The Horse and the Carrot – A story of perseverance

by Ryan McFadden

So I had a book come out. That was October, and now it’s January, and I’ve yet to hit the NYT best seller list, or the Macleans best seller list, or even the London Free Press best seller list, or any list at all. In fact, from my perspective, it feels more like a whimper than anything else. Oh, I’ve been trying – trust me, I’ve been trying to flog this book wherever I can without being rude about it. I believe in it, I think it will entertain my readers (by saying ‘my’ I mean readers that are typical of the dark fantasy story that I tell).

However, success is a funny concept. I graduated a creative writing program from York University. I loved university, and I loved the experience, and I always thought that I’d be successful quickly. My best friend gave me six months to hit it big. That was 1995.

It would take another 12 years before I made my first professional sale: a tiny little story called Last Rites (which can be found here: http://www.ryanmcfadden.com/541/).  I made $5 and I was a professional writer (though I never cashed the cheque).

12 years. That’s a long time to be alone in the wilderness.  During that time, I continued to write and I completed five novels (though really it was a 10-year period when I did that).  There’s that whole concept that you have to spend 10,000 hours on something to become good at it. Well, my 12 years was about right. None of those novels will ever see the light of day.

From there, I sold another few stories for a few bucks here and there. My good friend Eileen Bell asked me to come onto a project called The Women of the Apocalypse. They wanted a novella! Why, if I could get a novella in there, I’d be happy. Who knows what doors it could open? Women of the Apocalypse exceeded expectations and we won an Aurora award for it. Why, everything is perfect now, right? Yes, for about three days.

Then came a call for submissions for Evolve 2: Tales of the Future Undead by Nancy Kilpatrick. Why, if I could get a story included in there, I’d be set! Sure enough, I sold a story. Everything was going to be right in the world. And it was, for about two weeks.

You can see here I’m going with this: more stories, more awards, more Auroras, more inclusions in successful anthologies, and now, finally, my own novel.  Success! Right? Meh. These are all things that I wanted so badly – and don’t get me wrong, they are 100% awesome – but they still don’t quantify as success.

I’m sure as human beings, we always want more. A little more success, a little more money, a little more love. It’s like playing a video game where you’ll stop playing once you just kill this boss…

Success is a perspective.  I also wonder if I looked around at some of the things I’ve accomplished (that all seemed impossible only 7 years ago) and thought ‘wow, you’ve finally done it’ if I’d stop. Throw up my hands and say “I’ve done what I need to do here, time to call it a day.” Maybe. Maybe the lack of success is what drives perseverance.

There are many who claim to love writing: unicorns dance over rainbows and little orphans find homes. But not for me. I don’t particularly enjoy my time writing. I find it difficult – nearly painful sometimes, but I also find it’s something I absolutely must do, that my whole being is centred on striving forward.

This all sounds so incredibly negative, but it wasn’t meant to be. It was that our benchmark for success continues to move ahead, which in turn, drives us forward. Perseverance is the cart or the horse, and the success is the carrot, just slightly out of our reach…

 

About Ryan McFadden:

I am a writer of fantasy and horror, with short stories and novellas published through Dragon Moon Press, Edge SF & F, and Absolute X-Press. In 2014, my novella Ghost in the Machine won the Aurora Award (Canada’s most prestigious award for SF&F) for Short Fiction.

My motley past involves such dangerous work as database administration, ice cream flavouring (seriously, that’s a thing), hockey league administration, screen printing, web design, furniture building, and home renovations.

He lives in London with his two beautiful, but sometimes diabolical daughters, who he is sure are plotting to one day overthrow him.

My other writing credits include stories in Chicago Overcoat, Afterburn SF, Sinister Tales, as well as a finalist in the $1500 JFJK contest, a semi-finalist in the Writer’s of the Future (as well as receiving two Honourable Mentions)

http://www.ryanmcfadden.com/

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Luck Favors the Prepared

Persistence of Writing

by Loren Rhoads

 

In 2007, my husband was approached by a New York agent looking for someone to write a book on independent Japanese music.  Mason would have been a perfect candidate to write the book, but he didn’t feel ready to take on the project.  So the contact languished, until I had a proposal written for a book of essays I’d edited.

When I queried to Mason’s would-be agent about Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, I got no response.  I let a month pass, then queried again. This time the agent wrote back to say he wasn’t interested, but his assistant was.  She was becoming an agent herself and wanted to see my proposal.

The day she agreed to represent my book was one of the happiest of my life.  I became Hannah’s second client. Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues was the second book she sold.  In June 2008, it went to auction and won a five-figure advance.  I thought I had it made:  New York agent, book contract with Scribner.  My agent was interested in representing my fiction as well as the nonfiction. We talked about my writing career.  She said she was in it for the long haul.  Scribner saw my book as a perennial and wanted to keep it in print.

Then the economy collapsed.  The day my advance check came, my bank failed.  Everyone else was in line at the local branch of Great Western Bank to take their money out. I alone was depositing a check. The bank was insured, so I stood a chance of getting the money someday. If I didn’t deposit it and the bank the check was written on failed, it might be a meaningless scrap of paper.

Because the subject matter of the book was dark, Scribner decided to publish the book in October 2009.  I worked hard that month, talking to 17 radio hosts across the country, reading in 11 bookstores from LA to Seattle.  I interviewed all the contributors to the book on my blogs. I did everything I could think of to sell books.  Then the holidays came along and no one was interested in talking about dark subjects any more.

Borders closed.  Indie bookstores closed.  My publisher decided to pulp the paperbacks, but keep the ebook in print indefinitely.

