A Little Ray Of Sunshine

Well, after the tiny flood of rejection last week (and another one this morning), I’ve got a tiny ray of hope.  A couple months ago I sent out five submission packages of my first novel.  Today, I got the first response to one of those packages.  An editor has requested the full.  It isn’t a sale, but at least it means that my query package isn’t sinking me in the slush pile.  And it means my race score goes up to 33.

I probably won’t hear another peep about this submission for anywhere from 6 months to a year, but that’s okay.  The process is working.  Last week was tough, I started spiraling into the feeling that I’ll never be any better than I am now, that all of this was going to just be rejection after rejection.  So this little injection of hope came at just the right time and is a great reminder to me of the rules I just need to keep following.

Write. Finish. Submit.  It works!

Stuck Again?

Heh, it would figure that I would post about goals and dreams and then… get stuck.  Yeah, it happens.  I don’t get idea block, I get too many ideas and they make it hard to focus.  That is what usually happens when I’m stuck, anyway.

This time is a combination of too many ideas and just plain old self-pity/loathing.  A bunch of rejections came in, every single one of them with the general message “close, but no thanks, please send more”.  This is good on one level.  I’m close!  On the other hand, I’ve been there before.  I don’t want to have a story come close, I want the story to sell.  Close is just frustrating at this point.  The other reason I’m stuck is because I wrote a story that failed.  My writing brain was fighting me the whole process and then I made myself finish the story (and send it out, because I knew if I let anyone read it before I did I would never get the courage to mail it).

What did my first reader say?  “Awesome setting but I don’t care about the characters or what is happening until page 11.”  Ok, I could cut the first ten pages, but wait, it is only a 12 page story.  Yeah. Sigh.  So what I was trying to do didn’t go well.  But hey, setting!  Maybe some editor out there will love the feel of the story enough to ignore the rest.  Who knows?

But inside I feel a bit down.  I wrote a story last week that both my first readers thought was the best thing I’ve done yet.  Then this week, I fail.  It makes getting back on the horse tough.  I’ve made myself start another story and gotten about a thousand words down, but I keep finding reasons to walk away from the keyboard.  Like posting here. And doing house chores.

So I failed at the story I was trying to tell. So what? I need to pick myself up.  It’s just a story. I still have the idea, I can always write a better version knowing what went wrong with the first one.  Meanwhile, I have other projects that have deadlines (at least, the places I want to submit them close very soon, so it is kinda like a deadline).  I can do this.  Write, finish, mail.  Fire and forget.

It’s going to be a scary day when I get up to 80 stories out.  If the stars align, I could technically get 80 rejections in one day.  Yeah. Scary.

(Flip side is that I could also make 80 sales in one day.  I think one is about as likely as the other, so I should stop tilting at windmills and get writing, right?)

On Dreams and Goals

I have a friend who decided that she wasn’t happy with her life.  She has a MFA in Art, has been at her job for 9 years, has pets and friends and family where she is.  But she wanted a change.  Her dream, ever since becoming a huge fan of the TV show “Deadliest Catch”, is to work on fishing/crabbing boats.  That is her big dream, and I know plenty of people were skeptical that she could achieve it.  She has no experience with fishing or boats, she’s strong, but really short and hasn’t ever done truly heavy labor.

Did she care that many of the people around her thought it was a crazy dream? No.  She started reading about it, checking job sites, absorbing anything she could about how to get started.

Last weekend I drove her out to an interview with a crab boat captain.   Before she’d even flown back home, she had the job.  In a month or so, she’ll be on a boat, living her dream.

What does this have to do with writing? Plenty.  Dreams are important.  I know I tend to bog myself down in the nitty-gritty of the actual process.  But it isn’t just for the process that I’m writing.  I have a dream, too.  (That phrase is like “who you gonna call”, tainted by fame forever, hehe).  I don’t really talk about my bigger goals very specifically because frankly, I get a lot of criticism for them, both from fellow writers and from my friends and family.  The last time a friend asked what I hoped to do with my writing and I told answered, that friend then scoffed and said something like “yeah, I’d like to win the lottery too.”  That sort of talk is discouraging.  But I try not to let it get to me.  As I said, dreams are important because they provide something to work toward.

What’s my big dream? To consistently make 6 figures a year writing fiction.  I’d love to have a career that is a blend of Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and JA Konrath.  (If you don’t know who JA Konrath is, go here and read his blog.  If you don’t know who the other two are, get out from under that rock already!)

