Tag: submissions

So It Goes

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

So It Goes.  It’s what Vonnegut said about death in Slaughterhouse Five.  I’m not writing about a death — I hope — but it was at least a long coma.

If you peek at the date of my last post, you’ll see it was a little over a year ago.  Yes, a year.  I wish I could say that I’ve been too busy writing to blog.  Not so.  I’ve been busy being busy.  Life gets in the way…can’t find time to write…writer’s block…the same old tired excuses.  Bottom line, I really haven’t been a writer for the past couple years.  So it goes.

But the writer in me isn’t dead.  He’s been in hibernation, sulking in the back corner of my psyche waiting for me to stop sulking in the front corner of my psyche.  It’s been a rough couple years for me, no doubt.  It’s been tough to focus on anything at all, let along writing.  So it goes.

I find myself at the precipice of a lot of change.  I have a new job in a new city which means a new house which means unloading the old house (hey, wanna buy a house?) and uprooting my child which means altering the custody schedule. Good thing I have all this time during summer break to get things taken care of.  Right, time.  Why doesn’t there seem to be any? So it goes.

As every writer knows, time isn’t something you find, it’s something you make.  I was horrified when I realized that I hadn’t made any time for anything writing related short of conventions (another topic for another post).  So today I changed that.  I started small, with a few little flash fiction submissions (one reprint and two unpublished gems I had lying around).  I had to really scratch my head just to recall how to write a cover letter.  Three little stories in the wind for a few weeks/months.  And suddenly the ekg attached to this comatose writer made a little blip.  So it goes.  Or so it comes?

Yes, I need to return to actually writing to really resurrect myself as a writer.  That’s coming.  Directly.  But much like a coma patient with atrophied musculature, I can’t just leap out of bed and start typing a marathon.  I have to make sure I remember how to walk, then jog, then maybe some running.  Even just sitting up on the bed feels good. Time to see what the floor feels like under my feet.

Let’s see how this goes.

My Worst Heinlein Rule

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

If you are writing science fiction, hopefully you already know Heinlein’s Rules of Writing.  If not, I’ll let Robert J. Sawyer explain them.  I confess that I struggle with them all.  I go through spells where rule-one comes hard.  I have at least a dozen rule-two violations on my hard drive.  Rule-three…well, I’ve never been sold on that one because I do a lot of good work in the revision stages.  Rule-four is likely the one I’m best at, but its corollary rule-five is my nemesis.

Heinlein’s Fifth Rule of Writing: You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.  If I had a dollar for every excuse I’ve used for breaking this rule, I could write full time.  Or not, since that would take away half those excuses…but I digress.

At this hour three days ago, my Duotrope Submission Tracker (you support Duotrope, right?) had four stories on it.  Four.  Meanwhile my sreadsheet that pairs stories with target markets contained twelve stories.  That’s twelve finished, ready to submit stories.  Worse, two of those stories I was tracking on Duotrope were reprints and not even on my target list.  So that was two out of twelve stories in circulation.  Those two received responses on the same day.  That’s when I realized how badly I’d let Heinlein down.

The good news: I have been using the last few dwindling hours of my vacation to remedy that situation.  And I’m still sitting at seven stories on my Submission Tracker.  (For those keeping score, I’ve gotten five of the twelve out the door.)

Why so few?  One, I have a four-year-old who is also on vacation, so she has been a bit needy.  Then there’s a wife, housework, shopping, lame excuse, boring excuse, worthless excuse…  Oh, and then there’s my overwhelming urge to violate rule-tree and revise stories I had once declared as “finished”; that takes time.  I’m hoping to get a couple more out before bedtime and I have a goal of all twelve being out by Friday.  How many of these could have sold by now if I’d just kept them in circulation?

It’s all well and good to tout a few publications and call myself a writer.  It’s another to be a writer.  There’s no boss to remind me of my menial responsibilities; there’s just me.  Time to writer up.

What’s wrong with me?

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 7 Comments

My latest submission to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has been out 17 days.  Doesn’t sound like long for a postal sub, but my previous F&SF have taken 10 days, 8 days…and that’s it.

Only two prior submissions to F&SF.  What’s wrong with me?  Sure, I like e-subs for their convenience, but this is F&SF for pity sake.  They passed on “Leech Run” and an old novelette that I’ll one day novelize, E&P.  But that’s it.  At least that’s all my records show, and I didn’t record anything to Duotrope about either of them.  It’s been over two and a half years since I sent them anything.

I find this tough to believe, honestly.  My record keeping has gotten better of late but I could easily have missed a sub or two, especially if I considered them impossible sales.  But to not even try?

There was a time when I heard a heartbreaking stat about Gordon Van Gelder only buying like three stories from slush ever.  But that shouldn’t stop me from collecting rejections from them.  Heck, I haven’t sent them GB or EE or TOL or any of my other stories making rounds. I didn’t even send them my 1500-word fart joke, “Excuse Me”.  It’s possible that I sent them “Chasers”, a story I sold back when I was just starting to keep records.   (I’m thinking of sending that one to Escape Pod once I hear back on “Leech Run”…but that’s another post.

More and more I am realizing that the person who has stood in my way of becoming a professional writer is me.  So while I hope that this delay from F&SF could mean good news (not necessarily a sale, but a rewrite request or just a nice personal rejection would be lovely), I’m going to start creating a target list for markets and prepare submissions for those targets ahead of time so I can drop a story in the mail the minute it’s rejected elsewhere.