I sent my agent a proposal for a completed book of cemetery travel essays.  She made me revise the proposal over and over to answer the question of why anyone would want to visit cemeteries (a question it took me 332 pages to answer in the book itself).  She had nibbles on the proposal, but no one would commit to the book.

Over the next three years, I sent her a completed urban fantasy novel. A completed horror romance.  A completed space opera. A completed collection of previously published morbid personal essays.

In the end, I sent her a total of six books.  She sold one.  She took a proposal for another, but couldn’t find a home for it.  I was crushed.  I wondered if I’d ever sell another book.  I spent several months so depressed I barely wrote anything.  I felt like I was mourning a break-up, even though my agent never officially broke up with me.  It was just that the agency she worked for had morphed from representing interesting edgy work to selling celebrity cookbooks.  My work didn’t fit their mission any more.

A friend I met through the Horror Writers Association asked if I had any books for his new publishing company.  He bought my collection of cemetery essays. A small publisher that I met at a World Horror Convention bought the horror romance.  An author I read with said he was working at an ebook publisher and asked if I had anything he could read.  He bought my book of morbid personal essays.

I contacted one of the guys who worked at Borderlands Bookstore, my local genre bookstore. He’d co-founded an indie science fiction publisher that had been subsumed by a New York publisher, but he was still working for them as an acquiring editor. I told him I’d written a space opera he might like.  When I submitted it, I told him I had a Nanowrimo draft of a sequel to the first novel.

Two weeks after I submitted The Dangerous Type, Jeremy asked to see the unfinished sequel.  Then he wrote to say he’d told the publisher they should offer me a three-book contract.  “You can write a third book, can’t you?” he asked me, after the fact.

Three years after the last rejection from my agent, I’ve had four books published.  They include Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel (Western Legends Publishing), As Above, So Below (Black Bed Sheets Books), The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two (Damnation Books), and All You Need is Morbid (Wattpad).  Getting all those books into print helped secure the contract for the trilogy that will be coming out over the next five months.

Three years ago, I was so close to giving up writing.  The goal of my life had been to sell a book to a big New York publisher.  I thought that having an agent who was as committed to my career as I was meant that I had it made.  And then everything fell apart.

The seven books I’ve sold since leaving the agency haven’t netted me anything near the five-figure advance my agent scored for me, even cumulatively.  That big advance almost ended my writing career:  my book didn’t earn out its advance and that made me a bad risk for any other big publisher.  If I hadn’t gotten greedy, egged on by my agent’s enthusiasm, I could have made a smaller New York publisher very happy.  Instead, I had to get out of Dodge.

Each book I’ve sold on my own has been a step on the ladder back to the career I’ve always wanted.  Money is great, but what I really want is for people to read my books.  Every kind email from a reader, every glowing comment on Facebook, every great review makes the sacrifices worth it.

This past year has been rough.  Even though I signed the contract with Skyhorse for the space opera trilogy in February 2014, I didn’t get the editor’s notes on the first book until mid-October.  I finished the final draft of The Dangerous Type by mid-November, then dove into Kill By Numbers.  I expanded it from the 50,000-word Nanowrimo draft into a complete first draft.  The final draft of that book went in the first week of February. Then I turned to No More Heroes, which was nothing more than two scenes and an outline when I began.  I wrote the first draft, got the editor’s notes, and turned in the polished final draft on June 8.

No way could I have written and revised a 95,000-word book in five months without the training I’ve gotten writing all those earlier books, both the published and unpublished ones.  When it comes out in November, No More Heroes will be my tenth published book.  It’s the seventh novel I’ve written.

The most important lesson I’ve learned from all of this is to never quit.  The more people you meet – editors, publishers, other authors – the more opportunities will be presented to you.  That’s important and useful, but if you haven’t done the work – if you haven’t written the words, haven’t learned the tricks you need to keep your body in the chair, your fingers on the keyboard, plowing forward – all the opportunities in the world won’t help you.

Write the books you want to read. Do it for yourself. Luck favors the prepared.

The Dangerous Type trilogy:  http://lorenrhoads.com/writing/the-dangerous-type/

Loren’s blog: http://lorenrhoads.com/blog/
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/loren.rhoads.5
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/morbidloren
On Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Loren-Rhoads/e/B002P905PE

What is Success?

“My friend told me about your book. She said it was great! So I was excited to find it in my book bag! ”

Pinch me, someone. But no, it wasn’t a dream. A fan stood before me handing me my novel to sign at World Fantasy Con last year. How do I measure success? At that moment, all my years of writing had been wrapped up and tied with a bow with balloons floating overhead. Singer of Norgondy was being talked about by readers I’d never met! Wow.

Tea cup moments. I write fantasy novels. And I help edit the online genre magazine New Myths (check it out! the spring issue just came out at newmyths.com) I don’t “see” stories generally in the modern world around me. But my fantasy world is crowded with characters shouldering their shovels and circling me, shouting at me, heigh ho, it’s off to work you go. Decades of writing. Never really caring enough to publish. Just needing to write their stories. And more stories. And more stories…

There is an exception to my writing only fantasy. The real world does come alive with stories that have to be written in what I call tea cup moments. The closest literary term is flash fiction. But these flashes aren’t necessarily fiction. They’re the moments in people’s lives around me that shine with a sudden understanding. Most people walk around, day in, day out, same ol’, same ol’, in a pantomime, not necessarily unhappy, not necessarily in drudgery, just…unaware. Then that tea cup moment strikes, and they’re in a elevated moment of self-perception. The world sharpens and their life comes into focus enough for them to glimpse who they are, why they are, or who they could be. You can see it when people enter that state or hear it in their words when they make an observation of it. That startled moment can define them in your memory of them from then on. My father, for example, stood in the howling wind watching the sunset before his heart operation. His white hair whipped about his head, his eyes sparked bright blue. “Anyone can love a beautiful day,”he said, facing the coming storm. “But this, this is living!” Thirty years later, beyond all my other memories of him, I still see him in that one precious moment that defined him to me. A moment so short you can hold it in your hand, like a tea cup puppy, and once caught, you have to clutch it hard forever before it’s gone. Those are the moments I write about the real world. When real people sharpen into characters with a perception of life.