How am I going to go about reaching that dream?  That is where goals come in.   My friend couldn’t just decide to go work on a fishing boat and then bam! it happened.  She had smaller goals that got her there (ie post on job boards, network with people, read up on the industry etc…).  My goals are all things I can control.

So here is my game plan.  By Jan 2011 I will have 6 novels and 80 short stories out on submission.  (I’m at 1 novel and 24 short stories thus far).  That is just to get my butt in gear and because I’m practicing writing a bunch of different stuff.  Starting next year I intend to write four novels and at least 30 short stories a year which is about 550,000 words.  Half a million words seems like a lot.  Ok, maybe it is a lot.  But I broke that down into even smaller goals.  (I did this before in December, but I’ve revised what I’m doing, so now I get to toss different numbers out).

To get to 550,000 words in a year, I intend to spend at least 30 weeks a year writing 5 days a week (or really, knowing me, the equivalent time to that, probably spread out a little differently).    That’s roughly 18,300 words per week, which for a five day work week means 3,660 words a day.  Three to four hours of writing a day.  Not that scary when it is broken down like that, and it means I have time to take care of all the other stuff that crops up (like mailing stories back out: the more I have out, the more rejections that come back.  Who knew?!).

I write because it is what I do.  Getting paid for what I would do anyway? Awesome.  And that is why I have a dream, a dream that is possible, a dream that will allow me to keep doing what I do already.  And every time someone shakes their head at my dream, I’m going to remember my friend and think about her on the boat pulling crab pots.  And then I’ll smile.

Whew, Back to Work!

Got home from my trip to find two rejections waiting for me.  The one in my mailbox was a nice fat envelope from Analog, but alas, it faked me out.  It was fat because they’d folded up a couple pages of my story to send back, along with the longest form letter rejection I’ve ever seen.  Two single-spaced pages outlining guidelines and with check boxes next to things (none of which were checked…).  Oh well.  That story has space squid and FTL travel, so I figured it was a long shot story for that market anyway.  But in the name of not making decisions for editors, I sent it anyway.

Both stories are back out, one to a brand new market I’d never heard of (they aren’t that new, just my knowing about them).    I also managed to get two more stories out, one is new, one is the story I sold that has reverted to me, so I figured why not try to sell it again?  This brings me up to 22 stories out to markets.  Not quite up to 80 yet, am I? Oh well, there’s plenty of time left in the year to get there.

I’ve been doing a bunch of targeted reading lately as well.  If I’m going to get 80 stories out, they can’t all be spec fic.  I have 4 “literary” stories out at the moment and an idea for another one.  I went to the bookstore and got some mystery and thriller short story collections to pick through and dissect.  So far I’m really enjoying reading the stories, so hopefully that means I’ll enjoy writing some as well.  Meanwhile I’m trying to decide which novels of the ones I’ve read lately I want to reverse outline.  I’ve read about 15 books in the last couple weeks, hence the needing to decide which to focus on picking apart to see how they work.   The best part about this stretching and trying new genres is that I’m discovering authors and stories I’d never even heard of before (though I’m reading and re-reading some best-sellers, too).  I’ve been trying to focus on books by authors who have a long track record, since I figure if they’ve sold 10 or 30 or more books that something in all those books has to be working.

Once again, Dean Wesley Smith has a great post up about writers and practicing.  His comment about knowing what you are focusing on and working on with each piece of writing really hit home for me.  Sometimes I remember to figure that out, but lately I’ve been working on so many things I hadn’t really given it a ton of thought.  So I sat down and looked at my various projects and decided what I was going to work on for each.  So, because lists are so much fun, here they are:

Menagerie– not researching, ie just making shit up.  It’s fantasy and supposed to be fun and weird.

Hunting Delilah– pacing.

The City is Still Hungry– setting and noir pacing/feel.

To Honor and Obey– sex scenes, writing to a particular historical feel and tone.

The Weapons Master– sex scenes, not censoring myself.

And that’s just the novels.  Each short story I’m working on has its own practice goal as well. I’ve got about five lined up that need to get done in the next few weeks, one of which is about an hour from done… still. Sigh.  Need to stop poking at it and just get it done.  I think my practice failed with this one because man is it being stubborn about getting written, but oh well, I’ll keep the idea and re-do it at some point if I want.  Meanwhile, the story can go out into the wide world and get off my desk, so to speak.

Well, back to work.  Between family obligations, trips, and car issues, I’m feeling quite broke.  Need to write more, because no one can pay me for work I don’t do.