Curses and Dragons

I’m going to limit the writing talk to Wednesdays around here, and maybe not even every Wednesday. It will be better for both of us–you probably aren’t here for the writing talk, but I have to get it out somehow, but keep it from taking over the whole blog.

For the first writing Wednesday, I want to talk about the Long Process–but I’ll try to be brief.

I probably first entertained the notion of becoming a writer when I was 6 or 7. I wrote the first thing I was proud of when I was 7, and the second thing when I was 11. I wrote a LOT of what I will call “original fiction” from age 11 until about halfway through my first semester of college, when the sudden acquisition of a social life derailed me more than I would have expected.

At that point, I’d written enough to believe a) I was good at it; b) that it was what I wanted to do with my life; and c) I didn’t really need a whole lot more practice, I just needed to figure out how to sell things to New York. Much like the Underpants Gnomes, I was clueless about step 2. To me it was like: “1) Write book. 2) ? 3) Become Stephen King plus Robin McKinley (remember, we didn’t HAVE J.K. Rowling yet).

In retrospect?

A) I was good at writing–for my age, circumstances, and experience, but I was no prodigy. But I’d practiced a lot, and that helped. But I had had no formal practice, no deliberate practice, and little feedback, and I could have been better, and would get better. I had good instincts though, the kind that comes from having the free space and time to noodle around and practice whatever you want, plus from being a voracious reader.

B) I wanted to be a writer, but I had some lost years between ages 18 and 25, where I was mostly writing collaborative fiction related to role-playing games–and loads of letters (my college roommate and I wrote each other a letter every day one summer). I made, during this time, about four submissions of any sort of original work, half of it written before I started college. Considering I had already made my first submission when I was 15, this wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire.

C) About those four submissions… two were to paying contests, and two were to the lowest-tiered markets I could find in the Writer’s Market of the time. If you are a beginning writer and you want to know why I now think those were terrible ideas, drop a comment and I’ll explain why some other Wednesday. In any case, I really didn’t understand the industry. The internet was just beginning to be a thing where you could share information like that at the time; I didn’t know a thing about the subcultures of writers, how to tell a good market from a bad one… all I had was Writer’s Market. Which, btw, geared all their talk of cover letters to the non-fiction people, even though I didn’t realize it, and sent out the crappiest cover letters ever.

So, it was probably the year 2001, when I was about 26, that I knew I needed to get serious–basically, when my best friend started doing National Novel Writing Month, and I was like, “Whoah. What?”

And it took me another two years from that point before I was able to convince myself to actually submit something. Before I felt I had something complete enough and worthy enough to submit. And it was a long, steep climb from there. I made my first submission the day before my 28th birthday, just so I could say I was 27 when I Really Started.

Then this happened:

Six years, 228 submissions, 26 sales. All short stories, novelettes or novellas, reprints included, which skews the data a bit. Last updated shortly before I sold The Princess Curse and completely forgot to keep updating this chart even though I’ve sold at least a couple of short stories since then.

(I like to think: I needed this chart when it was all I had to measure success by. The world is not super-amazed by short story writers, you know? I mean, not even a little.)

So, if someone asks me how long this has all taken, I have to clarify. Since I wanted to be a writer? Then since 1982. Since I made my first submission? Then since 1990. Since I first started to have a glimmer of what Step 2 was? Then since 2001. Since I started Really Counting submissions? Then since 2003. The shortest answer is eight years; the longest is “almost thirty.”

Thinking about the long process always makes me think of my favorite proverb:

After taking 99 years to climb a stairway, the tortoise falls and says there is a curse on haste.

Because, as long as this process has been? The two months that stretch between now and the release of The Princess Curse feel like they are flying by too quickly.

There’s irony for you.