My tea cup moment as a writer came at that signing table at World Fantasy Con. I’ve signed copies of Singer of Norgondy many times at several signing tables. But that first fan who said her friend had told her told how good my novel was before she ever came to the Con and met me, defined success for me. Thank you, whoever you are, I’ll remember you all my life.

I self-published Singer of Norgondy. I’ve written novels for almost 40 years, my obsessive compulsion. But I was never interested enough in trying to publish my novels, not enough to go to a publisher or go to an agent. I’m not exactly an Emily Dickinson as some people have called me, I do like other people reading my novels, I do like other people enjoying them and finding the ideas in them interesting. But I wanted only to learn how to write, how to bring characters to life, how to make each novel better, each a little closer and truer to the world as I see it or wanted it to be. I attended the first Odyssey workshop in 1996 and started writing Singer there. I learned then that other people really did like my fantasy writing, enough that my classmates wanted me to moderate our first reunion workshop in what was to become the glorious TNEO workshop for graduates of Odyssey. Now, almost 20 years later, I’ve finally decided to start bringing out my novels, letting others read them.

So self-publishing was an ideal option for me. It’s the only way I would have published at all. Singer of Norgondy is available on Kindle and as a trade paperback at Amazon and bookstores, and even in a few libraries. It fairly consistently earns 5 stars from readers. My other works and more about my fantasy world can seen at my website holdenstone.com — I welcome all of you to come join me there and offer suggestions and comments.

Self-publishing, self-promoting, what little I do of it, works for me. But would it for you? If you are a novelist listening for advice, would I recommend self-publishing? I don’t know. It’s not an easy road. You possibly might sell more if you go through a publisher — that is, if the publisher actually promotes your book (not good odds on that, unless you’re already a famous author), and if your novel sells off the shelves within the first two weeks of its launch. Have you ever noticed how a bookstore is like a graveyard for remaindered books? Dreams and hopes and years of hard work that were poured into those thousands of books that never sold and will never be read, a bookstore can be the saddest place in the world for me. But e-publishing and print on demand books are a whole new story, increasing the chances of your novel being read for years to come. And self-publishing– as long as your book is very well edited or workshopped — can be a great option for making your novel available without a begging a publisher to “please, just look at it.” (And agents? I honestly don’t think agents have much of a future in publishing anymore, at least not for an author just starting out, why beg them at all to be nothing but a middle man for something you can do yourself now?)

But self-publishing is not for everyone. It still does carry a sting of illegitimacy. Unfortunate, but true. It doesn’t carry the prestige of a novel brought out by a publishing house. At the major Texas state fantasy convention in Austin, you can’t be on a panel or give a reading if your novels are self-published. Thankfully World Fantasy Convention held each fall no longer has that official bias, and other conventions will slowly, I think, follow suit. But we’re not there yet. Also, at some independent bookstores it’s hard to ask for a reading or a signing event if your novel is self-published. At a few you even have to PAY! them for the privilege of displaying your self-published book for a week or two, and pay them $100 more to do a signing there or even more to do a reading in a back room. On their side, I can see their point, there are so many self-published authors who would swamp small independent bookstores without any guarantee their novel is good enough for the bookstore to sell. A novel sent by a publishing house may or may not be any better, but at least the independent bookstore owner knows the novel was at least read and accepted by an editor. But for self-published novelists, that bar to distributing your books is still pretty unfair. And above all, remember, having someone else — a publisher — promote your novel is probably still the easiest route to getting the word out about it.

So, although I’m happy with my experience of self-publishing Singer of Norgondy, and I plan to self-publish more of my novels, I probably don’t recommend it yet to everyone.

Good luck, and I hope to read you too, someday.

Just One Editor’s Opinion

Just One Editor’s Opinion

By Vonnie Winslow Crist

This is the first tale of perseverance I usually tell a writers’ group or classroom. It’s not a pretty tale, and alas, it is only one among many moments in my writing and illustration career where good old-fashion determination opened a door. Or in this case, a magazine page.

I’d already had several dozen poems published in literary and speculative (science-fiction, fantasy, horror) magazines in both the USA and UK when I started to submit fiction. My stories were very short at the time – barely drifting to word counts above the flash fiction level. Still, it was a big step for me to leave the comfortable poetry niche and venture into the unknown world of prose.

When you have even slight success publishing your writing (which you can cheerfully list in your cover letter), many people think all of your worries vanish. I’m here to tell you, “Nope!”

Whether you’ve had one story or 100 published, the acceptance or rejection letter will most likely be based on one editor’s opinion. What if the editor is having a bad day when they read your submission? What if the editor has a cold or their babysitter didn’t show up or they had a fight with their mom or a deer ate their bean plants or… Well, you get the idea.

Let’s get back to the story: I’d completed an odd tale about animal crackers. Using a market source similar to www.ralan.com , I’d found several markets which sounded like they might be a good fit for “Animal Crackers.”

