our love is all of god's money
Dec. 27th, 2010 03:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyA couple follow-up thoughts from my post on submitting short stories:
1. Short stories are not going to make you rich. That's just a fact, and if it bothers you, you may want to focus your energies on novels. (Novels probably won't make you rich either, but there's at least that tantalizing, mocking possibility of hitting the motherlode with the next Wheel of Time or the like.)
Don't get me wrong. I like being paid for my short stories, and I like it even better when I'm paid a lot. (It doesn't happen very often.) I'm not about to tell anyone they can keep their filthy lucre to themselves, thank you. I'm just saying that if income is your priority in your writing career (as for example, if you have a family to support or medical bills to pay or any other perfectly good reason why you need your creative genius to earn its keep on a daily basis), the return on short stories isn't going to keep the wolf from gnawing down your door.
2. What short stories will do is help you keep yourself visible and help you keep finding new readers. My last novel was published in April 2009, well over a year ago. My next book publications will be in the second half of 2011 (The Tempering of Men in August and Somewhere Beneath Those Waves and the re-release of The Bone Key in October/November), and my next solo novel will hopefully come out sometime in the first half of 2012. I can't do anything about the necessarily glacial pace of book production schedules, but I can keep trying to write and sell short stories. It's a way to keep myself in the game.
(Since Corambis, I've published "White Charles," "After the Dragon," "Mongoose" (with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala), "On Faith" (Shadow Unit 3.00), and sold "Extract from '"I opened the book and read": Self-Reflexivity and Self-Reinvention in Hôtel Image,'" "The Devil in Gaylord's Creek," and (non-fiction) "The Kindness of Monsters." Plus selling the short story collection Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, which will have two previously unpublished stories in it. I have three stories in submission right now, and a handful more that are in the final stages of editing before they go out.)
It would be all too easy for me to give up, to just sit here like Eeyore in a puddle and do nothing. Short stories give me, if nothing else, the illusion of control; they give me something I can do for myself. And they keep me occupied instead of fretting, which is a big help.
3. Okay, a third point. The other reason I write and publish short stories is that I enjoy it. I enjoy them. None of the rest of it would matter if I didn't. I do this job because I love it; it's too hard, and too much work, for any other reason to make it worthwhile.
1. Short stories are not going to make you rich. That's just a fact, and if it bothers you, you may want to focus your energies on novels. (Novels probably won't make you rich either, but there's at least that tantalizing, mocking possibility of hitting the motherlode with the next Wheel of Time or the like.)
Don't get me wrong. I like being paid for my short stories, and I like it even better when I'm paid a lot. (It doesn't happen very often.) I'm not about to tell anyone they can keep their filthy lucre to themselves, thank you. I'm just saying that if income is your priority in your writing career (as for example, if you have a family to support or medical bills to pay or any other perfectly good reason why you need your creative genius to earn its keep on a daily basis), the return on short stories isn't going to keep the wolf from gnawing down your door.
2. What short stories will do is help you keep yourself visible and help you keep finding new readers. My last novel was published in April 2009, well over a year ago. My next book publications will be in the second half of 2011 (The Tempering of Men in August and Somewhere Beneath Those Waves and the re-release of The Bone Key in October/November), and my next solo novel will hopefully come out sometime in the first half of 2012. I can't do anything about the necessarily glacial pace of book production schedules, but I can keep trying to write and sell short stories. It's a way to keep myself in the game.
(Since Corambis, I've published "White Charles," "After the Dragon," "Mongoose" (with
matociquala), "On Faith" (Shadow Unit 3.00), and sold "Extract from '"I opened the book and read": Self-Reflexivity and Self-Reinvention in Hôtel Image,'" "The Devil in Gaylord's Creek," and (non-fiction) "The Kindness of Monsters." Plus selling the short story collection Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, which will have two previously unpublished stories in it. I have three stories in submission right now, and a handful more that are in the final stages of editing before they go out.)It would be all too easy for me to give up, to just sit here like Eeyore in a puddle and do nothing. Short stories give me, if nothing else, the illusion of control; they give me something I can do for myself. And they keep me occupied instead of fretting, which is a big help.
3. Okay, a third point. The other reason I write and publish short stories is that I enjoy it. I enjoy them. None of the rest of it would matter if I didn't. I do this job because I love it; it's too hard, and too much work, for any other reason to make it worthwhile.
