Oh no, not the numbers game!

Alright so if you didn’t gather from my first post I am a writer of speculative fiction. Mainly I stick in SciFi and Fantasy--what I like to call Fanta-Sci-- but I do meddle in a little horror too. Right now I haven’t been published…Yet.

And that right there is one of the reasons I know I will eventually be published. A lot of things go into it. Anybody can write. And if your writing purely for your own enjoyment or to hand down stories to your kids in a dusty shoebox one day, GREAT! Your done. Write away as you are now and your good. But if your looking to actually get your words out in front of people then more than likely you have some work to do. First you’ve got to learn about the bones of the story, then how to fit all those pieces together with words, and then you have to edit it all so the ‘T’s are crossed and the ‘I’s are dotted and all that lovely punctuation is in its proper place. Fine any decent writing course or school will get you those eventually.

But then there’s the thing that turns a writer into an author. Sending it out. It scares the living bajeebus out of you. Or at least it does me. You wrap up your nice new baby and send it out to the dark mysterious land of editors. Congratulations you’ve just sent out your first story.

Then, after a few weeks or months, in comes a familiar beige envelope with their response. And guess what. It’s more than likely gonna say something akin to a soda pop cap. Sorry, Please play again. YAY! Now you’re an experienced writer. And you can do one of two things with your baby here. Either put it safely back in its drawer-- where no more unkind eyes will ever dare defile its splendor-- or you can get real, get serious, and get it back out there in the numbers game.

Believe me I hate to say that. I’ve developed a true hate for the numbers game as a whole, thanks in no small part to playing the numbers game door to door lugging a two ton vacuum cleaner along for the ride. But a cad’s a cad and if you want to be published you gotta play the game. Right now I have 3 frames in my office. One is full. It has my first rejection slip. The next will soon be filled with my first acceptance letter and a photocopy of a, hopefully large, very cashed check. And once that’s filled the last will hold my latest acceptance letter of many to come in my career. Hopefully they both get filled this year. I can't really control that. But what I can control is the fact that I’m going to be annoying editors as much as I can this year with as many good stories as I can pump out.

I’ll keep you posted.