I carefully typed (yes, I’m talking a typewriter) a copy of “Animal Crackers” along with a cover letter. Then, I folded the 6 pages of white paper in thirds, and slipped the submission along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope into an envelope carefully addressed to a small press speculative magazine published in New England.

How do I know it was six pages? In those days, you could send a cover letter, a 5-page story (or 5 poems), and a SASE for one stamp. If you sent 7 pages or used really “good” paper, then the envelope was too heavy and you needed to get it weighed at the post office. (I live in a rural area, so the Post Office is not close).

While I waited to hear from New England Editor, I worked on other stories and poems. About 10 days later, my SASE arrived in my mailbox. Hoping for an acceptance, I opened the envelope and read one editor’s opinion of my story. I will paraphrase, but rest assured this is nearly a word-for-word rejection letter:

“Dear Mr. Crist (yes, I am a Ms.), This is to inform you we won’t be using ‘Animal Crackers.’ It is a terrible story, and I see no value in your writing. Please do not send anything else to us. In fact, I would encourage you to stop writing and find something else to do with your time. Regards, New England Editor”

For a minute, maybe 2, I felt like crying. The rejection note was personal and unkind. What sort of person would write such a mean rejection? Then, I did what I’ve done many times since, I sat up straight and looked up the next magazine on my list of prospective publishers for “Animal Crackers.”

New England Editor had returned my story in excellent condition: no tears, no coffee stains, no smell of cigarettes – so I didn’t even retype the story. I wrote a new (though nearly identical) cover letter to Virginia Editor, slipped it and the story along with a SASE into an envelope and sent it to the next small press magazine on my list. Then, I went back to work on other stories and poems.

About 10 days later, my SASE arrived in my mailbox. I opened the envelope and read one editor’s opinion of my story. I will paraphrase, but again, this is nearly a word-for-word acceptance letter:

“Dear Ms. Crist, This is to inform you we will be using ‘Animal Crackers.’ It is a wonderful story. Please send us more of your work for future issues. You should receive your contributor’s copy in about 6 weeks. Best Wishes, Virginia Editor.”

So why an acceptance the 2^nd time around? Both Editor #1 and #2 were male and about the same age, ran a speculative small press magazine, paid in free copies, and had similar circulation numbers. Both editors had professional credentials of about the same level.

The difference between a nasty rejection and a gushing acceptance letter was simply: One Editor’s Opinion. Whether an editor loves your work or hates it often has nothing to do with your writing. It can have everything to do with the editor and what’s going on in their life. Or perhaps, the editor has just accepted a story thematically similar to yours or maybe they have a prejudice against stories told in the first-person or they only have room for a 2,500-word tale or…

Rejection letters are not something to shed tears over, rather they should challenge you to submit again (and again and again if necessary). You need to believe in your writing. Let me repeat that, you need to believe in your writing. Double-check for errors (or coffee stains) and submit rejected work to another editor. Because in the end, it’s just one editor’s opinion.

Vonnie Winslow Crist’s poems, fiction, and nonfiction have been published in Italy, Spain, Finland, Australia, Canada, the UK and USA. Her YA fantasy novel, “The Enchanted Skean,” was a 2014 Compton Crook Award Finalist, and both of her recent story collections, “Owl Light” and “The Greener Forest,” were voted Top Ten Books in the P&E Readers Poll. A Pushcart nominee and 2-times Writers of the Future Honorable Mention winner, Vonnie’s stories regularly appear in speculative anthologies and magazines.

Buy Link: http://tinyurl.com/Vonnie-Winslow-Crist-Amazon

Website: http://vonniewinslowcrist.com/home

Blog: http://vonniewinslowcrist.wordpress.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/WriterVonnieWinslowCrist

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/vonnie_winslow_crist

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/VonnieWCrist

My Inglorious Writing Career

My Inglorious Writing Career

by Christie Maurer

I first started writing in 1951 at age 14—a spy story while my father and I were visiting my uncle after my mother’s funeral.

I held my firstborn book in my hand in July 2013. I knew I had to write, and if people couldn’t relate to my stories then I could improve them.

My parents wanted me to be a teacher, but I feared 4-year college and went to secretarial school. I ended up in the Pink Ghetto despite a BA in Creative Writing from Goddard College (1959-61) and an MPA from Cal State Hayward (1979-82).

At Goddard I wrote Novel #1 and did a study on Proust and Impressionism. Finished midyear, cast off 200 years of New England heritage and took a Greyhound across the country.

January 1, 1962 I arrived in L.A. and got a job as editorial secretary for a quarterly journal at UCLA. There I corrected spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure, copy-fitted, formatted, marked type, proofread. At home I rewrote and submitted Novel #1 and got rejections. I joined a writers’ group. BTW We scheduled a writing get-away at Big Bear Lake on the weekend of 11/22/63 and listened to the Kennedy Assassination instead.

A novel writing class at UCLA Extension indicated that Novel #1 needed a total rewrite. That was B.C. (Before Computers) and I couldn’t face it. I quit and soaked up the 60s—Beatles, Carl Jung and dream work.

August 1971 God’s foot landed on my backside. In three days I ditched 9 years in L.A., found a job at UCSC Extension and a guy with a flatbed to move me. On my balcony up in The Valley, surrounded by redwoods, the river down below, I knew I was home.

A friend suggested I write my personal myths. I wrote up a few dreams as stories but didn’t know how to market them. Thirty years later, after several hundred rewrites, I sold “A Maiden’s Heart” (formerly “After the Dragons were Slain”) for $5 to mytholog.com.

