Yeah, yeah, the decade starts in 2011, blah, blah. It sounds better this way.
“Mayfly,” a SF story of mine will be appearing in the Warrior Wisewoman anthology. Out sometime later this year. I think. I’ll let you know.
So you can buy, buy, buy!
It’s not for me. It’s for the economy. And because those trees had it coming.
So 2009 has been shoved out the door, disheveled and stammering, and we won’t see it again until someone combines a time machine with an unholy craving for Transformer sequels. So here’s my writing year in review–yeah, other crap happened, but I’m trying to focus here.
Two stories sold- Adam, Unwilling and The Blood of Dead Gods will Mark the Score.
Two stories published- Adam, Unwilling and The Farthest Born.
One award ceremony/workshop attended- Writers of the Future 25.
A few agents poked, with little reaction.
One book mostly finished.
Joined SFWA.
Summation- progress made, but improvement’s needed. Time to buckle down.
So the goals for 2010, just so I have something to feel guilty about next year…
Novels- Finish ‘Little Dutch Girl’ by the end of January (currently at 75K), then start its rewrite after I’ve let some readers tear it apart. Do a rewrite lite on ‘Chosen Wings’, polishing it up. Start 2010 novel–currently lacking a title (and plot)–toward the end of the year. Get serious about badgering agents, editors, and whatever hapless civilians that get in the way about Chosen and Dutch.
Shorts- Keep shopping around what’s done. When done with the current book, plow through the ideas I have for new stories and get a new batch out there.
Work-1000 words a day, 20000 a month (I’m not that bad at math, I’m building in flexibility). At least.
Other- More publish, more awards, more money, more minions.
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything. Short synopsis of life– diaper changes. Keeping the baby from killing herself. Doing as little housework as possible without giving older daughter cause to call social services. Same old, same old.
Writing has been squeezing in there. I started a new novel in September, hoping to have it done by the end of the year. That seems pretty unlikely now, as I just hit sixty thousand words, but January should be doable.
Because of the book, I haven’t let myself mess around with short stories. Much. I did revise the twenty four hour story that I did at the WOTF workshop. Got it critiqued a few times, polished up, and then I sent it off to Fantasy Magazine.
And they bought it.
My third sale. Now, this means something more to me than just another check. First of all, at this stage of my pitiful, crawling blob of a career, any success is a major milestone. But three is special because of a somewhat arbitrary goal I set for myself. I wanted to be able to join SFWA (Sci-Fi and Fantasy Writers of America–like a writers union, but it’s not, go read the web site if you really care). To join, you need to have sold one novel or published 3 short stories in professional markets. This makes three, so now, according to their by-laws, I’m considered a pro writer and can join. Well, once I pay the membership fee, of course.
A pro! I should have a t-shirt made, with PRO written across it.
Or might that be misunderstood?
So what is Writers of the Future? Aka WOTF? Easy answer is to head to their page or wiki it.
But here’s my short response. It’s a writing contest, for speculative fiction works. And it’s cool. Why? Because it’s been around for twenty-five years, it pays well, and it involves some of the best names in sci-fi and fantasy as judges and workshop instructors. And speaking of workshops…
That’s probably been my biggest interest in the contest. The money is nice, the pro sale is nice, and getting your story into an anthology that’s sold world-wide is fantastic. But on top of all that, you get to go to the workshop.
The week before the award ceremony (yeah, they have a fancy ceremony where you get dressed up and people clap and you get treated way better than you probably ever will be again as a writer) you spend a week at a workshop. Provided by the contest, usually with some cool pro like Tim Powers. And that kicks all sorts of ass.
Plus, you do it with all the other winners for the year. Like summer camp. But with laptops instead of S’mores.
When I was fourteen, I took my first stab at getting published.
I’m not one of these people that started compulsively writing when I was a kid. I made up stories all the time, but I was fairly content to let them play out in my head, a much more flexible space than the grammar cage of print on page. But I played with writing sometimes, and the idea of being an author (pronounced auteur) did wander through my career options tree at times. Along with president, astronaut, and ninja.
But in my early teens I came across a book that tempted me to try to actually take an idea, write it down, and send it in to a market. That book was the first volume of the Writers of the Future contest. A contest for beginning writers, and here they were, people who had written in and had their stories printed. And they got money, too. So I wrote something out, and sent it in.
My first rejection came a few months later. Very pretty, a certificate with the name of my story on it in calligraphy. Yeah, calligraphy. It was like one of those ribbons you got for losing the three legged race in play day at school. Sweet. So I sent in another, and got another certificate. Not to surprising really– even at that age, I had a pretty good idea that my stories were not, let us say, good. At all.
I didn’t write for a while after that. No crushing disappointment about my inadequacies, just busy with other things. My storytelling jones got fixed with gaming, and life went on. Then I became a stay at home dad.
Being trapped in a house with a two year old, alone, out in the country, and you start thinking. Thoughts about how you better find something to do with your brain, or it’s going to melt out of your head and all over the kitchen floor. Where you’ll have to clean it up, along with the spilled apple sauce and cat puke. So I started writing again.
After I knocked out a few short stories, I looked to see if the contest still existed. I checked online, didn’t find it and wasn’t surprised. It had been twenty years, after all. Then at a bookstore, I saw it, Writers of the Future Anthology 23, in the new book section. How the hell I had missed it on google I still don’t know, but when I checked online again, there it was. So I started sending things in.
