I'm stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again--or something like that.

[truepenny]

I'm starting to get back in the groove on the short-story submission side of things.

This is, honestly, one of the most soul-destroying and downright tedious parts of a professional writer's life. (OMG, did I just call myself a professional writer? Shit, man, can't take it back. It's true.) Send the story out, wait, get the rejection letter. Send the story out, wait, get the rejection letter. Lather, rinse, repeat. The tedium is only infrequently enlivened by actually making a sale, and one is beset at all times by doubts and anxieties and the general sensation that perhaps one is making an ass of oneself. Or that perhaps one is just a lunatic and would be better off making paper airplanes of one's mss and launching them from the top row of bleachers in the football stadium.

And yet I (and matociquala and buymeaclue and dozens of other Earnest Young Writers such as ourselves) keep doing it. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. Being a writer is banging your head against a brick wall until the wall falls down.

This week I have submitted three stories (plus one that has to wait until Monday so the Post Office will have IRCs in stock again), picked the three stories that are waiting for Tales of the Unanticipated's reading period to open on July 15th, queried about four stories in submission and resubbed one.

I have thirteen stories out, one that's going out Monday, and three that will be going out 7/15/04. And that's my entire inventory.

It won't last, but it's a nice feeling while it does.

Comments

[pameladean]

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. Being a writer is banging your head against a brick wall until the wall falls down."

You have said a true thing. And it's funny, too.

Pamela

[larryhammer]

I go through cycles of alternating diligent submissions and slacking off in favor of heads-down writing. I've been in the latter mode since winter, but slowly working back to the former — sparked, as usual, by selling something.

---L.

[larryhammer]

By which I meant, intermittent reinforcement works, rather than the egopuffery it reads as. For which latter I plead the tiredness of scanning print checks all day.

---L.

[desayunoencama.livejournal.com]

I hate submitting things. Which is one of the reasons I hardly write for magazines, almost all of my attention being focused on anthologies. Admittedly, the print run of almost any anthology is less than your typical magazine, but I find that your chances (even if it's not an inivtation-only project but an open call) are so much better because the editor needs work on a specific subject/theme within a specfici time frame. And so many writers, it seems, are not able to stick to those guidelines. But mostly it's laziness on my part. And insecurity.

I find that i'm much more likely to sell a book project to a small press/independent publisher I know where I can sell it off proposal (sometimes just a verbal pitch) as opposed to having to write the book first and then find a home for it--which could concievably result in a much larger sale to a much larger publisher. But I find that I'm so deadline-impulsed, that without the deadline bearing down on me (or having passed, unfortunately) I don't organize my time well.

I've not been writing hardly any spec fic lately, in part because the anthology market there has dried up.

Also, I'm better able to "recycle" the queer or erotica stories I write, and later publish a collection of my own stories, or whatever. (Sometimes, it's the other way around, I'm trying to finish enough stories for a colelction and later find first-serial homes for them, although that's not as common a problem.)

But I really need to have a strong idea of where I'd publish something (and maybe a few back-up places) before I can sit down and write, usually.

(For one thing, it lets one figure out what assumptions one canmake about the audience. Like, if i'm writing a queer fantasy story for an SF market, I explain the gay background details more but take for granted that the audience will understand the spec fic content more easily. If I write the same story for a queer market, I do the opposite, explaining the spec fic but taking for granted that the audience would understand concepts like butch/femme or hanky code without needing to explain them.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That definition of insanity is not original to me, but be darned if I know where it came from. matociquala quoted it to me recently, but I know I'd read or heard it somewhere before that.

The bit about the brick wall, on the other hand, I think is mine. (Tho' my brain could be lying to me.)

But anyway, glad the description is recognizable. :)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And I can't write to spec. Perhaps this, along with a whole host of other things I used to think I couldn't do, is something I will learn as I become a better writer. But at the moment, nope, no way, nothing happening. Asking me to have an idea on a specific theme or with a specific type of character is like asking me not to think of a blue-eyed polar bear.

Well, I suppose, if someone literally asked me ("we're doing an anthology on X, and we'd love for you to submit a story"), I might be able to work with that. But there's something about a call for submissions "looking for stories about X" that just knocks the creativity right out of me.

No kind of value judgment going on here, btw. Just saying I can't imagine being able to write the way you do. (Which I say about a lot of people's processes.) But it's cool that you can.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I only have one out. I should hear in July, maybe, if it made the first cut.