One of the things I’m doing in this blog is talking about what it feels like to go from a person making an occasional sale to a semi pro or small press market to selling stories to bigger, national magazines. The August 2014 issue is the first time my name has appeared on the cover of Asimov’s; it’s my forth story published, and the longest piece of my career, a short novella.

I’ve been hugely gratified to have three or four people tell me how much they liked the story on this site. Strangers, from hundreds of miles away. I can’t really tell you what that means to me, other than to say, it’s good.

When you first start writing you imagine readers and accolades and awards, if not tomorrow then some day. As life has it’s way with you, and you settle in for the long haul, you get over that. Writing becomes some part of you, a ritual, meaningful, part of the way you deal with the world, but, often for years, the only people who read what you write are a handful of work shoppers, friends and beta-readers. You forget, almost, that you intended for your work to be read by many.

Then, in some way, it happens, and thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people read your words.

So I’m at tens of thousands now, optimistically.

But it hits you, that you’re out there. You’re putting yourself out there. Sure, it’s fiction. Sure, those characters aren’t you.

But really they’re all you.

The world is you, the characters are you the craft is you the plot is you. Your pessimism or optimism your quirks, your fetishes, your blindspots, your weirdnesses. You’ve cracked open your skull and invited tens of thousands of strangers to wriggle around through thick glistening folds of your cerebral cortex.

Sorry about the thick glistening folds there.

There’s a flash of horror, there. Sure you’ve been trying to do this for decades. Yes, you have succeeded, more so now than ever. But if, like me, you got there by diving deep, mining any and everything you can from a lifetime of peculiar struggle, from a closet packed deep with demons, there’s this ‘oh shit,’ moment, too.

Suddenly you get why people use pen names.

You know that dream, where you suddenly realize you’re not wearing any pants? But you’re out in public? And even though nobody has noticed up to that point in the dream, you know, now that you know, that other people are gonna start noticing. Any second. Are you even wearing underwear?

You’re too scared to check.

So some new muscle needs to get stronger. (This is new metaphor, honestly, stop thinking of me pantless. My eyes are up here.)

The same muscle you first flexed with the first story you shared that scared you spitless; you shared it with a work shopper or beta reader or your friend, and you could see their face and they could see yours and you talked about it.

Your heart hammered in your chest like it was going to burst.

There is nothing like looking someone in the face as they struggle to be honest and supportive about your work–at the same time. Watching them fail, by lying, or by reducing everything you’ve done to ashes, is I think where many of us learn how to write.

(Sending stuff to magazines and editors is different, very easy at first, because you can’t rally visualize them very well and the rejection slips are so terse you often don’t get the feeling anyone is paying attention. Online workshops, ditto. )

Anyway, you’re out there, and people are reading you and they  have opinions. They write reviews. I’ll talk about that next, but to some degree it’s an entirely different thing, than the workshop, because, regardless of what anyone says about your work, it’s been published. It’s out there. You did it. You got paid. Someone believed in you enough to buy you.

Will you get used to walking around pantless?

Only time will tell.

 

 

 

Sometimes, as I wake up, and the world rushes in, I find myself filled with dread. Dear God. I’m trying to be creative. Again. I’m writing. Again. People are actually seeing the work, and reading it, too (have I mentioned my recent sales yet, again? Hm?). As shaky as this gets me, it’s not as bad as when I find myself thinking of this blog, which is mostly me thinking out loud about my own writing life, my own tiny nothing insignificant writing life, which will not be remembered or celebrated, certainly; why bother talking about it at all? I mean, do it, sure, do your bit, do what you can, make the art you must, but for God’s sake, why talk about it?

You’re not that smart, you’re not that talented. Why in the name of God would anyone want to read your take on things?

It’s a stumper.

So, what am I doing?

I want to celebrate my publications and the editors that have bought me and the publications themselves, but, by itself, that’s just narcissism, so, what else do I bring to this table? More narcissism. Narcissism mayo for the narcissism sandwich of this blog. Bon appetite.

What could I be doing? Well, I could be celebrating the work of my peers, talking about the books I’m reading that are affecting me. Of course, that is revealing, too. My reading is scattershot. The book a day habit of my teens has degenerated to a few books a month, and my criteria, for what I read, is unfathomable even to me. I read a lot of YA, I read stuff that is obviously not even aimed at me; I read things that are soothing, I read things that are reactionary, I read things that are challenging and interesting, too, but not nearly enough. Not nearly enough.

I could be projecting a kind of happy persona, a character based on me, which I would have to, of course, make up, which would be somehow… likable? A persona designed to sell my work, to magazines and eventually as books, because eventually, one suspects I must write books.

So, I could do that. I probably should do that.

Instead I lurch out here and tell some version of the truth of what is going on inside my somewhat ordinary mind.