By 1978 I’d written Sir Lancealot and the Had-Been Princess, a 17,300 word “novel” but had no idea how to sell it. I had no idea about world building either, but that piece contains the story outline, characters, and themes of my current WIP.

I went to journal workshops and “saw” images during meditation exercises that told stories—like the last true High Priestess, exiled to die alone in the desert.

In the mid 80s my boss put a computer on my desk. Come to Mama! I blew a wad on a 50 lb. “portable” and rewrote The Novel, called variously Sir Loriano and the Had-Been Princess, Troubadour, or Dragon Gold. By 1989 it had been rejected by every Sci-Fi and Fantasy publisher in the country. I gave up.

1991 during a meditation exercise at a journal workshop, the High Priestess appeared: “Do it! —Or Else!” (Yes, Mother.) I discovered Writers’ Market and sent out short stories. Two were accepted in tiny, typo-ridden publications. The only novel writing-group I found was the local Romance Writers of America chapter. At the first meeting I learned why every publisher in the country had rejected my novel. I joined and learned fiction-writing Kindergarten level up—plotting, dialogue, character development, motivation, conflict, etc. And “how to be a writer” (synopses, partials, agents, submissions, editors). I went to conferences and workshops, Sci-Fi Cons, joined professional level SF&F critique groups. The Novel grew branches and assumed multiple shapes.

I retired in fall 1995 and by spring 1996 The Novel was 142,000 words, entitled The Dark Lady’s Troubadour. I had synopses and draft chapters for The Dark Lady’s Servant (prequel) and The Dark Lady’s Priestess (sequel). I found an agent (didn’t work out), and connected with a NY editor (ditto).

2002 I joined Broad Universe and went to ConJose.

2005 I found a superb critique group and began doing NaNoWriMo where I wrote out my beloved Ancient World stories about Karié, the last true High Priestess.

2007-08 I tossed off the 6,000 word “Dark Lady’s Stone” as an introduction to Troubadour. I was implementing my critique group’s suggestions when a shaman appeared and transformed it into a 113,000 word novel. I committed writer-heresy and started submitting to e-presses, and collected rejections.

Writing saves my life. The Fall –7/18/11—broken femur, steel plate, Rehab. I lost so much muscle I couldn’t stand even after months of PT—the Cadillac of wheelchairs. Dreams of Death standing at the foot of my bed. (FYI he looks like an East Indian weight lifter.)

I got out my MacBook Air, chugity-chug to Starbuck’s in my wheelchair, and opened up my rewrite of Dark Lady’s Troubadour. Words, characters, and story unfolding under my cursor reconnected me to Life. I followed up on submissions of Dark Lady’s Stone)—“almost but not quite” rejections. I kept submitting and in 2012 sold stories, “Heritage” to White Cat Press and “Whitewood Kitarra” to American Athenaeum’s Sword & Saga.

Winter 2013 I awoke in the dark sensing I wouldn’t live until summer. Too many people die before they’ve fulfilled their lifetime ambitions and mine was been to hold my book in my hand.

SCREW THEM ALL! I’LL SELF-PUBLISH!

A week after I found a free-lance editor and cover artist I started bleeding profusely. Three doctors said Cancer. I wrote back cover copy while recovering from surgery. Then the pathologist said, “Benign.” A week later I came down with pneumonia. Some nights I didn’t know if I’d wake up. I did.

I loved the cover and my freelance editor loved the book—why hadn’t somebody published it? I called back skills learned in the early 60s and formatted both print and e-editions myself.

When I held that firstborn book, The Dark Lady’s Stone, in my hand, I wept.

Selling is another matter altogether.

You can follow Christie’s blog here.

My Story – Maria V. Snyder

Our next guest blogger is the amazing, New York Times Bestselling Author, Maria V. Snyder, whom I got to know through Seton Hill University. Her newest book “Shadow Study” just came out. Maria’s website and contact information is below her entry.

 

My Story

My very first writing attempt was while I attended Penn State University as an undergraduate meteorology major.  I started a science fiction novel about a girl who had just graduated college and was scuba diving off the coast of Florida.  She gets “sucked” into the future while underwater.  You see the people of the future were starving because of all the animal extinctions and they used time travel to bring food to their world.  Not a bad premise for a SF story, but the execution…awful!  The attempt was abandoned after one chapter.

When I graduated Penn State, I found employment as an environmental meteorologist for a consulting firm.  Work came in waves and during the “lulls” I started writing cheesy SF short stories.  I attended a writing conference in Philadelphia and submitted one of them to a professor who was teaching the short story workshop.  The professor provided feedback and gave me a 7 out of 10 possible points.  I asked her if I had any talent and she said the 7 was one of the higher marks.  Thrilled, I kept writing.  If she had told me I didn’t have an aptitude for writing, I would have stopped and found something else to do!

I tried to sell my short stories to the various short story magazines like Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Nothing sold.  Eventually I sparked on an idea for a fantasy novel about a poison taster and began writing.  During this time, I took classes and attended writing conferences all to learn about the craft and business of writing.  I also found a writing critique group and they were wonderful with feedback and providing motivation.  I wrote one chapter a month so I had something to handout to my critique group.

