Saturday, March 26, 2011

How I got started, quit, and came back.

Well, Aoife's Kiss finally got back to me. And they bought the story!

How sweet is that?

Pretty damn sweet, if you ask me.  Which you didn't.

But with this sale, I'm batting 1000 for steampunk stories.  Which is way better than I was doing writing Lit-Fic.  With that I was batting 0.  For 4 years.

Yeah, no joke.  Let's take the way-back machine to December, 04.  I finished up my last year of college, and had my newly minted Bachelors of Arts, English with a focus in Fiction Writing clutched in my sweaty hands.  I had two short stories that had been excessivly workshopped through the last year in school ready to go.  And, like a good n00b writer, I started submitting them like mad.   

I had vision of the works I would write.  I was going to write about the human condition.  I was going to write about the pain of life.  I was going to write Literature, damn it!  I was going to write Art. 

I should take this moment to explain something: imagine that writing is like the Olympics. 

If you get published, you won the gold medal.  You get to stand on the highest podium and your anthem gets played.  Everyone applauds.  That's the gold medal.

If you get a personal rejection from the editor with relevant feedback about your work or some other encouragement, that's a silver medal. 

If you get a standard form letter about how "it's not what they're looking for but feel free to submit other works more in their vein" you've won a bronze.   I should add that they have to say it's okay to submit other work. If they flat out reject you and tell you to submit your work in other places, that's bad. 

Anything else and you didn't make it to the podium.  No response means you got cut in the first round. 

Got that?  Okay, good. 

So, back to the story, fresh outta college I started submitting my excessively work-shopped Lit-Fic stories.  And, just as I had been trained, I started writing new ones right away.  For the whole year of 05 I cheerfully wrote short story after short story, and submitted them.  I even wrote a novel and sent off to agents for consideration.

And outta all those shorts, and that novel how many medals did I win?  How many golds, silvers, or even bronzes do you think I got?

0. 
Nadda.

Zip. 
 
None. 

Now, I should add that in school I was the star student.  I was the guy in the creative writing class that had the best story.  The one that most people said, "I love it.  I think it's great like it is, I don't have any feedback for it."  The one the prof's held up as an example for the class.  If there was a vote, I would have been "most likely to succeed."  

And I went from that to not even getting a response.   I was getting cut in the first round, with no feedback as to why.  Most of the time I wasn't even getting a form letter about rejection.  Just no response.  If I did get an email back, it was a straight rejection and they didn't tell me to submit other works I h ad written.  That's bad.  I may as well have been sending my stories to the local landfill. 

And that went on for 4 years. 

I wrote one more short, and sent it off.  Swearing in my heart of hearts this would be the last one.  If this one didn't get any traction, I was done.  Clearly it had all been a massive waste of time, money, effort, and years of my life.  I targeted several lit-fic magazine's that I hadn't submitted to before, and emailed it out. 

After a few weeks I got a response from just one of the 4 I had submitted to. 

Let me tell you, I was excited.  I think my hands actually shook when I clicked on that email.  Had all my pain and suffering finally paid off?  Was I about to get my first credit?  Was this the first step on the path to glory? 

No.  It was another rejection.  Although this one was personal.  Well, sort of.  It said, "Your writing is strong, but it's not what we're looking for right now.  Best of luck submitting it to other places."  At least he'd taken the time to write "Your writing is strong," before pasting in the rest of the form letter.

I'll be honest.  Right then and there I gave up.  I was done.  I quit.   I heard Mark Twain's quote, "write for 5 years, and if no one is willing to pay you at the end of 5 years, go back to chopping wood." ringing in my ears.  My dream of writing for a living was dashed on the rocks of reality.  I decided to call it a year early, and stop after 4.  One more year wasn't something I could take.  In May of 2008 I called it off.  It was over.

I settled down into my day job, and decided to make the best of that life.  I even bought a house.  With a yard.  Which I should be mowing now.

About a year or so later in 09, a co-worker looks over at me in the break room and says, "You write short stories, right?"

