of slush in public forums; he never wanted anyone to feel like a sincere effort was being met with scorn, or ridicule.
I figure talking about it now can’t hurt.
At the bottom of the barrel was the typewritten stuff. There wasn’t much of it in the 90s, but at that point, not having a word processor meant that you weren’t serious about writing. I’m sure there were, and still are, some serious established writers eschewing word processing, though none comes to mind. But at that time and in that place, the typewritten stuff, the translucent paper all braille like, embossed and crinkly, with patches of white out, was the most uniformly awful material we saw.
Word processing and spell checking doesn’t catch every mistake, obviously. It does, however, make too many of them on a page unforgivable. Why? Because it’s easy to key in an edit. It’s not like you have to retype the page (yes, people did that) and if you can’t be bothered, or won’t clean up your content, well, what does that say about you and it?
We saw all the things writers are told not to do, manuscript preparation wise. Otherworldly, cthulian fonts. Unreadable ink colors. Three hole punched manuscripts fashioned together with yarn, or brass bolts, or something other than a paperclip; badly xeroxed copies of typewritten manuscripts; odd smelling manuscripts; angry harassing cover letters.
You know what we didn’t see a lot of?
Properly formatted, carefully copyedited stories that totally sucked.
I passed on a lot of decent stories of course, or was part of that process, but it was hard not to notice, a correlation between the quality of craft and content.
Here’s where peer based workshopping becomes a time saver; it is easier to see someone else’s typos than your own. Even if your own sense of grammar is imperfect, your spelling rusty, your grasp of punctuation workmanlike, you will still find things to fix in someone else’s manuscript, even when that other person is a better writer than you are.
And studying someone else’s unpublished prose, looking for little ways to improve it, is an education in and of itself. Your detachment, from other people’s work, will frequently help you spot problems with your own.
I once sold a story to a magazine called Mindsparks, edited by Catherine Asaro. The magazine folded before the story got very far, but it was one of those early sales that gets you thinking more seriously about your work. She sent back the manuscript, dripping with red, edits to be keyed in.
A friend in my workshop saw the manuscript and said, “Wow. It’s amazing she bought it at all.”
I burned with shame.
Because every mistake you see in a manuscript pops you a little bit out of the story; it just does. Like watching William Shatner’s toupee slip in a fight scene in an old Star Trek Episode, or a styrofoam rock ricochet off of Deforest Kelly’s head; like the boom mike swinging into view in a low budget movie.
So why use tools like Gammarly? You have your workshop, right?
Marking up low level errors can make a reader miss higher level ones; you’re going to burn the attention, burn the insight that could have been yours, if you’d given your reader something cleaner.
DISCLOSURE: I’m trying out the service at Grammarly now in a seven day free trial; one of those where you give them the credit card info and you have to remember to shut it off to avoid a charge if you don’t end up using it; standard free trial kinda thing. So far, having used the service twice, I see that it catches stuff that I have been forcing humans in my workflow to help me with; it may end up being worth 12 bucks a month to me.
I know these blog posts have been sloppy, too. If they’re worth sharing I guess they’re worth copyediting, and again, I don’t want to give people a shitty impression; I’d like for readers of the blog to one day buy a novel or mine. So.
Here’s to new tools and processes that make us better.
What do you care about? I mean, really care about? Care enough about to have really strong opinions about? What interests you? I mean fascinates you.
Those are personal questions. If a stranger asks them of you, you’ll lie, say something normal, inoffensive, something job-interview like. Because, Jesus, who the hell wants to let a goddamn stranger know that kind of thing? Know what really twists you up and makes you tick, turns you around, chews you up and spits you out again.
You do, Bucko.
You’re that kind of fool, you’re that kind of idiot, if you want to be a writer. If you aren’t that way to start with you’re going to end up that way, in some form or another.
Some people disguise themselves elaborately with characters and plots which transmute whatever it is they’re twisted up about into something unrecognizable. What is the vampire, the zombie, the serial killer, the sociopath, in your book, really? What is she to you? Why are you writing about her?
Everything is a memoir. You reveal yourself in every word, in every image, in every character, in every plot.
If what I’m saying now makes no sense to you, and you’re writing, but not publishing, think about it. If you’re publishing more and better than I am, please tell me I’m full of shit, because I want to be.
Because writing is embarrassing. Write about love and friendship and commitment and betrayal and anger and forgiveness and despair and strength and weakness and you’re going to bump into yourself, over and over again, and not the sanitized, official version of yourself, but the truly misbegotten version of you under the mask that is purely and wonderfully and awfully you.