When I finished Poison Study, I revised it a couple times and thought I had a pretty good story.  I sent it to literary agents first.  Forty agents rejected it.  Then I made a list of publishers who accepted unagented submissions.  The list had 20 markets.  Starting with number 1, I mailed what they requested (mostly the first 3 chapters and a synopsis).  The rejections rolled in.  One after the other.  Lots of ice cream and chocolate therapy ensued. 😉

While the rejections piled up on my desk, I considered doing other types of writing.  In June 2003, I submitted a bunch of non-fiction article ideas to a number of local magazines, I applied to Seton Hill University’s graduate school for a Masters in writing (I liked to teach so maybe I could teach writing), I submitted a proposal to write a thirty-year history of a local candy company, and I sent Poison Study to this new imprint at Harlequin called LUNA Books – they were number eighteen on my list of publishers – I only had two left and I was determined to send my book to them all.

All summer I waited for replies.  Nothing.  September came and went without a single letter or phone call.  Was this a sign that writing wasn’t my thing?  Should I go back to meteorology?

I’ll never forget October 3, 2003.  Never!  The phone rings and a woman with a British accent is on the other end.  At first, I thought it was for my husband since his job takes him all over the world, but she asks for me.  She’s an editor with LUNA Books and loves Poison Study.  Blink.  Blink.  Blink.  Excuse me, but could you say that again?  She wants to buy Poison Study and a second book.  I have a second right?  Uh…Yes, of course! (actually no, but I had a year to write what would become Magic Study).

Happy dances ensued and squeally phone calls to my husband, mother, neighbor, and strangers—yes, I was that excited.  What a wonderful feeling and how could life get any better?  Well…the next week I received a phone call from an editor at Harrisburg Magazine.  She loved my article ideas and could I write four articles for her.  Uh…sure.  No problem!  Then a letter arrived soon after.  Congratulations, you’ve been accepted to graduate school!  Wow, that’s…er…fantastic.  Another phone call announced that my proposal to write the candy company’s history has been accepted.  Here’s money, go write the book!  Gulp!

You know the expression, “someday your ship will come in” – well, in October 2003, a whole flotilla arrived and my port was full!  Amazing!

One piece of advice that I heard over and over again during all that time was persistence and I really didn’t think it’d work, but in my case it did!  Persistence also helped me to write all those articles, finish Magic Study, research the candy company, and attend graduate school.

You’d think an acceptance of my novel would have given me more confidence for writing fiction, but Poison Study had been rejected fifty-seven times, and, in the back of my mind, I suspected LUNA Books only bought it to be nice.  Yes, I know it was silly, but that was how I thought until I attended Book Expo in New York City the summer before Poison Study was published.  Not only was my editor excited about the book, but the sales team was gushing, the PR staff was thrilled, and the Barnes & Noble book buyer stopped to talk to me.  It was fantastic and it made me realized that they weren’t being “nice” and that I had talent.

I continued to write and teach.  My thirteenth novel, Shadow Study was just released, and I have also published seventeen short stories, and dozens of articles.  I’ve been on the New York Times bestseller list, won eight awards, and my books have been translated into sixteen languages.

So my career is well established and I don’t ever receive rejections anymore.  Right?  Wrong!  I still get rejections for my novel ideas and short stories.  I’m determined to have a short story published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction before I die!  And a short creative non-fiction piece of mine was just rejected by Seton Hill’s literacy magazine!  My bruised ego didn’t hurt too long as they did accept a couple of my photographs.  But still!

Now I’m working on novel number fourteen and it’s a huge lumbering beast – I wish I could tell you writing gets easier with success, but it doesn’t.  In fact, now I worry about disappointing my readers and writing the same plot over and over again.  But I look at my stack of books and think, I did this before and I can do it again, just keep on persisting, keep on putting the words down.

 

And don’t give up.  Ever!

 

For more information on Maria, you can find her here:
http://www.MariaVSnyder.com
http://www.facebook.com/ mvsfans

Catastrophe and Transformation: One Writer’s View of Survival and Success

I am pleased to open up the Stories of Perseverance blog with a posting by Jason S. Ridler, PhD. Jason was a classmate of mine at the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2005. Our desks were next to each other and he never ceased to amaze me with his wealth of knowledge about the genres of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror, the books, the authors. He had so many ideas, and such a great sense of humour. After Odyssey, Jason and a couple of other classmates of ours challenged each other to write a story a week for a month or two. At one point he had 50 stories circulating the slush piles, and he racked up hundreds of rejections that first year.

When I asked Jay to guest blog for me, once again, I was blown away by what he had to say. Jay, you inspire me.

Sherry

CATASTROPHE AND TRANSFORMATION: ONE WRITER’S VIEW OF SURVIVAL AND SUCCESS

By Jason S. Ridler, PhD.

WARNING: This article will not end with me being rich and famous, having a bestseller or a million-dollar movie deal, or even being able to quit my day job. Nor will it instruct you on how to hit those targets. If those are your goals, please, go elsewhere.  It is inspired by the recent works of Rachel Nabors, Carrie Vaughn and Kameron Hurley on work, creativity, and careers. 

Summer 2013. My life collapsed. My marriage was ending. I was unemployed. And my mother was diagnosed with and then killed by four different cancers. I had three of the five most stressful psychological crises happening simultaneously. All certainty, stability, and normalcy shattered. Including my ideas about art, writing, and money. I say this because catastrophe, while horrific, can be transformative. It was for me.

Between 2009 and 2013 I struggled with my desire for a writing “career.” After ten years writing short stories, I quested to be a career novelist in the commercial marketplace. I thought I had what it took. My stuff is character driven, full of action and strong dialog, and dark. Much of that ilk was making a mint. Why not me?