I admitted that I used to do that, yeah. 

"Oh," he said.  "Blizzard is looking for writers now.  They have an open contest going on.  Winner gets flown out to California to talk with the head writer for World of Warcraft about a job offer.  You should give it a shot." 

I checked out the Blizzard website, and sure enough, there it was.  A global writing contest.  You could write a story for either WoW or for Starcraft.  I thought, "why not?"  It's not like its real writing.  This should be easy to knock out.  And I enjoyed just about anything Blizzard ever put out.   After some research on the forums for Blizzard, I decided to write a Starcraft story. 

I figured fewer people would be doing that.  And to make it stand out from the crowd more, I decided to write about how a Marine went AWOL and then came back to the fight.  It was a pretty good story.  I made sure to use plenty of details from cannon material (without plagerizing, of course) and like the game itself, I made some sly referrences to Alien and Aliens.  I even borrowed quotes from Smedly Butler (the most decorated Marine officer in the history of the Corps. He got 2 Congressional Medals of Honor. Think about that for awhile.  2 of them.)

I should add at this point that while I was researching cannon material for Starcraft, I also picked up Jeff Vandameer's first Steampunk anthology at Half-Priced Books. 

I mailed off the story. 

I didn't hear back from Blizzard beyond acknowledgment of receipt of the story.  6 months later, that co-worker says, "Hey, they put up the winners.  Did you ever hear back from them?" 

I admitted that I hadn't, and that probably meant I didn't make the cut.  But that wasn't a shock to me.  I was used to not hearing anything back from a publisher already.   When I got back to my desk, I checked out the site, sure enough there was the finalist on display. I decided to read through the story, to see what I could learn from the winner. 

It was a World of Warcraft story.  I made it 4 pages before I had to stop.  I remember the very last sentence I read.  It was, "The blueish gate was hovering impressively in the middle of the room." 

I don't remember too much after that.  I remember clearly saying, "What the fuck!?!"  out loud.  Well, to be honest, I may have shouted it.  My co-workers assure me that I spent the next 5 hours ranting unrelentingly about the sheer lack of skill, craftsmanship, and general personhood it took to write a sentence like that.  I was livid about that story for the next 3 months. 

It's been over a year now, and that sentence still galls me.  How do you win with a sentence like that?  Seriously!  Well, I was going to show them a thing or two. 

Now, keep in mind I had been trained to write literary fiction.  I was trained to sneeringly say, "commercial fiction has its place, but it's not real writing.  It's not literature.  It's not Art."   In school, writing fantasy, science fiction, or even bad magical realism would result in a failing grade.  There was only one genre, literary fiction, and you would have no other before it. 

But I was going to show Blizzard.  I was going to re-write that story, remove all proprietary elements to Starcraft and make it work. In a fit of rage I fell from the faith.   I fell far.  I was going to commit the most egregious of sins; I was going to write genre fiction.

And not just any old genre fiction.  Oh, no.  I was going to make this story work for a sub-genre so obscure I had only just discovered it a few months ago; steampunk. 

So, in the course of a week I sat down and re-wrote that story from the ground up.  Instead of a Starcraft Marine, now it was a Steam Marine in a steam-powered battle suit that fought aliens.  Instead of being bugs born from the creep, it was mind-controlled alien apes hatched out of alien Jungles/ hive minds/plants things. 

 I poured all of my disdain and anger into that story.  He wanted to run away from a life of war, and I understood that.    I poured in every ounce of wantimg to quit, to run away from writing into that Marine.  I made allusions to Tarzan, the Jungle Book, and any other famous work involving apes.  It was a war story intended to be an allagory for the War on Terror.  The Apes hated humanity for just being human.  Hell, I even threw in the Fall of Adam and Eve into the subtext.  I held nothing back.  I even kept the Alien references.  It was on. 

And, as I had been trained, I researched online and print magazines looking for steampunk stories. There were 3.  And only 1, Steampunk Tales, was actively looking for shorts at that time.  I reformatted to how they wanted the submission, and sent it off.