It’s possible that this is a silly way to write and I’m getting to the end of my rope; I have no desire to repeat myself, and I find the same characters and stories and plots and obsessions swirling around again and again, and I want to get out of myself and do something different, but I want to own what I do, to feel like I am qualified to write it, and that keeps me close to certain things.
I’m not sure sometimes if I need to write more or become a better human being, somehow, if I want to write better.
More empathic, intuitive, observant…more in touch with my own subconscious, more disciplined, less motivated by selfish desires and simple animal drives.
I’m 50. Has that ship sailed?
I come to fiction for the hope of transformation and character change, and I’m the character I want most desperately to change; I come to fiction because I know it happens damn infrequently in real life. But I want it to happen. I want to be able to work hard at something and not fucking have it explode on me, melt away like the dot.com era, blow up in my face and silence me for decades.
I look around and see the people my age with their stacks of novels and their elaborate personas and their degrees and families and interests and I think, Dear God, I am hopelessly outclassed. I’m fucking doomed. I can barely make food and do laundry for four people and write a goddamn short story now and then.
Oh well. Back to the 1000 words a day, and here’s hoping I live long enough to embarrass myself well and truly before I’m gone for good. Because it’s all I ever really wanted to do. Even if I’m not great. And why the hell not. Anything is possible. People change.
I know that, because I’ve read about it, in books.
I believe firmly in the idea that one way to learn how to write prose is to write and finish and share a bunch of short stories; you can even try to market them; the rejection of those first few stories is always a bracing experience, letting one know that one hasn’t gotten the hang of the thing. Yet.
Some folks stick with the short format, (in Science Fiction I think of James Tiptree and William Tenn; in the mainstream I think of Raymond Carver), but most branch out and write at longer lengths. Dean Wesley Smith’s thought experiment aside, there are virtually no professional short story writers anymore, and haven’t been for decades, so for those pursuing prose as a paying career, the short stuff is for training and marketing and experimentation.
In Danse Macabre, Stephen King explains why writing short stories, for him, makes no financial sense.
And he’s Steven King.
When should one start writing at length? When should one write novels? As soon as possible. One handy thing about the novel is that, once started, many have a kind of inertia which can keep you writing, carrying you through your first few million words, your first five years, or 10,000 hours of writing. (Gladwell’s Outlier metric for success.)
Really, I think, it doesn’t matter what you write, just that you do write, and read, and get feedback, for 10,00o hours. I do think that short stories have the ability to let one write, and let go, of a lot of things quickly; a novel will hold you, in a tone, in a voice, in a milieu, in your own understanding of what writing is and isn’t. If you are anything like me, and you sucked horribly when you started , it’s best that you pass through a series of mental models for the activity, as quickly as possible.
There is a magic moment, in between writing THE END, and staring at the blank page once again, during which something inside you can shift, recalibrate, reset itself. Every ending; ever beginning, resetting; recalibrating.
You need to get through the “I have a neat idea and the story exists to illustrate it’ phase, the “I have a wonderful plot and a series of robot like characters trapped inside obeying the Plot,” phase, the didactic, “I have a message about how to live” phase, the “playing dungeons and dragons by yourself, the living breathing characters in search of a story” phase, to the integrated phase, where you do all of these things at the same time without really thinking about it.
Because you don’t really write by thinking about it. Writing isn’t really thinking. It’s something else. I’m not sure what.
Writing contains ‘thinking about it’ phases, of course, research and notes and editing, which are all think-intensive activities. But the writing is something else again.
So, Mr. Miyagi has us wax the floor and paint the fence, do All The Things, separately, and then, somehow it comes together in the end and we kick the bully in the face and we triumph and write a book that we sell and live Happily Ever After.
My problem is that I haven’t figured out how to write anything longer than a short story, yet. I’ve internalized a set of rules, for starting the story close to the end, for paring back the list of characters to a few, for revealing worlds in a few choice lines of exposition, and through the Edges of Ideas (I always have to cheat some, and use some exposition, but I try.)
Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t already read the Turkey City Lexicon, please, just go and do that and get back to this if you feel like it.
So, I write, I slip into the dream and I keep waking myself up, my short story alarm keeps going off, saying, “This is backstory. You can’t get to the end in 7000 words at this rate!” “You are spending too much time in someone who is not the protagonist or the antagonist. Stop!”
I’m afraid the only way through it is going to be write a shitload, and throw away half of it.
So. I guess I better get writing.
Wish me luck.
I’m working on my second novella now, God help us. Ms. Williams at Asimov’s told me to write at this length; they publish a lot of novelettes and novellas.
