I have just posted my 40th submission of 2019 – a 3000-words science fiction story. This being the 28th week of the year, it means I’ve been submitting 1.4285 stories per week. That’s a lot.
And yet I’d like to write more, and submit more.
My current bounce rate is pretty high – of the 40 stories I submitted, I sold 9 and have six still out waiting for an evaluation.
It’s not bad, but there is ample space for improvement.
I have no illusion of ever becoming a 100% sales writer, but it would be nice to sell more.
I’ll work on it.
Category Archives: Writing
Who are we writing for?
I caught a snippet of a discussion in which I was not really involved, yesterday, about the two souls of fantasy fighting each other.
The crux of the contention was, should writers play for the high-brow, sophisticated readers, or should they be down-and-dirty, catering for the lowest common denominator?
Which is a nice conceptual framework, and I guess an interesting topic for discussion while we wait for the takeaway delivery boy to bring us our Szechwan dumplings and our fried rice. But once the food is on the table, the discussion becomes irrelevant.
This is an important thing to keep in mind – we that write do love talking about our craft. The tricks of the trade, the stumbling blocks and the shortcuts, that time I wrote 8000 words in a single night and the editor loved it… it’s part of our tribal practices, like dancing around the fire and throwing the kids through the jaws of a shark to signify they are now men.
Rituals.
Hating John Watson
In five days I need to deliver the final draft of a Sherlock Holmes pastiche that I pitched a while back and the editor wants to see finished. It’s a big opportunity – to break in a new market, to make some money, to reach new readers and to please an editor I hope will buy more stories of mine.
In the last three weeks I wrote five different versions of the story, and scrapped each and every one.
Tropical diseases, Egyptian curses, colonial traditions and Sherlock Holmes
I skipped a post yesterday: first I was busy doing a supermarket run and stocking my freezer with ice cream as a defense against the heat (36°C and 74% humidity as I write this), and then I scrapped the Holmes story I have been working on these last two weeks and started it over.
So I spent part of the afternoon and night of yesterday checking out books about Egyptian magic, and old Victorian books about tropical diseases.
Just let me write this blues away: 2000 words
I have just churned out 2000 words out of nowhere, in a single sitting. One hour. My hands hurt, I need a cool drink, but now here I have the first half of a short story that’s absolutely unwanted, and that will never find a home. It’s a free writing exercise, the sort of thing that happens when I say frell it all, let me just write!
It’s also sort of a prequel of my novella Parabellum Serenade, that I’ll (hopefully) will self-publish this autumn.
It’s a war story, set in an alternate timeline in which the Great War spun out of control as the Bolshevik Revolition spilled into the West, and the resulting mess of revolts and military coups intersected the great epidemic of Spanish Flu, and then things went down the drain.
Someone might label it Dieselpunk, or whatever.
Think fast: outlining a novella in two hours
So what happened was this: after posting about my idea of writing a story based on a character like Captain Katanga in the Indiana Jones movies, I was discussing details and possibilities with my friends online.
Stuff like who’d be part of the crew, would they operate only in the Mediterranean or extend their activities to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, would they kick Nazi ass exclusively or would they also punch some other occasional colonial bad guys… stuff like that.
And one of my publishers dropped me a line…
“You know where to send this one once it’s finished, right?”
And so, considering the pitch had already happened and worked without me doing nothing, I went and sent him a proper proposal and an outline for a 30.000-words novella.
Straight away.
No barrier between thought and action.
That sounds damn smooth, but first I had to put together a 1000-words/4 pages outline, and do it fast.
Honor among thieves
The thing one does for research. Today I weathered the heat and humidity by applying massive doses of cold tea and by reading an interesting article about the ethics of criminals.
Apart from the interesting bits about organized crime in 15th century Spain – that might come handy for future writing pursuits – I was particularly interested in one aspect of the ethics/crime/professionalism quandary: if I can compare writing to a con game (as Lawrence Block, among others, has done), and a writer to a highly skilled international jewel thief (cfr. Paddy McAloon’s “The Best Jewel Thief in the World”), then what is the place of ethics in all this?
Does being professionals only mean we get paid, and any way we get paid is OK?
Or is there something more? And how it works?
Spending a few hours with this article helped define some basic principles.
I might write about the whole thing, one of these nights.
Karavansara 