Bhagwan @ Large

Out the Door

The biggest, and most effective tool in separating amateur and professional writers is the submissions process. Historically, it involved typing (or causing to be typed) query letters, manuscripts, securing postage for both legs of the trip, and then months of waiting for hypothetical response most likely to be a rejection letter.

I have done all these things. I have agonized over novel summaries, outlines, formatting, postage, and my own quite inadequate handwriting on the envelope itself. I have checked the email every day for a year, waiting to see a letter justifying my efforts.

Tonight, I submitted three short stories within 20 minutes of one another, using exactly the same technology I needed to write them. I researched paying markets, guidelines, did final edits, and then sent my digital children out into the ether in hopes of success. I used previous rejection letters to narrow my attacks on the editors’ sensibilities, and my own opinions on what those pieces were supposed to say, and what they actually convey tot eh hypothetical reader.

In short, I wrote. I haven’t done that in some time, other than quick story treatments and brainstorming. This fall’s convention circuit has re-instilled in me my biggest failing as a writer.

Apathy.

It is so blindingly easy to send work out into the world, there is no excuse for my stable of stories not to be circulating at all times. If they are not being submitted, clearly there is something wrong with either them, or with me.

And I think they’re pretty good.

So tomorrow, I’ll be selecting more homes for more pieces. I’ll be collecting feedback on other stories in preparation for other submissions, and maybe I’ll even dip into the brown notebook for another piece of low-hanging fruit.

Or, and this is crazy talk here, I could continue work on the two novels also not being submitted right now.

Occupying Apathy is not a way to end the tyranny of procrastination. It’s time to move on, move out, and move up in the world.

It’s time to write.

In the wee dark hours of the now

This last weekend I was in Las Vegas, getting to know and experience the culture of Horror writers. Not horror fandom, that I know all to well. But instead the creative methods and disciplines of those who purvey and portray that which goes bump in the night.

Why, you might ask? You’re a science fiction guy, you proclaim. You make video games, get back in your box!

Alas, I cannot. My fiction has been described as dark far too often, and some of my closest friends do not want to read my words on a regular basis. I have been known to say “I don’t write happy,” and it’s true that even the more uplifting of my short fiction has a serious edge to it.

Horror was the original category of storytelling. It’s one of the reasons I believe we evolved language in the first place, to express concepts besides basic hierarchical needs. It’s all well and good to relate the size and appearance of the bear, but to get across why you should be afraid of it takes art and imagination.

(You should, by the way. Because though most bears are pleasant, simple denizens of the wild places, they in no way recognize homo sapiens sapiens as a dominant omnivore. In fact, the only animal that instinctively hunts humans is a bear. The most efficient non-dinosaur predator of prehistory was a bear, and I’m still not positive that one’s not going to eat me as I walk to the bus.)

But I digress (seriously, BEARS). The markets I’m submitting to like my prose, but can’t really find a place for it among their standard offerings. Broadening my portfolio can only help get the words out, and in truth I’m relieved to find more monsters in spirit roaming the halls of conventions. Mind you, I’ll never stop writing about superheroes and spaceships, but now I can relax and let the darkness flow.

There are several such stories germinating in the festering madness of my mind right now. Tales so stark and uncompromising they threaten to chase away the two books I should be finishing when I sit down not to write. I’m afraid of one, and amused by the other. As I prep for next month’s big fiction gathering, I feel I’ll have a lot more to talk about than before last weekend.

Of course, imagine how much more productive a trip it would be if I could just finish the damn books.

Time to make video games. I’m fairly sure there are no bears in my office today.

They mostly come out at night. Mostly.