How far am I along on the road to writing fame and fortune?
This last year, 2011, was a good year. I had 8 speculative short stories accepted, 5 of them at professional rates, and the remaining 3 of them at semi-pro rates. By my count, once all the pro-rate stories are published, I'll be eligible to join the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA)--makes me feel like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz getting a chance to see the guy behind that curtain.
I'll discuss the writing and marketing of each of the published stories in other episodes, and I'll discuss the other accepted stories in later posts when they are published.
While I was still teaching college mathematics, I had some publishing credentials in non-fiction: three mathematics textbooks with West (about 1995) and one with McMillan (about 1975). I knew I could write complete sentences and whole paragraphs. After all, my undergraduate major was not just in mathematics, my second major was English literature.
I don't mean to give the wrong impression. I did not decide to write fiction, jump in, and sell eight stories the first year. No. I had grandiose plans to start at the top by writing best-selling novels. So my jumping off point almost five years ago began with a novel. I struggled. I wrote. I revised and rewrote. I imagined that my other experiences, including what I knew about writing non-fiction would be enough to produce a good novel. It wasn't.
Many, many years ago, I had written a novel, but then, who hasn't? After I finished college, got a job and started graduate school part-time, I sent the novel, The Crystalline Man, to a small spec fiction publisher. Everything was by mail in those days (about 1967). The novel was about an undercover agent disguised as an android in order to infiltrate android revolutionaries (basically android terrorists, but that wasn't a term commonly used back then). This was before Mr. Data, and my androids were all but indistinguishable from humans except for the Made on Earth logo stamped where the navel should be. The publisher responded that the story looked pretty good and they would like to hold it. My life got busy, but not with writing. (Although, I had become enamored with Star Trek, and I wrote a couple of screen plays, each of which garnered nice feedback from the Scott Meredith agency, but no offer of representation. Star Trek, like most video productions, only accepted agented manuscripts)
After a year with no firm decision on The Crystalline Man, I wrote the publisher that because they had made no contract offer, I would like to withdraw the novel. I got the MS back and, with no little frustration, trunked it. At the time, I didn't know what making the noun trunk into a verb meant. Recently, I re-read my dog-eared hard copy of that old novel (no PCs in those early days, and yes I've got a really old trunk). I still like the plot, but I wouldn't try to market that novel today without a complete rewrite; however, that's another episode.
Although presumptuous for someone who had attempted fiction in almost forty years, I thought I could whip out a novel, and publishers would beat a door to my path. After all, that is exactly what happened when I wrote a textbook. I did not fully appreciate the difference between textbook publishing and publishing trade books. Textbook publishers really did beat a path to a profs' door on the rumor that the prof has an outline for a possible text, or was considering writing an outline, or even knew how to spell the word outline. They'd sign you up for a pittance and put the book in development while you wrote it, all the while getting feedback from numerous content reviewers. As an example, one of my textbooks had more than forty reviewers and I was expected to rewrite to make them all happy even when they contradicted each other. As a result, IMHO, textbooks get most of their personality distilled until they resemble every one of the popular competing textbooks: a sure route to ego-less manuscripts.
I always wanted to do something different, or use an unusual approach. Perhaps not smart for textbook adoptions, but it's a personality trait. Perhaps that's why I find fiction so appealing.
So forty years after The Crystalline Man, in 2008, I finished my next novel, Wobbling Star at over 100,000 words and looked for a publisher. Most required an agent, but I found one who would take an un-agented MS, Baen. Baen is a publisher with a slant quite different from most publishers, particularly about electronic books and DRM. They publish a lot of military science fiction. Although the trunked Crystaline Man has a slight military slant, Wobbling Star has none.
I submitted Wobbling Star electronically, and started writing a second novel. A year later, I had not heard back from Baen. Online, they indicated that they were behind because of the many submissions, so I waited longer. According to the online information, they had read the slush pile up to the date for my submission--and then passed it with no word to me. I sent a query and got a very nice letter of rejection, apparently they had messed up my email address. In retrospect, the rejection is not a big surprise: my novel was not only unpolished, it probably didn't fit well in Baen's list. Based on the number of competing manuscripts, I also learned that anyone who has ever read science fiction, also want s to write it.