If you’re a depressive or bipolar the writing thing swirls through your disorder, your ‘non-neurotypicality,’ if we want to be less pejorative. Your mental state radiates into your characters and worldview; the world’s reaction to your writing feeds back into whatever scripts you’re feeding yourself about your life and work.
It can be hard to keep going.
Early on, in my late 20s, I started seeing posts, now and then, from well-published writers that said things like, “if you can quit, quit. There’s no earthly reason to encourage someone to do this. Money? Security? Respect? Critical success? There is so little, of any of this, to go around, that the very idea of encouraging someone else to persevere seems cruel. Morally wrong.
The only reason to write is that you have to, these posts all said.
I saw posts from people wondering if people really could learn how to write. If you were still getting only rejections, five years in, maybe it wasn’t in you.
All of this combined with the wall of rejection and my own mental state to create a kind of toxic subtext to my work. I wrote stories that became hard to parse, they were so bleak; universes almost completely devoid of opportunity. You know why Dystopias are so damn easy to conjure up in fiction?
Because writers already live in Dystopian Darwinian hell worlds similar to the Hunger Games.
Theres this one pile of food; everyone rushes to get it; someone else’s success is your failure; your brother’s in arms, your workshop mates, are your competitors. How many pro publication slots are there in award winning markets? How many slots are there in the spinner rack at the drug store? How many books are really seriously marketed by a publishing house? Finite numbers, all.
Once upon a time in the genre, there was supposedly this feeling of camaraderie; almost unique to science fiction, where writers did not see each other as competitors. I remember reading about this in the 70s and 80s. It sounded way cool.
I like camaraderie! It’s one of the things that gets me through the day.
I’ve also read that this camaraderie was a side effect of the publishing culture at that time, and that that time went away, and SF publishing became a lot more like publishing in general, where camaraderie is far from a given.
Now I’m enjoying this weird moment of validation, having sold the four stories to Asimov, where I feel like I can reach out, to other writers, who are publishing, and see if I can’t kinda…
Make friends?
I’m fifty, and making new friends at this age feels very weird. Typically, it’s mostly only necessary after death, empty nests or messy divorces; most people have all their friend slots filled at this age, and people who don’t, well, you have to wonder about them, the way a woman in her 30s regards the man her age who has never been married.
Befriending younger people is always fraught with a kind of tension. You have to suppress the desire to tell them how young and beautiful and inexperienced they are, and how their optimism is kind of painful. And my God, people in their 20s and 30s all seem goddamn radiant when you’re in your fifties with teenage children. They’re like campfires shooting out rays of warmth and light.
But I’m doing it, or trying to, fitfully, and I’m writing my 1000 words a day whether I want to or not. I’m making a goddamn literary life, goddamn 1000 words at a goddamn time. A charming note at a time, a note to a writer. Reading and writing like it was a job, more than a job, and less than a job, (when it comes to money…alas.)
Summer turns to fall and inside my head it is getting darker, and it’s all material, it’s all stuff I can use, if I push through it. If I keep working. Even if I don’t believe in what I’m working on. Maybe I only have to believe that I can keep working; maybe that is all I need.
Write for the workshop who is growing tired of your schtick, for the trash bin, for the rejection slip, for the indypub book that never sells a single copy. Write for the bad reviews. Write for very little money.
Write for the worst case scenario. But write. Don’t stop. Because as lousy as writing sometimes is, not writing is worse.
If the Bush administration taught us anything, it is that things can always get worse.
Caroyln See has advice for writers on Making a Literary Life. I’m taking it.
Most of us start writing knowing nothing about the writing life; knowing no writers, in places where there are no book-readings of note, and nowadays precious few bookstores to boot.
Of course there’s always Amazon and ebay and ebooks and even libraries, so people have access to books, even if they don’t bump into writers and editors on a daily basis. In school, bored teenagers are deprived of cellphones and computers and often end up reading as a result, to stave off madness induced by boredom. This is one reason YA is a great category to write in.
Of course, if you’re interested in the writing scene, there’s trade press, packed with photographic evidence of the fleshy reality of writers, and there are also conventions, where one can go and see a writer or editor, read their name tags and gape at them. (Nowadays, with twitter and facebook it is possible to literally drown yourself in a writer’s, ‘platform,’ but never mind, just bear with me.)
In the genre, conventions are often dominated by media related things or a few big name, rock-start type authors, but there are exceptions to the rule. Readercon is one, a convention so lousy with writers that they often outnumber the fans.
If you were anything like me, you didn’t look at trade press, you had only read interviews with a few big name writers, you didn’t do social media from writers, and your knowledge of publishing was based on introductions and forwards in books by writers from long ago
And so you write and send things out and you hope like hell somebody notices you. Somebody likes you. Somebody cares. And you have no idea what to expect, what you’ll get back, in return.