Seriously. What the fuck.

I have bragged here about word counts, and its time to come clean and admit that, because (insert life-based excuse here) I am barely managing a few hundred words a day, which is fine, if you’re Hemmingway, but I’m not, I’m 50 and I have to get off my lazy ass and get this shit done, toot fucking sweet. (Suite?)

My stuff is selling, in a variety of ways. I should be making more. Even if some of what I make I can’t send out, because, after I cool down and look at it, I see, ok, not good. That’s no reason to stop. No reason to stop. No reason to stop. Right? Right.

Wish me luck.

So, in my How Not To Be a Writer series I explored, in depth, the process by which it took me twenty years to make my breakthrough series of sales. I wrote these pieces and this blog to some other version of myself, some younger incarnation, to try to help him or her past the stuff that slowed me down. I also write in the tradition of the wonderful autobiographical sketches by people like Asimov or James Thurber, bits which I often enjoyed as much, or more, than the stories that they surrounded in various anthologies. Not that I deserve such scrutiny. Still, it’s fun.

Who are writers? Where do the come from? Are they like me? What’s it like being a writer? There’s whole rafts of these books out there, it’s a fun sub-genre.

This isn’t that.

For once I’m going to try to be straightforward, to the point.

ADVICE TO YOUNG OR NEW WRITERS BEGINS HERE!

0. Read. Read for pleasure. Also, read higher on the food chain than you want to write and publish. If you want to write like Stephen King, read authors who have more literary fibre than Steven King; because that’s what Steven King does. Read stuff that wins awards and decide if you concur with that judgement. Read reviews and criticism, if only in your genre, but hopefully beyond it as well.

Oh, and read what is being written now, published now, what is winning awards now, what is being talked about now; not exclusively, but this should be a part of what you do, at least, in the beginning. You should read into the past too, but if you’re stuck, in a single era, a single genre, it’s going to be harder for you to get a real sense of what you’re doing.

Because the books you end up writing may not be the book you intended to write. Like it or not, you are a creature of your time and this moment and you cannot help but be informed by it.

1. Write. Write what you want to write. Actually write. Spend actual time writing. If not every day then every week. Measure what you write. Try to write more. Keep trying to write more, until you start spewing utterly useless crap; then write a little less than that. Until the useless crap comes out, though, you don’t know what your capacity really is. Figure this out. When do you dissolve into a shuddering wreck? 2k a day? 5k? 10k?

There’s writing and Being a Writer; being a writer is an identity; writing is an activity. Ideally, these two things line up; in practice, they often don’t. I’ve spoken of Kris Rusche’s Dare to be Bad challenge, of Dean Wesley Smith’s Race Score; if you haven’t read about these things, please do.

In short, don’t let being, or not being a Writer interfere with your writing practice. Write when you feel inspired, and write when you know you’re a fraud. Or perhaps, just edit when you know you’re a fraud.

2. Share what you write with people you have to look at. This can mean classes, face-to-face peer group workshops, graduate programs, internet based workshopping, Here’s a truth. Face to face is better than on-line. Because it’s harder. It’s harder to say sad or hard things to others faces, and it’s hard to hear these things; the whole process hurts much much more, and you can’t shut the pain off by discarding an email or a marked up Word file.

Telling the truth, the whole truth, the hard truth, to another writer is hard because it emboldens them to tell the truth about your writing to you. Learning how to be true without being mean, without being cruel, is difficult. You will screw up and say things you regret. You will be too mean sometimes and too nice other times. But keep trying.

Every workshop, every group of people develops its own internal logic, its own style and tenor; some of these can be damaging and toxic but the rewards, of even a toxic workshop, tend to outweigh the downside.

Honestly, this is a Darwinian environment. The person trashing your story at least read it and showed up to tell you and she thought about it. A lot. To say all those terrible, terrible things.

Professional editors simply do not have the time to do this for you.

They simply don’t. I can say, having had my little breakthrough, that it was form rejects and then acceptances with virtually nothing in between. You can be almost good enough, for years, and you’ll get forms, and then you’ll be good enough, and you’ll get checks. You can be very very close to breaking through and you won’t have a clue, if you don’t have a big, self created honest community giving you feedback.

3. Edit and revise what you write but do not let revisions stop you from writing new stuff. Rewriting doesn’t mean incorporating every suggestion someone gives you. This means hearing critiques and seeing new opportunities in a work; other people will give you permission to add stuff in you wanted to put in; this also means reducing reader confusion; if five, ten people all get the same mistaken impression from your story, the problem isn’t them; it’s your story.

Oh, and sometimes this means cutting, lots and lots of cutting.

There’s a lot of writing that you’ll discover is just you, in character, in deep POV, in the fictive dream, going from place to place in your story; there’s a lot of stuff that you write, that you need to know, that isn’t actually in your story. Other people can help you cut that stuff out.

