crime and publishment

Saturday was my twenty-fourth birthday. I had a marvelous time, despite working an eleven-hour shift at the airport café during the airshow. No matter. Somehow I managed to get home, recuperate, and host a grand cocktail party which lasted until the wee hours of the morning.

Having finally subdued the hangover, I now reflect on what I've accomplished in life so far.

It looks as though I've done nearly everything I wanted to do before the age of twenty-five. I've acquired a college degree, lived in a foreign country, gotten drunk on absinthe, published some travel articles, learned how to tend bar, and (as of last Monday) earned a private pilot's certificate.

(Miss H and I are going to Disneyland sometime in October, so that will soon be off the to-do list as well.) 

Only one accomplishment remains. I still need to get published.

I don't need to publish my novel before I'm 25. I'm cool with that. But I would like to land on Planet Fiction before I'm a quarter of a century old. Just to prove to myself that I can do it, you know. Get in there while I'm still young. Make my mark. Publish a short story or three.

So I'm writing sci-fi stories like mad, and have already submitted one to Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, as you'll recall. Some of these stories are pretty long: ten thousand words or more, well into novelette range. 

Fortunately, there are still plenty of magazines out there that publish works of that length.

I'm going to pick up the pace over the next few days. I've decided I need to try harder at this, even despite working six days a week and entertaining a lady friend. There's no reason not to. I can easily set aside an hour or so every day for this. The only thing that separates me from all those sci-fi authors I admire so much (Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, Isaac Asmiov, John W. Campbell, Jr., H.G. Wells, and many more) is persistence.

The way I see it, writing is a lot like acting. Most of the work is done before you become famous. You have to lay the groundwork before you attain any kind of notoriety, or even success: writing dozens, hundreds of stories and sending them to every publication and periodical you can find. It's exhausting work, costs a mint in postage, and requires diligence, patience, and determination.

You have to have the determination (and the stamina) to write those hundreds of stories and revise them until they're suitable for publication. If your schedule is busy, then you need to set aside time to write and submit, too, just like you would to exercise or play fetch with the dog. No excuses. I don't care if you have to cut your teatime short by five minutes. Make sure you're writing and submitting at least an hour a day. You can find that much time, no matter who you are or how frenetic your day is. I know a lot of writers who work nine-to-five jobs and come home exhausted every evening. When do they write? On their lunch breaks. It's getting yourself into the proper state of mind, that's all. It's not a matter of whether you can do it. It's a matter of when. 

You have to have the diligence to package your submissions the way the magazine wants you to: typically, Courier font, double spacing, numbered pages and word counts. Trust me, this is worth your time. The worst thing you can do when submitting a story is fail to format your submission correctly, especially when the submission guidelines are often readily available on the publication's web page. The guidelines are there for a reason. They make your submission more professional in appearance, as well as render it easier for an editor to read. This just might help you find out whether you're being published sooner—not to mention give you a better shot at being published, period. No editor's going to have the time or the willpower to try and decipher a single-spaced, thirty-page manuscript written in an undecipherable font in the colors of the rainbow.

Finally, you must have the patience to wait the requisite 4-8 weeks to find out whether your submission is suitable for publication. Many editors are swamped these days, thanks to an ever-growing population of wannabe writers. They're not going to look more charitably upon your work if you badger them all the time querying the status of your story. Working tirelessly on stories (every day, folks, every day: you want to keep your hand in, don't you?) and shotgunning them across the fiction universe (making sure, however, that you follow individual publications' respective submission requirements to the letter) also takes patience. Just remember, you're not going to be an overnight success. Most latter-day critics agree that Herman Melville wrote some of the best stories in the English language, and yet he was highly unappreciated in his time. Most of the stuff he wrote, which today is venerated by literati, was a flash in the pan back in the 19th century. Melville himself worked as a customs inspector most of his life, just to make ends meet. He never made enough to support himself on his writing alone. Chances are, neither will you. There's no harm in trying, though. You have to write a lot, submit a lot, and wait a lot in this game. Write, submit, and wait. Make sure you do a little of all three, every single day. Slacking is a crime punishable by death—or worse, life in obscurity. Slackers never get published (unless they write for IGN).

Remember, if you keep up the fight and don't let your writing slide, and keep up a steady stream of submissions, publishment will be yours. It may take a while, yes. The process may be tedious, yes. The flood of rejection slips will be heartbreaking, yes. But persistence is key. I heard that Sylvia Plath submitted one story to the New Yorker at least 30 times before they finally published it. If she'd quit after 29 tries, would she ever have succeeded?

Like former Vice President Dan Quayle once said, "If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure."

Persist and you will find what you seek. Such is true of every literary hero, no matter what side of the page they're on, no?

And when you do get published...celebrate. Do a happy dance. Eat something unhealthy. Watch a fatuous TV show. Buy 582 Slim Jims. Reward yourself for your persistence. Go ahead and relax. You earned it.