What strikes you immediately, as you wait for your rejection letters, is that the short fiction thing is a smallish world. A handful of professional magazines, another handful of respected smaller presses and online markets, and a plethora of start-up ventures that pay Dickensian rates and last an issue or three before folding, often with your unloved story sitting in their inbox…or in their accepted but not yet paid for pile.
Yes. It can be a sad business, the writing thing, for the first few years. Or in my case, decades.
At some point, if you persist, you find an editor who likes your stuff, and buys more than the one thing from you. They buy a few things. And suddenly, you have a relationship with someone else in this endeavor, a business relationship, and this relationship is different in tone from your relationship with fellow struggling writers.
Some writers like to go to conventions and find their heroes and pal around with them, buy them drinks and mine them for anecdotes and advice. You can do that, if you’re that sort of person. Carolyn See, in her book Making a Literary Life suggests that you ought to reach out to fellow writers and I suppose editors and industry people with charming notes, handwritten letters in which you thank writers for the work of theirs you have enjoyed; these thank you perhaps include a few insightful comments, and perhaps, are answered, and perhaps, lead to rewarding two way relationships, eventually.
You do not ask writers to your read your manuscripts; that’s what editors and agents do. If you’re persistent.
The purpose of these notes, conventions, of meeting your heroes and editors is that writing can be sort of a lonely business, and somehow, for many, coming together to talk about it can be very very satisfying. There can be some bit of useful advice.
Someone might hand you a copy of the scarecrow’s diploma, the lion’s medal, or the tin man’s heart.
Of course, you have to let yourself do this. You have to imagine yourself as someone worth knowing, someone worth talking to. This should be something you can do, of course, if you expect people to read and pay for your writing. Not everyone is like this; some people write well without hand-holding and drinks and anecdotes and farcical metaphorical objects and shun the socializing. They’re great, and they get read, and more power to them, and you, if you’re one of them.
But most of us want to be in this game with some friends, want some comrades in arms, want a champion, or two, on the editorial side.
I have found they will come to you, by and by, if you don’t get ahead of yourself. (See my series of posts on How Not to be a Writer and don’t get ahead of yourself. Seriously.)
In the company of writers you will find yourself discussing openly the most peculiar and intimate things. In the same way a doctor or painter is supposedly immune to the embarrassment of nudity, some but not all writers feel immune to embarassment with regards to… pretty much everything.
I’m one of those.
I’ll never forget, a one-off workshop I arranged, back when I first let myself imagine myself as someone worth talking to, a discussion of a story, which featured a slip-stream nerd hero ejaculating dust onto the belly of an earth mother type deflower-er. The dust was a metaphor for the guy’s desiccated soul, or something, but it was quite an image, and we all found ourselves wondering out loud if the guy would actually do this.
Was his knowledge of sex based on porn? What kind of porn existed in his world? Is that something people did who didn’t watch porn? Well it’s a form of birth control now isn’t it? Back and forth we debated, a group of men and women, strangers, of marriageable age, not a blush in the crowd.
But when you meet your heroes, your editors, your champions, it’s not really a peer thing, it’s something else; there’s a power imbalance; editors spend a fair amount of time crushing the most cherished dreams of very weird people, which if you think about it for more than a second is a rather brave thing to do.
So you will struggle, with your champion, your hero, to be a somewhat less neurotic, needy, aspergery version of yourself, perhaps.
So I met Ms. Williams, the award winning editor of the award winning magazine at the Brooklyn book fair, and Rob Reed, whose stories in Asimov’s I’ve enjoyed, and a wonderful illustrator named John Allemand, and Emily Hockaday, a magazine staffer who has helped me with my galleys, and I did my best to not act crazy or unappealing, not to talk too much, and to express my joy, my happiness, at becoming a part of the magazine’s history.
Maybe just a four story part; but hopefully more.
Everyone was very nice to me. Ms. Williams radiated a kind of intelligent calm at me. I need more people in my life to do that. My wife needs help.
And I did not ask Ms. Williams about my stories, one of which she has had for perhaps a stastically anomalous number of days.
Annus mirabilis is a Latin phrase that means wonderful year, “year of wonders” or “year of miracles”. (This term originally referred to the year 1666, celebrating its non-awfulness even though it had the number of the beast, ‘666’ in it.) My Annus Mirabilis was my 50th. I’d returned to writing a year earlier and had rebuilt a long neglected community, reconnecting with people I’d written with in the 90s, and made a bunch of new friends as well. I’d decided to give short fiction one last shot.