But my relentless desire, efforts, and hubris to beat the odds blinded me to this goal’s external hardships (the nature of the marketplace, the Great Recession, etc). Worse, I struggled with accommodating market demands. My novels were afar from what the trade market wanted (novels about wrestling, fat kids, and a thriller with a female lead, which, according to some, might give the dominant male readership syphilis) that they weren’t really accommodations at all. There are other reasons, too. Agent shifts. Bad psychology. Private shit. Bottom line? These works did not sell, let alone generate a career. And it was my fault.

Navigating between what the market wanted and what I was driven to write proved, in hindsight, impossible. I actively despised much of the work I’d read in the genres where I was told I would “best” fit. So I tried to recoup a novel career by publishing my work online during the “Ebook Hysteria” of 2011-2013. Despite polemics about freedom from convention, everyone had a formula or myriad of rules for “success” in this world (series novellas, perpetual content, fantasy and thriller genres, covers with big boobs or chicks holding things, unending PR efforts, publishing everything you ever wrote with shitty covers, writing novels in a week). I tried my best. I wrote five novels in two years. Had covers made. Tried to crank the PR machine. The late Lucius Shepard liked and blurbed one of my novels, which for me was praise from Caesar. But my most common review remains “I never thought I’d like a novel like this one, but I did!” Hardly box-office gold. A few bucks, sure, but I’d made more cash with a pro short story sale. In this world as well, I was financially unsuccessful.

In terms of my career goals, I was fucked.

I’d written eight novels in three-and-half years trying to find the right book, books, or approach for success. I’d also finished 75% of a popular non-fiction book that would have had a real life-saving payday. None of them sold. I was burned out, at the brink, and terrified. I’d failed. Every major effort to make a living as a writer crashed. The amount of self-hate I’d generated was blinding.

Then 2013 happened.

All the writer-career-talk became piss in the wind.

Worrying about how to write a bestseller, or doing a blog tour, or using the advice of every Tom, Dick and Konrath about an ebook revolution. . . all of it is meaningless when you watch a loved one die, end a marriage, give up animals you cared for, or sell what you own to eat. For a blip I hoped publishing might help against the mess I was in. After all, these works were “assets” that I could play. Sadly, hope is desperation in disguise. My agent didn’t save me with a great deal in traditional publishing. My ebooks didn’t save me with those “free” samples generating sales. And no, reading fiction didn’t become a magical land where I could escape. Real life stepped forward, eviscerated me, and there was no magic in the written word. Writing didn’t save me. Family saved me. Friends saved me. And I saved me.

I jumped from grief, to desperation, to survival at mach speed. I juggled the numbing drudgery of finding employment (over seven hundred applications and interviews before one hit), finding a new home (that has no kitchen, but wasn’t decorated with bullet holes), and rebooting my existence in bad economic circumstances. I now viewed all publishing, traditional, indie, and self-publishing, as “The Machine.” The Machine wants what it wants. It’s not malign or benign. It has no personal vendetta. It simply operates under its principles of profit, desire, chance and internal contradictions. If you don’t have what it wants, the way it wants it, when it wants it, it just keeps rolling. In the wake of all these nightmares, I realized I didn’t lose my writing career with The Machine. I never had one to lose.

And I didn’t care. For a year and a half I worked between two and six jobs to regain the essentials of life. I never pined for the days when I had more writing time than most. I didn’t pine for writing at all. If that part of my life had fucked off and died, cool beans. I had to eat. I had to save. I had to keep myself from ending up on the streets or worse.

What little spare time I had went to improv acting, a new vocation. It was a perfect fit. Improv champions failure, working together, and the fun of making a difficult art. There is no Hugo or Nebula or World Fantasy Award for best improviser. And it’s rarely a career. It’s a vocation. All that matters is doing the work. Improv became my “escape” from fifteen-hour days, six days a week, and rekindled a love of art, collegiality, and performance that had suffocated in relentless attempts to become a successful novelist. One of improv’s greatest values is its ethos of “fail.” Failure is terrific. You find new things when you fail because you’re going where you hadn’t gone before. Failure is where things are interesting and unexpected. And failure isn’t done alone, but with a gang of artists that want your failure to be awesome. If you’re not failing, you’re not doing it right. In my old, dead life, failure at writing carried a heavy price and poisonous stigma regarding perceptions of self-worth and investment in the future.

In the wake of 2013, I realized: if I fail at writing, who fucking cared? I had no writing career, no relationship, and The Machine still didn’t know I existed. Being a ghost to that world made me feel like writing again. Back to my punk rock roots. Fuck it. Just do it because you love it, you bastard.

But do what?

There’s an old trick in psychology. If you’ve experienced trauma, do something new that has no relation to the context of said trauma. You generate new memories for your brain to chew on. Improv fit that pistol, and was life-saving. In writing, I abandoned the dead god of novels and moved to comic book scripts. I love comics, but had never attempted them because . . . if you think making money with novels is tough, it’s Shangri La compared to becoming a “professional” comic book writer. But I didn’t care about money, or a career. I had now stabilized my income to a degree where I felt comfortable easing off the gears of work and spending some time writing. I learned comic script format for fun. I found artists to work with, which was fun. And I failed all over the place as I learned the art, the business, and the challenge of working with artists. Some of this sucked bunnies, but I didn’t care. So long as I learned and got better, I enjoyed the challenge.

Soon, I worked with artists I dug. To see my ideas meld with theirs into fully realized comic book pages was like Christmas morning in my brain. We got traction with indie presses. And I learned to write pitches, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I loved working with editors to refine the ideas of a pitch into something better: the exact opposite of my experience with novels (pitches are hard, but take far less time than finishing a novel. So the investment of blood, sweat and tears are lightyears apart). This was a welcome revelation. Nothing has landed yet (please see the WARNING at the start of this piece). And I really want it to. But not because of a big payday. I just really want to write comics, work with artists and editors, and see what happens next. I also rekindled my interest in short stories, and have begun to create wild things free of any external validation or concern.

