Welcome to the World of Writing

One of my favourite quotes of all time comes from a movie called Stick It.  It's about ja girl who's forced back in to gymnastics after she walked out of the worlds.  If you haven't seen it, it's a fantastic movie.  Anyway, here's the quote:

Gymnastics tells you no. All day long. It mocks you over and over again. Telling you you're an idiot. That you're crazy. If you like running full-speed towards a stationary object, vault's for you. If you like pealing pieces of skin the size of quarters of your hands... bars is for you. Because the only thing more fun then rips, is when your rips get rips. It's super sexy. And floor, are you serious, I mean who doesn't want to parade around in a leotard getting wedgies and doing dorky choreography? It's delicious. If you like falling, then gymnastics is thee sport for you! You get to fall on your face, your ass, your back, your knees, and your pride! It's a good thing I didn't like falling... I LOVED IT!

So, why am I telling you this quote?  Quite simply because, in my eyes, I can equate it to writing.

Sure, as a writer we don't actually physically run toward a stationary object, but we do run toward the ending of a book, not knowing exactly how it's going to turn out.  We may not have skin peeling off our hands, but we have wrist problems from writing so much, and headaches from listening to characters.

But, most of all, it's the falling that really got to me.  We don't literally fall on our faces, our asses, our back or our knees.  But when you don't know where to take the book, it feels a little like you were running full out and landed on your face.  When you realize half way through a chapter that you don't need it, or the one before, it feels a little like the ground has fallen out beneath you and you find yourself on your ass not sure you want to do the work.

And out prides?  The pride of a writer takes a beating unlike almost any other profession in the world.  We work for ages on this book, something that we've poured our heart and soul in to, we fuss over it like it's our child, and worry about whether it's any good.  Then we send it out in to the world and hope that we've done everything right.

As I learned this past week, more often than not that results in a fall.  Our pride takes a beating as we get back rejection letters telling us that the work that we poured in to our manuscripts or short stories wasn't enough.  That we did it wrong.

Being a writer isn't all fun and games.  To be a writer, we have to (as the quote says) not just like falling, but love it!

We have to be able to get past those beatings and continue onward toward our ultimate goal.

With that in mind, I'm going to take that story and submit it somewhere else.  After I lick my wounds for a couple of days.  Because, no matter how bad of a beating my pride took, I know that this is what I want to do.  And if I want a story published, I have to be persistent.

Now, I just have to find somewhere that I think is good enough for my story, and hope they think it's the right fit too.

Wish me luck!

Have you gotten any rejection letters yet?  What do you do to keep yourself from thinking that you're not good enough?

There is Only One Goal

Each writer has their own goals, set using different variables.  How fast we write.  How fast we edit.  When we need to have something done by.  What's going on in our lives.  etc.  But there's one goal that every writer has: To be able to call themselves an author.

There is a difference, of course, between a writer and an author.  While you have to be to a writer in order to be an author, the same is not true for the other way around.  You see, writers are people who write, but have yet to be published.  Authors are people who write and have had a piece of work published.

I'm a writer.

My friend Eric A. Satchwill, however, is an author.

This momentous occasion occurred today!  He wrote a short story and submitted it to an anthology.  One yes, a couple blog posts, and some publishing later, and he finds himself with the brand spanking new title of Author.  Shiny, right?

Of course, there may have been some small amount (or huge mountains full of) jealousy on my part, but I still couldn't be happier for him.  He has achieved the first step in making it in the world of writing.  He's gotten published, and -- for today at least -- he can sit back, look at that short story and think that he has achieved something.  He's accomplished his goal.

Just like the rest of us, though, his journey isn't going to stop there.  Let's face it, I doubt there is a single author out there that got their first book/short story/poem published and thought 'yep, that's it.  My life goal.  I'm done!' No.  We always have more dreams, more goals, more accomplishments to push toward.

His is the novel he's been working on for the past two years Fallen Things.  As someone whose a part of his critique group, I can tell you that it's great, and one day it's going to be out there on the shelf ready to be purchased.

And me?  Well, we all know that I have a short story out for submission (50 days and counting...hoping to NOT get a response, because they're saying that an early response is not generally a good thing).  And, of course, there's Pandora, which I'm currently editing.  It's going well, for once.  I think that may be because I got most of the issues ironed out in the first go around.

One day soon I'm going to join Eric in the ranks of published author.  I'll have that shiny new title (may even make a name plate that says so...just for the hell of it) and I'll be ready to jump in to the work of authors and make my mark (I'll probably use a red pen...)

How close are you to getting your shiny new title?  Do you already have it?  What are you working on hoping to get published??

Editing Bound

Well, Nano is over for another year, and I once more find myself sitting in December wondering how I'm going to edit all of the words I wrote during November.  The answer, of course, is one book at a time.  I just wish I was faster at the editing process than I currently am.

Anyway, as I'm sure all of you noticed, my blog got a little bit of an update this week.  I (sadly) took down the donation link to nano (though if you would like to donate, just visit www.nanowrimo.org and you can definitely make the donationt here).  It will be back next year, though I won't be travelling to San Francisco in 2013.

