I sat down with my list of things to do, and I became so overwhelmed with the length of it, that my bones sort of jellied. After about an hour of staring at the spreadsheet, muttering "no way can I do this I cannot do this I'm going to fail fail fail", I snapped the fuck out of it, and decided that next year will NOT be made of fail. I just need a new approach.

So, on the first of every month, I'm going to post a list of things I have to get done by the end of the month. At the end of each month, I'll post what I accomplished, and what needs to be carried over to the next month (or crossed off altogether). I think breaking it down into monthly sections will make it seem much more manageable. I'm like a dog this way - I have to be tricked into doing something, otherwise I dig my claws into the floor and howl like a howling dog thing. :P

Tomorrow, the first Monthly Goals post of the year. Until then, I hope everyone has/is having a Happy New Year.

Labels: 2008 monthly goals

Final Drafts Finished:

This Year:
1. "Disambiguation" (poem)
2. "Silver Night Train" (poem)
3. "The God of Suburbia" (poem)
4. "Crepusculum" (flash)
5. "Queen" (novelette)
6. "Horses" (novelette)
7. "Shang Hai" (novelette)
8. "Her Deepness" (novelette, completely rewritten from short story)

Last Year:
1. "Blackberry Sweet" (flash)
2. "Teslated Salishan Evergreen" (flash)
3. "Her Deepness" (short story)
4. "Take Your Daughters To Work" (short story)
5. "Summer of Love" (novelette)
6. "The Four Hundred Thousand" (novelette)
7. "The Unattainable" (novelette)
8. "The Ruins of Love" (novella)

It looks like I tend to write about 8 new things a year (I don't have stats for 2005, but I think it was around the same number, maybe lower - and I'm not counting the 50k words of the novel I wrote this year). Not bad, and I don't see any need to force myself to write a higher amount next year. Quality and fulfilling obligations to invites by editors/markets should be my concerns, not quantity. I'd rather write a couple of very good stories than twenty mediocre ones. The mediocre stories might sell just the same, but that's beside the point: there's too much mediocrity out there already. No need for me to contribute to it.

It also looks like I'm more comfortable with the novelette (7500-14,000 words) than short story (under 7500 words). This isn't much of a surprise, but it means I have to take into consideration that there will be less markets for me to submit them to. Many of the best markets have a 4000 word limit, and I just have to either accept that I won't be published in them, or force myself to write shorter stories. At this point, I don't think it's necessary to force anything. I'm happy with what I'm writing, and I'm selling it, so that's fine.

Submitted:

As usual, I don't keep track of submission figures, I just try to keep writing work that is submission-worthy, and keep sending them back out if they return. What's important is that this year I only wrote one story that I had to abandon because I got it wrong with the first draft ("Crepusculum") - and it was only a momentary trunking, as it's now in rewrites for a new market. This is a HUGE improvement in my level of skill at assessing/editing my work as I go. I should be submitting a higher number of stories next year - "Shang Hai", "Her Deepness", "Queen" and "Crepusculum" will all start going out in January, which will be the most stories I've ever had in submission at a single time.

Rejected:

Some. As I've said before, I don't keep track of rejections, except in terms of advice given to me by editors, and any requests to see more material in the future.

Sold:

This Year:
1. "Brimstone Orange" (as a reprint to PseudoPod)
2. "The Unattainable" (to Cowboy Lover: Erotic Stories of the Wild West)
3. "The Four Hundred Thousand" (to Subterranean Online, Fall 2007)

Previous Year:
1. "Teslated Salishan Evergreen" (A Field Guide to Surreal Biology)
2. "Take Your Daughter to Work" (Subterranean Magazine #6)
3. "Jetsam" (Sybil's Garage #4)

Three sales a year isn't bad. I don't write quickly, so I don't expect this figure to get higher next year. If I hit three again in 2008, that'll be great.

Published:

This Year:
1. "Take Your Daughter to Work" (in Subterranean Magazine #6)
2. "Jetsam" (in Sybil's Garage #4)
3. "The Unattainable" (Cowboy Lover: Erotic Stories of the Wild West)
4. "Brimstone Orange" (podcast on PseudoPod)
5. "The Four Hundred Thousand" (in Subterranean Online, Fall 2007)

Previous Year:
1. "At the Edge of Ellensburg" (novella, erotica)

I can't control this aspect of the business, so there's no real goal here. Things get moved in and out of publishing schedules all the time, so I can't say I want "X" things published next year. I hope that something of mine will be published next year - I just can't say what it will be, or how many times it'll happen. I just have to make sure I'm continuing to write and submit stories so that I will continue to be published.