4. Submit what you have edited. Struggle for publication and readership. I don’t care if you want to be the next Hugh Howy, or the next indypub sensation, still, write finish and submit and search this space. Use a service like Submission Grinder or Duotrope to track your submissions. Follow the rules scrupulously. Stack up rejections. 

Seriously. Stack those things up.

It’s humbling and humiliating and enervating and nauseating. And exhilarating. Because it’s a hard thing to do. It’s hard because nobody can really tell you exactly how to succeed.

You can go to school, and work hard, and go to law school and pass the bar and get a job at a firm and become a lawyer. Making partner of course, is super hard, but the other stuff had rules. Clearly defined rules. On How to Succeed. Tests and courses and content and classes and everything parceled out in bits and bites.

As the rejections pile up, you realize that, in writing, after gaining a modicum of craft and developing a voice, there are no rules, there is no guarantee, you may never make it, all the work might be for naught. and then, you keep doing it some more. And yeah, you console yourself with all the stories of the days of early bitter struggle by the Real Writers you idolize, but honestly, you might not be them. And you know that. You might just suck.

Then you keep doing it anyway.

It will build your character or destroy you; or perhaps just remake you. Because you know what going through something like this is, don’t you? It’s goddamn mythic. It’s heroic. It’s poetic. It will make you into something more than you were before.

I guarantee it.

1. Start novels, never finish them. Write and workshop the first few chapters and then give up, and then start another. Lather, rinse, repeat. The great thing about this is, no one can actually give deep feedback on a fragment. So you’ll shield yourself from deep critiques; you can also disregard a lot of bad things said, figuring, hey, these points will be addressed later on. Only, you know, you never actually do that. 

2. Rewrite the beginning of the novel endlessly. OK, so, you take all the feedback to heart, and now you’re going to make people read your novel correctly. Have the same people look at the draft over and over again. They’ll be able to tell you when you have it right.

2. Submit short fiction to magazines you never ever read. Hey you’re a reader. You have even read a few dozen short stories by a few authors you like in single author collections and in school. So you know more or less what a short story is. So why bother reading the magazines you submit to? They exist to validate your efforts with sales or to galvanize you with rejection slips. They’re not really for reading.

3. Disregard all negative feedback. When people tell you things you don’t want to hear about your writing, figure out what books they like to read that you don’t like, and figure, well, this person has no taste; they liked Twilght or Fifty Shades of Gray or Finnegan’s Wake for God’s sake. you’re not trying to do that.

4. Embrace deeply all negative feedback. The flip side of above. Focus on the most dismissive comments made by work shoppers. Believe mutually contradictory critiques of a story simultaneously.

5. Write as little as possible. A few short stories a year are sufficient to maintain your Writing Identity. So don’t write more than that. 

6. Submitting counts as writing. Have some stories out at places that take a year or two to reply? Well, you’re a writer as long as you have stuff out. Just wait. Those things will sell. Then, you can write some more.

7. Fixate on a tiny number of venues and markets; write in only one genre. Success comes to those that narrow the chances of success to as few avenues as possible, Nobody said, ever.

8. Do not network or communicate in any way with other writers. As we know, most accomplishments occur in pure vacuums. Don’t realistically assess how much work a successful writer you wish to emulate put into their career. Writing will probably get much easier after the thing you have out sells.

9. Immerse yourself in writing peer-group stuff to the point where it eats all your writing time. If a little networking is good, non-stop networking and socializing with a group of writing peers is better. Collect dizzying amounts of mutually contradictory information on every story.

10. Delay, delay, delay. Remember, there’s no rush. Sure, at a 1000 words a week it will take you over a year to write your first novel, but, you know, since first novels so frequently do so well, and sell so quickly, there’s no reason to try to speed that process along.

11. Social media writing counts as writing–you’re building your platform! For this to help you get Nowhere, don’t use metrics on your social media; just assume that lots of people read your stuff. They probably are. After all, you’ve published that one story a few years ago.

12. Never submit your fiction for publication. The great thing about this is, if you never get a professional opinion on your work, you can safely ignore all the peer criticism you’re getting. What do they know? They’re you’re peers. If you submit your work, and get rejected, and the piece is rejected over and over and over again, well… maybe that opinion  your ten workshoppers/beta readers had about the thing was correct. It was confusing. The protagonist was unlikable and erratic. The world made no sense.

So, number 11 has me thinking, time to go and actually write. Good luck to you all.

So I haven’t done a book reading in twenty years. I’m not sure why. I didn’t write, other than blog about my kids, for about fifteen years. Oh, wait, that’s it; I had children. I didn’t see any non-animated movies for a decade either. Also to be frank, people need to needle me to leave the house. What’s strange is I have a great time, whenever anyone drags me to anything; play, musical event, reading, lecture, parade, fetish bar, whatever. I’m delighted to be out of the house. Which I never want to leave.