You might also notice that I've added a 'goals' section.  This is very important, because I have a lot of goals for next year, and I'm hoping that tracking them here will make me focus on them a bit more.  Now, I didn't want to discriminate, so any and all goals I have will be making it into that section.  You'll see that getting Pandora submission worthy is first on the list.  What isn't there is getting it to Beta's by the 24th.  I decided not to add that, because technically the list is for 2013 goals, and that's still 2012.

I've actually started to continue reading through Pandora to get it edited (almost done.  On chapter 35 of 40) and I'm finding that there are actually some chapters that I enjoy reading!  This is shocking because I'm definitely my biggest critic.  I will sit there and rip my stuff to shreds, and then I hate putting it back together again.  I think this is why I don't enjoy editing as much as some of my friends do.  Anyway, the point is, I didn't find myself cringing during every chapter, and I think that means that maybe I'm ready to start raking in the rejection letters! (Let's face it, we're talking about a werewolf book.  While I think it's great, most places are going to tell me that it's a hard sell...)

Of course, I'm still waiting to hear back for the short story I submitted.  I'm not frantically checking every email, because I almost want it to take longer.  Every day I don't hear back is another day that I haven't been rejected, so I'm looking at it as a good thing that it's been over a month since the submission!

I'm slowly reorganizing myself to truly become serious about writing.  I always thought that last year I was ready for it, but I didn't even begin to be serious enough to truly make it as a writer.  I'm not quitting my day job just yet, but I'm going to crack down.  I'm going to follow through on my goals, and I'm going to be published.  Maybe not this year, but soon.  I have so many stories that I want to share with the world!

P.S. I have decided that, for now at least, the Sunday and Wednesday schedule is good for the blog, so I'm going to stick to that!

Pushing That Button

I started at my screen, my breath coming in short gasps, and my heart beating rapidly in my chest.  I had just spent hours getting ready for this moment, and I was going to blow it.  I was going to chicken out and not press the button.

Wondering what I'm talking about?

Two nights ago, I decided that the story that was sitting on my computer doing absolutely nothing (a short story entitled Blood Mask) needed to be put out there.

So I opened the already edited story, and sat down to figure where I was going to submit it.  The truth of the matter is that it's not as easy as it sounds to find a place where your story fits.  I went through a lot of publishers, rejecting for various reasons.  From the fact that some of them seem to think that 'dark fantasy' automatically means 'horror' (ie. Please only send us work that will make us unable to sleep at night.) to magazines that get published so frequently I wondered how any of their authors could truly be featured.

Now, I'm not saying that any of these publishers are bad.  The opposite, I'm certain, is true.  The plain truth, however, is that this is my baby.  It might not be a novel that I've spent years of my life working on, but it's still something that I've poured myself in to.  Every single story I write has more of myself in it than I want.  If I'm going to put it out there, I want it to be to the publisher that I feel comfortable with.  I want the best things for it.

So, I spent most of my night sorting through publishers and formats.  I had pretty much given up hope, and I ended up deciding to make my search just a little bit less refined.  I decided to allow the search engine to show me publishers that aren't open to submissions.

This may seem counter productive to you.  It's entirely possible that I wasn't thinking clearly, my head clouded with thoughts of how I was never going to get this story published, but whatever the case, it worked.

I came across a publishing house based right here in Calgary.  The entry in duotrope was actually for Tesseracts Sixteen (which is an anthology), which was closed to submissions.  But I went to the website, because, I'll admit, I was enthralled with the concept.  I was sad that I wasn't going to be able to try and get my story in to this anthology.

Crazy thing, though, when I went to that website, lo and behold, Tesseracts Seventeen was being displayed as accepting submissions.

It was crazy!  The very thing I wanted, and there it was, open for me to try for.

So I did!

After a couple more hours with me pulling my hair out trying to get this submission up to the standards they were asking for.  (My open office REALLY didn't want to format anything.  I'm not kidding you.  I would format it exactly the way I wanted, close it, open it to double check because I'm just paranoid like that, it was back to the way it was before...kill me...) I got the email set up, the story attached, and had my mouse hovering over the send button.

And that's where you came in.

For the record, I didn't stare at the button for too long.  I think it was about half and hour.  That's not too bad, is it?

A friend on twitter managed to convince me that I had to actually hit the button, so I did.  After which I had a complete freak out which lasted a couple of minutes after I talked myself down, reminding myself that there really wasn't any way to get it back, and now I was just going to have to sit back and wait to see what happens.

So, now I have a story out there in submissionland, certain that I'm going to get rejected, and not so sure I'm upset about that.  After all, a rejection is still someone who has read my work.  Maybe it just doesn't fit with their anthology, and maybe it just wasn't their style.  Whatever, my work is officially out there in the world!  It's getting read by people who don't know me or anything about me.  It's getting judged by only it's worthiness as a piece of fiction, and I can't wait to see what comes of it.

No more pounding heart, no more shallow breaths.  At least, not until the email comes from them that tells me my fate.

Have you submitted anything lately?  What was your reaction?