Jan. 17
5:39 PM
Pro Credits, Short Story Rejections, And Other Topics I Usually Avoid
Molly has a very thoughtful post on her website regarding the frustrations new writers face, and though I don't often weigh in on these things I think it would behoove just about everybody who writes and submits fiction to give it a look. If nothing else it'll give you something to nod along with, though it's gotten me thinking about my own attitudes.
One thing I don't talk a lot about here is the inevitable, frequent, and occasionally debilitating frustrations that go hand in hand with trying to sell fiction--something that, for me, will never go away. Part of the reason it will never go away is that I'm neurotic and part of that is that the market is full of fierce and talented competition, and whatever aid you might get from top tier publishing credits on your cover letter will evaporate on contact if the story it prefaces doesn't outshine the competition.
I had a tremendous stroke of luck that powered me through the bleak stretches writers experience when the rejections mount and nobody has anything good to say--the first story I ever submitted was bought and published by an editor for his pro-rate anthology. The reason I say luck is that because, frankly, luck is what got the story in as much as anything else--I had a great friend who absolutely butchered my early draft of the story with a red pen, and without his help it never would've sold, and then I had a further stroke of luck in that the editor enjoyed my story. Sure, sometimes you know an editor's taste from his or her publishing track record and submit based on that but for me this was a shot in the dark, and somehow it hit. But all that luck wouldn't have mattered if I hadn't been writing for years and slowly improving before the aforementioned friend finally convinced me to actually submit something--without a story behind all that luck nothing would have come of it.
That sale, to James Lowder's zombie anthology The Book of More Flesh, was in the summer of 2002. I did not sell anything else until The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart was bought by Orbit in the summer of 2008. Nothing, not a single short story or piece of flash, and I was submitting the whole time, gathering an impressive stack of rejections for this, that, and the other...but zero sales. Then the holy-fuck-is-this-really-happening sale of the novel, which again would never have come to pass without healthy doses of concentrated luck, outside assistance, and a manuscript to back it all up.
Since that sale eighteen months ago, and the publication of the novel two months ago, I have sold exactly two more pieces--the short story "The Bear and the Sea" to ChiZine in the spring of last year and the short story "Blamed for Trying to Live" this month to Ekaterina Sedia for her Running with the Pack anthology. I have also garnered almost as many rejection letters as I did between my first sale in 2002 and my second sale in 2008. The reason for this increase in both rejections and acceptances is simple--I'm writing more and submitting more. The increase in sales is due entirely to the fact that I have improved as a writer, and I've got an ever-growing pile of form rejection letters to show just how far I have to go. Part of it is luck, sure, but when my first story sold to a pro market I had nothing at all to get me through the slush other than the story itself, and the regular influx of rejections implies to me that it'll be an improvement in my writing through practice and discipline that will get me published again, not the pro credits in my cover letter--it obviously never hurts to have them, but there's only one way to get them in the first place.