So I’ll admit that when the teachers at my son’s free-school invited me to a friend’s reading, I assumed I’d skip it. Then Bryce, my son’s teacher, read me a few pages, in which a wise-cracking youngish writer surrogate in a filthy apartment found himself confronted by Lucifer Morningstar. The Devil. And something about the quality of the protagonist’s internal monolog made me want to go. So I hopped on the subway, left my family to their own devices for dinner and homework, and headed out to Porter Square.

Jeremy Bushnell’s reading started where Bryce left off. The youngish (to me) Northeastern University teacher took the podium, and promised to not take his pants off at this event. There was a smattering of applause at that. You could tell there were a fair number of friends and students in the audience of twenty five or so people. Bushnell’s reading was relaxed, unrushed, and thoroughly enjoyable; humorous; the heavily trodden territory fresh in his voice.

When Billy refuses to watch Lucifer’s power point presentation, I decided I had to buy the book.

The second chapter was better than the first; much was made in the text of the coffee which Lucifer had brought with him, and in fact, the Brooklyn Roasting Company had created a special blend of whole bean coffee to commemorate the books launch. You can buy the book and the coffee at the same time here. 

We were told there would be a drawing, to see who won a free pound.

During the Q and A, when a bookstore employee piped up that the first person to ask a question would win the coffee, I piped up with a perfectly ordinary question which I hadn’t thought worth asking. How long have you been writing fiction? Of course, the answer, for as long as I can remember. Jeremy’s first novel is of course, his third or forth—not that he ever marketed the juvenilia. Published by Melville House in Brooklyn as general fiction, we spoke a bit about genre labeling and the rich world of stuff wedged halfway between traditional genre categories and literary fiction.

“There’s a huge space, there, I think,” Jeremy said. “I don’t care where I’m shelved, really. I love fantasy, and fantasy tropes. But what I’m doing with these characters run’s deeper, than what you see in most fantasy.”

I sensed no animus in the statements, not a whiff of condescension, and instead of being offended I got what he was saying. As a BFA without a lot of college level English under my belt I have felt, to a degree, like a naif, as a writer, aspiring primarily to entertain, and then, uncontrollably making art, sometimes difficult and sometimes crappy, instead. Some of the negative reviews of my stories in Asimov’s has made me wonder, at times, what the hell is is I’m actually writing. Or trying to write.

At any rate, I look forward to finishing the novel, and drinking the coffee.

God it’s great to get out of the house.

 

So it’s a tough time for me now, writing wise, which isn’t really intuitive, but there it is. My recent streak of sales should be inspiring, and in fact, it has been; I’ve written a lot of new words, writing to a schedule for a while now. The problem is none of it is anything I can send out.

I’ve had some family, life stuff, of course, but everyone has that, all the time, so it doesn’t feel worth mentioning.

So. I know I need to just write and trust the process, trust myself, trust the universe, let go of expectations for each thing I write, let it be what it is and go on to the next and be glad I can write anything at all; not everyone can. Knowing what you should do and doing it are two different things.

Odd influxes of people reading the blog lately, too, which is strange. Generally speaking I get a few readers every time I post and then the thing dies back to almost nothing. Huh. 

Anyway, my goal for the week is to write 1000 words, every day, in a different place; I’ll post some shots of the interior, I’ll drink the coffee, and I’ll bang out words. If I have to write ‘all work and no play makes jack a dull boy,’ I’ll do that. I’m dead serious.

Part of me wants to just give up and look for regular employment. I had my little moment. It’s over. Some bit of pent up something has spilled out and maybe it will regenerate and maybe it won’t. I need to nurture whatever tiny spark there is inside me, marshall it, not just keep expecting it to roar out of me…

Well, fuck that. I’m fifty. I could be dead tomorrow, in six week, in ten weeks. Hey, if I want to write a goddamn novel? I have to write it NOW. If all there is in me is another ten unpublishable novellas, fine. Whatever. I’m writing the damn things.

I wish I could say it was getting easier. Everybody else seems to know what they’re doing, to have some kind of clue, but me? No idea.

But today the voices started in again, the characters and stories were boiling away, again, and who knows if they’re any good or not really. I guess that’s not for me to decide.

I can do this. Is it worth doing really? Will I ever have fans, people who really care about my work, people who buy something because my name is on it? Can I finish a novel; if I can, can I market or sell it, and if I can, will anyone buy it? Who knows.

But I can write. I know I can. All I have to do is lower my standards, and a tidal wave of crap pours out. I’ll pick through that. If it’s garbage it’s garbage and I’ll chuck it.

Trust the process, trust the process, trust the process. Say it with me. Trust the process.