By then, I had finished a second novel, The Princess, the Knight, and the Knave. the first in a planned young adult series. Who to send it to while I worked on the sequel? By now I realized that direct entry to most publishers was difficult to impossible. I queried one and entered a contest. No luck. Rather than acquisition editors such as I had faced with The Crystalline Man, literary agents had become the gatekeepers into the magical world of publishing fiction.
Publishers were mostly inaccessible, but surely, an agent would look at my wonderful novel. Nope. First they want a query letter, and maybe the first few pages of the novel. I didn't have a clue how to write a good query letter, nor was I great at starting up a novel. I expected novels, like the English literature I had studied, to start leisurely and build. I did not expect that I had to slap the reader in the face in the first 1000 words in order to pull her into a 100,000 word read.
How many invites did I get for Wobbling Star after 30 queries to agents? Not one request to read the novel. Not even requests for the first few chapters. Perhaps half did not respond to my query at all. Frustrating, but again perhaps not surprising.
How many invitations from a similar number of queries for The Princess, the Knight, and the Knave in the following year? One, based on a query letter pitch alone, the agent asked to see the first ten pages. I sent the requested pages and got a polite rejection. Clearly, I knew zilch about writing either a query letter or about the first ten pages of a novel. More on that in another post.
I knew I was in trouble, because I did not have a clue how to write and market a novel. I needed some fiction experience. I needed some credentials to get an agent to read more than just my query letter.
So I decided to learn to write commercial fiction by writing short stories. I could practice the craft of fiction on projects that didn't take a year to complete and get some credentials when they were published. Moreover, you don't query: you send the entire short story to a magazine. If you get rejected then at least they read what you wrote--just maybe not all of what you wrote. I will discuss slush readers and reader hooks in another episode.
This is my cliff hanger for this episode: How can I learn to write commercial speculative fiction, when my only knowledge of short stories come from anthologies of English literature?
This last year, 2011, was a good year. I had 8 speculative short stories accepted, 5 of them at professional rates, and the remaining 3 of them at semi-pro rates. By my count, once all the pro-rate stories are published, I'll be eligible to join the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA)--makes me feel like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz getting a chance to see the guy behind that curtain.
I'll discuss the writing and marketing of each of the published stories in other episodes, and I'll discuss the other accepted stories in later posts when they are published.
While I was still teaching college mathematics, I had some publishing credentials in non-fiction: three mathematics textbooks with West (about 1995) and one with McMillan (about 1975). I knew I could write complete sentences and whole paragraphs. After all, my undergraduate major was not just in mathematics, my second major was English literature.
I don't mean to give the wrong impression. I did not decide to write fiction, jump in, and sell eight stories the first year. No. I had grandiose plans to start at the top by writing best-selling novels. So my jumping off point almost five years ago began with a novel. I struggled. I wrote. I revised and rewrote. I imagined that my other experiences, including what I knew about writing non-fiction would be enough to produce a good novel. It wasn't.
Many, many years ago, I had written a novel, but then, who hasn't? After I finished college, got a job and started graduate school part-time, I sent the novel, The Crystalline Man, to a small spec fiction publisher. Everything was by mail in those days (about 1967). The novel was about an undercover agent disguised as an android in order to infiltrate android revolutionaries (basically android terrorists, but that wasn't a term commonly used back then). This was before Mr. Data, and my androids were all but indistinguishable from humans except for the Made on Earth logo stamped where the navel should be. The publisher responded that the story looked pretty good and they would like to hold it. My life got busy, but not with writing. (Although, I had become enamored with Star Trek, and I wrote a couple of screen plays, each of which garnered nice feedback from the Scott Meredith agency, but no offer of representation. Star Trek, like most video productions, only accepted agented manuscripts)
After a year with no firm decision on The Crystalline Man, I wrote the publisher that because they had made no contract offer, I would like to withdraw the novel. I got the MS back and, with no little frustration, trunked it. At the time, I didn't know what making the noun trunk into a verb meant. Recently, I re-read my dog-eared hard copy of that old novel (no PCs in those early days, and yes I've got a really old trunk). I still like the plot, but I wouldn't try to market that novel today without a complete rewrite; however, that's another episode.