Story one, a fantasy, bounced with an honorable mention. Which means they actually bothered to read it all the way through, and I got my name on their blog. Not calligraphy, but encouraging. Story two, sci-fi, made it to the critique round. Which means it almost got passed along to the final judges, but just missed. So as a consolation prize, I got a critique of the story. So I changed it around, posted it on Baen’s and changed it some more, and that one got bought. Meanwhile, story three was sent in. I was feeling good about this one. It was a good story, and I had progressed up a level with each earlier submission. Surely this one would make it in. And then I got the call.
I was a finalist. Fantastic. I remember talking on the phone, trying to figure out where I had placed. Then I realized I wasn’t done yet. Finalist just means that my story, and seven others, were going to the judges. Three stories from my group would be picked. I’d find out in a month. I gave my thanks, and that was the call. Then, the waiting began. Oh, the waiting.
When the month deadline hit, we were on vacation in a cabin in north Georgia (the state). I had actually bothered learning how to get messages off our answering machine remotely, just in case. I called the machine the day one month had passed. Hoping, hoping, hoping… first place, second, third, I didn’t care. I just wanted to be done with this, to have placed. And crap, there was a message, and I had won second. I called the number back, figuring no one would be there (late evening on a Sunday night) but there was, and I confirmed the details. I’d won! I was in! Second? Oh screw that, yeah!
So anyway, my first sale, and a check in the mail, and something to put on my cover letters. And a trip to California for a fancy ceremony, a chance to meet some great authors, and a workshop with the other winners from the year. Very excited. But… See, I had one the first quarter. Of the year. Which meant the workshop was, roughly a year and a half away. So, waiting, again.
Well, now it’s just about done. I’m getting ready to go to Hollywood– really, that’s where it is. So now I finally have some blogging material. I’ll talk more about the contest over the next few days. Then, after I’m done, I’ll talk about the workshop. If I survive…
(That’s just a dramatic hook. Yeah, I’m flying American, but I have that covered– I’ll bring my own lunch.)
Enough with the short stories. For a while at least. It’s time to move on to book two.
Not the sequel to the first novel I wrote- though I have a rough start on that and a decent outline, I’m leaving it alone. I like the idea, but it’s putting too many eggs in one basket when I have no offers on book one. So I’m moving on to something completely different.
As for the short’s, well I have thirteen different stories on the send list right now. Six sci-fi, four fantasy, and three horror. I’ll just keep bouncing them from market to market, hoping that one will hit hard enough to stick. Which should happen. Real soon.
Right?
One of the editors from Baen’s let me know that ‘Adam, Unwilling’ had gotten reviewed at the Internet Review of Science Fiction. And it’s a good review, which is of course why I’m mentioning it. So yeah me. I’m gonna get myself a cupcake.
For bad reviews, I’ll get a consolation cupcake. Of course.
‘Adam, Unwilling’ is now online. This was the second story I sold, but it’s the first that will be going out to the world. It’s really weird, seeing my name on a cover, but in a definite good way.
One hazard of appearing in an online publication has now occurred to me. I feel highly tempted to go out and get an Iphone or a Kindle, just for the opportunity of brandishing this image in the face of anyone who asks me, ’so what have you written?’
My short stories have a distressing tendency to be not-so-short. What’s the problem with that? Most places pay by the word, right? Yeah, but most places have word count limits too. 4000, 6000, 9000… sounds like a lot, but my not-really-shorts sometimes sprawl past even the 9000, drifting from novelette out towards novella. Which means that sometimes, in order to make a story ready for submission to a certain market, I have to get out the cleaver and go chasing words.
Early this week I took a story called ‘Changeling Fall’ from 9500 words to 9000, so that I could send it out to Strange Horizons. Tonight, ‘A Legion Blade’ is under the knife, so that it can go to Fantasy. 6700 words going to 6000. It’s painful, but good exercise. It forces me to justify every word, which is important in a short story.
And not a bad idea in a novel, either. I mean, does every fantasy book have to be over 500 pages? Books are for reading, not for killing marmots.
Sample stories are problematic. Why? Well, people might read them and decide I’m a hack, that’s one thing.
The other is that I’m actually trying to sell this stuff. If I write a great story (if?), it’s getting sent off to the slush piles to work for a living. Hopefully, it’ll send back a check, otherwise it has to slog on to the next pile. Posting the story on the web before it’s picked up would count as publication and completely nerfs the poor things chance at getting a real job.
If I happened to have a story that made the rounds and was rejected by every market, well, I could publish that. But its failure at selling might suggest that it has some inherent problems, and might not be the best example of my work. And so far, nothing has made it that far down yet. Yet.
That’s the problem. Here’s one work-around. I have a piece of flash sci-fi called Neverland that I did for a contest, mostly just to see if I could write an actual story that had only 500 words. I manage to wring something out, and it got an honorable mention, which hopefully means it’s not completely full of fail. I trotted it out to the one pro flash market, but it bounced. So, shazam, it becomes my gift to you, oh reader.
Mostly so that I can now say- ‘Check out my work at garykloster.com!’ And it’s true. In a truthy sort of way.