I may have even said, "Hah!"  as I hit the send button.   And didn't think anything more of it.  I was done. That was the last bit of writing I was going to do. Ever.  It was over.

Now, I should clear something up.  I read a lot of commercial/genre fiction.  I have bookshelves full of the stuff.  I have 8 bookshelves stuffed full now, and probably should get a 9th one to clear the books off the floor.  I have several shelves of steampunk books now.  As it turns out, I liked the sub-genre.  It's fun.  But, as a trained writer, I didn't write it.  I could enjoy reading, but I sure as hell shouldn't be writing it. 

Anyway.  You can imagine my surprise when I got a response from the editor of Steampunk Tales a few weeks later.  You see, she liked the story and wanted to buy it.  I swear to you right now I sat and stared at that email for at least 10 minutes.  This had never happened to me before.  I got rejected.  I was numb to the pain by now, but that's what happened.  I never got to the podium, let alone a gold medal.   I had to call my wife in and have her read it to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding what I saw. 

She read through it, and confirmed what I had read.  They wanted the story.  She kissed me on the cheek and said, "Congratulations, honey.  I knew you could do it."

I saw a call for reprint submissions by Jeff Vandameer.  It seems he was putting together a 2nd anthology of steampunk short stories.  I thought, what the heck? Riding high on that success I sent off the short that was so recently had published at Steampunk Tales. 

He rejected it, but- and this is important- he sent a personal letter to me.  In it he said, and I am going to quote him here, "You have a great voice, and strong writing. I like it.  You should be writing great sweeping epic novels of adventure as your action borders on the poetic." 

In the space of a few months and 1 short story I went from not making the first round to getting a Gold and Silver Medal. After 4 years of no response, form rejection letters, and out-right quitting that personal message meant a lot to me.  It still does, actually.  But now there was no stopping me.  I researched the hell outta the genre.  As of November 2010, there isn't a steampunk book I haven't read. 

Since then I've written a total of 3 steampunk short stories. And I've sold them all.  Each one on the first time too.  I've never had to re-submit a short to a second publisher.  I'm 3 for 3. 

What’s the lesson here?  I’m not sure, really.  Don’t quit?  Put every ounce of emotion that you can into every story?  If you don’t succeed try something else?  Be asymmetrical in your approach to success?
Beats me.  I just know I’ll be writing steampunk stories for the foreseeable future.  No one can stop me now. 

It's on.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

I'm back

Sorry for the dissappearing act.  My wife and I had a baby! 

Yes, it's our first and we're super excited.  I also get very little writing done as most of my time is spent changing diapers, calming baby, or doing the dishes.  All fatherly sort of chores in the first month of my son's life, but it doesn't seem too manly.

But that's really the sacrafice we make when it comes to life and children isn't it?  We can spend time on our careers, to make more money and get them a better life, but it's a life we'll miss.  We won't be there to see the series of firsts if we're out making that bank.  The flip side is we're always there, but that's at the sacrifice of the career. Which means less money.  And less of a life for the kid.

And, I know what you're thinking, you're thinking, "But kids don't care about that kind of stuff.  They just want to be loved."

Having grown up dirt-ass poor, I can assure you that children do care about that kind of thing, but they don't brnig it up to their parents. 

I think that's the real cruix of my fears as a father- that I'll put my son through the same crap I had to go through.  I see it with other parents all the time. Sending their children to places and activites because they had to do it, even though they hated it. 

As an example- a friend of mine just had a baby girl.  She's not a religious woman.  She's even spoken out about the hypocrasy of the church, and how she doesn't like the institution of the church.  But she's taking her daughter to be babtized, and has already told me how she plans to take her to church every Sunday. 

Which doesn't make any sense to me- why do that?  Why take your child to something you have actively dissapproved of and spoken out against?  You're the adult.  You don't have to put your kid through the things you hated. 

I guess I'll just have to muddle through it, and when the boy turns 18 ask him how I did.