Novels faded from interest, with three exceptions. My small reputation as a writer of “wrestling” stories got me an invite to write whatever I wanted for the FIGHT CARD series. The result was RISE OF THE LUCHADOR, and I thoroughly dug it, though I haven’t retired to Monaco just yet. I also wrote a short novel for my newsletter group that explores my love of Saturday morning cartoons. I did it for free. It had only one lodestar: have fun. I also reclaimed interest in my ebooks, and worked hard to get them new covers that I liked. None of them have made a mint. But the result made me happy. It was worth the hours of labor teaching high school History and English, adult writing classes, creating curriculum, grading grad school papers, writing pop history articles, and all the other junk I do to survive. I’m also selling short stories again, but the joy is just letting them roll into the strange creatures they are. Rejections arrive, too, but are also meaningless. Keeping my creative life wide, diverse, and renewed, instead of hyper-focused and commercially driven has yielded far better returns and done my mind far more good than when I wrote in genres I hated for a paydays that never arrived. Life is too short to bleed for the wrong muse.

When my mother was dying, two images hit me. One was from the film A DANGEROUS METHOD, about Carl Jung’s relationship with Sigmund Freud. At the end of the film, Jung sits on a park bench in the throes of mental strain, knowing something awful will happen (the Great War). It is followed by a note that after this anguish, Jung emerged into a period of creative flourish and output that lasted until the end of his life. This image haunted me, and does still, because my mother was a passionate fan of Jung’s work (I was not), and I, too, was enduring compounded trauma. The image of Jung on the bench crashed into another, provided by Elizabeth Kubler Ross in one of her books on grief (I can’t return to those books, so this is from memory). Grief can be transformative. The struggle with trauma produces heroes as well as villains. It is awful, painful, and yet inevitable, so if you have your wits about you, it can be a catalyst for profound transformation. Ross noted that we are inundated with pictures of youth and beauty, even within struggle, but what of the Grand Canyon? Its majesty is the result of titanic forces of strife, wrestled within nature for millennium. Traumas caused it to be transformed, and it has endured. That is what makes it beautiful.

The last time I spoke to my mother, she shared a simple truth which I hold very, very dear. In the end, what makes this world worth anything is love. It is the only value that really matters. You can argue against me all you want. You can footnote your answers, dance around my simple statement with dense rhetoric, and even win. Go ahead. I don’t care. See who comes to your funeral, and, by the way, go fuck yourself. Love is all that truly makes life meaningful.

When 2013 destroyed my life, I made a promise. Whatever happened, I would not let the sheer volume of trauma destroy me. It came close. But I did not reach for the bottle. I did not retreat from the world. I did not hand the reins of my existence to anyone else. I let the awe be transformative. And in my creative life, my lodestar would not be money, not status, not stardom. It would be love, whatever shape or form it should take. Comics? Improv? Short stories? History? Spoken word? One-Man-Shows? Plays? Teaching? Even novels? Sure, so long as the love is true. So if The Machine wants to pay me top dollar, I’ll cash the check. If it ignores me, I’ll be too busy doing my thing to notice. But I will love what I make, generate a lot of it, and grab as many dollar-sacks as possible before I, too, am only a memory. If a “writing career” happens, cool beans. Until then, bills will be paid by other means so that I never write for the wrong reasons again.

Also, are you guys hiring?

Jason S. Ridler is a writer, improv actor, and historian. He is the author of A TRIUMPH FOR SAKURA, BLOOD AND SAWDUST, the Spar Battersea thrillers and has published over sixty stories in such magazines and anthologies as The Big Click, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Out of the Gutter, and more. His popular non-fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Dark Scribe, and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada.

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Stories of Perseverance

I have been thinking a lot about what makes it so difficult for us to sit down and write. Why are we so willing to give in to our Inner Saboteur, even when we know that’s what we’re doing?

A lot of times it comes down to the thought “Why bother?”

Let’s face it, being a writer is hard. As soon as you tell family or friends you’re writing, they expect your short story or novel to appear in print within a month because that’s what happens on TV. They also expect you to be the next J.K. Rowling, raking in the billions.

They don’t understand, and they don’t see, the hours spent alone at the computer trying to figure out the perfect wording for the sentence, the hours agonizing over description, or dialogue. They don’t see the years of languishing in the slush pile. They don’t get that it can take years to land an agent, and longer still to get a book contract. They don’t see your $5 – $10,000 advance, 15% of which goes to your agent.

But we, as writers, know what it is to slog through rejection after rejection. We all face the changing publishing industry.

We love to share our ‘terrible rejection’ stories when we’re together. But we rarely celebrate successes. I suspect it is because we hear about someone getting the book contract or story sale and think “why couldn’t it be me?” or we think “Probably happened for them right away. Hack!”

The truth of it is, success comes in different ways for all of us. We all want that Sally Field winning the Oscar moment of “You really like me. You really like me!”  We should be celebrating each other’s successes, and think “It can happen to me too.”

I have asked a number of authors who have experienced their own success, to tell their stories of perseverance, what they went through to get to that success. This doesn’t necessarily mean their stories end there. Some will go on to bigger and better things, others will not.

And that’s OK.

What is important is that they believed in themselves and their writing enough to push through the tough times, the slush, the wondering “Why Bother?”

Let their stories inspire you to do the same!

Happy Writing!