Although presumptuous for someone who had attempted fiction in almost forty years, I thought I could whip out a novel, and publishers would beat a door to my path. After all, that is exactly what happened when I wrote a textbook. I did not fully appreciate the difference between textbook publishing and publishing trade books. Textbook publishers really did beat a path to a profs' door on the rumor that the prof has an outline for a possible text, or was considering writing an outline, or even knew how to spell the word outline. They'd sign you up for a pittance and put the book in development while you wrote it, all the while getting feedback from numerous content reviewers. As an example, one of my textbooks had more than forty reviewers and I was expected to rewrite to make them all happy even when they contradicted each other. As a result, IMHO, textbooks get most of their personality distilled until they resemble every one of the popular competing textbooks: a sure route to ego-less manuscripts.
I always wanted to do something different, or use an unusual approach. Perhaps not smart for textbook adoptions, but it's a personality trait. Perhaps that's why I find fiction so appealing.
So forty years after The Crystalline Man, in 2008, I finished my next novel, Wobbling Star at over 100,000 words and looked for a publisher. Most required an agent, but I found one who would take an un-agented MS, Baen. Baen is a publisher with a slant quite different from most publishers, particularly about electronic books and DRM. They publish a lot of military science fiction. Although the trunked Crystaline Man has a slight military slant, Wobbling Star has none.
I submitted Wobbling Star electronically, and started writing a second novel. A year later, I had not heard back from Baen. Online, they indicated that they were behind because of the many submissions, so I waited longer. According to the online information, they had read the slush pile up to the date for my submission--and then passed it with no word to me. I sent a query and got a very nice letter of rejection, apparently they had messed up my email address. In retrospect, the rejection is not a big surprise: my novel was not only unpolished, it probably didn't fit well in Baen's list. Based on the number of competing manuscripts, I also learned that anyone who has ever read science fiction, also want s to write it.
By then, I had finished a second novel, The Princess, the Knight, and the Knave. the first in a planned young adult series. Who to send it to while I worked on the sequel? By now I realized that direct entry to most publishers was difficult to impossible. I queried one and entered a contest. No luck. Rather than acquisition editors such as I had faced with The Crystalline Man, literary agents had become the gatekeepers into the magical world of publishing fiction.
Publishers were mostly inaccessible, but surely, an agent would look at my wonderful novel. Nope. First they want a query letter, and maybe the first few pages of the novel. I didn't have a clue how to write a good query letter, nor was I great at starting up a novel. I expected novels, like the English literature I had studied, to start leisurely and build. I did not expect that I had to slap the reader in the face in the first 1000 words in order to pull her into a 100,000 word read.
How many invites did I get for Wobbling Star after 30 queries to agents? Not one request to read the novel. Not even requests for the first few chapters. Perhaps half did not respond to my query at all. Frustrating, but again perhaps not surprising.
How many invitations from a similar number of queries for The Princess, the Knight, and the Knave in the following year? One, based on a query letter pitch alone, the agent asked to see the first ten pages. I sent the requested pages and got a polite rejection. Clearly, I knew zilch about writing either a query letter or about the first ten pages of a novel. More on that in another post.
I knew I was in trouble, because I did not have a clue how to write and market a novel. I needed some fiction experience. I needed some credentials to get an agent to read more than just my query letter.
So I decided to learn to write commercial fiction by writing short stories. I could practice the craft of fiction on projects that didn't take a year to complete and get some credentials when they were published. Moreover, you don't query: you send the entire short story to a magazine. If you get rejected then at least they read what you wrote--just maybe not all of what you wrote. I will discuss slush readers and reader hooks in another episode.
This is my cliff hanger for this episode: How can I learn to write commercial speculative fiction, when my only knowledge of short stories come from anthologies of English literature?
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