Raymond Chandler's Law:

It takes writing a million words of shit before you become a professional writer - or so the saying goes. Supposedly attributed to Raymond Chandler - I've never been able to find the exact quote or positive proof that he said it. But I like it. I've come to interpret it as this: you should expect to write about a million words before you really find your voice, your "groove", and begin to write publishable fiction on a regular basis. I think for me this is an accurate assessment.

To date, I've written about 633,000 words - last year it was 545,000 words, so the increase is very, very small - I wrote 88,000 words in 2007. However: I've published 59,319 words - up by almost 100% from 28,499 published words as of last year. In other words, 9.36% of all the words I've written have been published - up from 5.2% last year. 9.36% is, in my opinion, a far more significant number than how many words I wrote. I'm being published more. That's what counts.

Tomorrow, I'll post my goals for 2008.

1. Hammered by Elizabeth Bear
2. Scardown by Elizabeth Bear
3. Worldwired by Elizabeth Bear
4. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
5. Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine
6. Old Twentieth by Joe Haldeman
7. Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo
8. The Terror by Dan Simmons
9. Dead Souls by Michael Laimo
10. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 1 by Alan Moore
11. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 2 by Alan Moore
12. The Store by Bentley Little
13. Bestiary by Robert Masello
14. Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
15. 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill
16. The Well of Stars by Robert Reed
17. The Deep Dark by Gregg Olsen
18. Year Zero by Jeff Long
19. The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy
20. Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
21. Dreadful Skin by Cherie Priest
22. The Darkest Part of the Woods by Ramsey Campbell
23. Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
24. Lost Girls, Volumes 1-3 by Alan Moore
25. The Rosetta Complex by Richard Paul Russo
26. The New Lovecraft Circle, ed. by Robert Price
27. Everything's Eventual by Stephen King
28. The Blue Mirror by Kathy Koja
29. Ghost Dance by John Case
30. Titan II: A History of the Cold War Missile Program by David F. Stumpf
31. The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe
32. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
33. Between Worlds (six SF novellas), ed. by Robert Silverberg
34. Ghosts and Grisly Things by Ramsey Campbell
35. Sleepwalk by Adrian Tomine
36. Salon Fantastique, ed. by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
37. The Ghosts of Partition Street by Robert Levy
38. The Night Class by Tom Piccirilli
39. L'Assommoir by Emile Zola
40. James Tiptree, Jr. by Julie Phillips
41. Grey by Jon Armstrong
42. Dark of the Night by John Saul
43. The Keeper by Sarah Langan
44. Shadow Coast by Phillip Pullman
45. A Brief History of Western Civilization by Thomas Greer
46. Alas, Babylon by Pat Logan
47. Firelands by Michael Jenson
48. Blindsight by Peter Watt
49. Next Season by Michael Blakemore
50. Elemental, ed. by Steven Savile & Alethea Kontis
51. Deeper by Jeff Long
52. The Missing by Sarah Langan
53. The Best of the Best, Volume 2 (novellas), ed. by Gardner Dozoiz
54. Wyrmhole by Jay Caselberg
55. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
56. The Overnight by Ramsey Campbell
57. Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick
58. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

I'm not quite finished with The Devil in the White City, but I put it on the list - I'll finish it over the weekend. I don't have much commentary on what I read. I read mostly for pleasure this year, which I think is kind of indicative of the year in general: in other words, I pissed away a lot of valuable time doing nothing to further my writing career. I don't have much commentary on that, either, except to say that the year was what it was. I refuse to apologize or take any part of it back. Who knows? Maybe I was laying the foundations for some phenomenal work that will spring out of me in the future. You never know, and you can never judge. Sometimes you just need to chill out and fuck off for a while. It's not really my place or anyone else's to say I wasted time. It's my life. Even if I don't know how to live it, some part of me deep inside knows how to live it. And this year, that part of me said: read, fuck off, and don't sweat it.

Next post will be a list of what I'll be reading next year. O sweet jebus, it's not going to be "fun", but it will be interesting! Ok, maybe it'll be a little fun. :)

People are starting to post lists of what they've written & published over the past year. I haven't had the urge to do that yet, mainly because I'm thinking of my schedule for 2008. Just a few days ago, I sat down with my trusty Excel spreadsheet, and plotted out what projects I wanted to write next year. I have a lot of half-finished stories, and I spread them out over the months, also giving myself chunks of time in case I needed to slip in a story for an anthology or the like. It was a solid, doable schedule, and I was quite proud of it.

Of course, yesterday I threw it all out the window. But that's not a bad thing. A publisher (not one of the behemoths, but a very high-quality market with pro rates) expressed interest in the Tacoma Steampunk novellas. I confessed that they hadn't been written, but that I could deliver them later in the year, and in the meantime I could finish my in-progress novella "The Girls of the World" and deliver it in March. They said yes (as in yes please send everything when it's ready, not yes we'll publish anything - just want that to be clear).

So: my new schedule for 2008 will be to write a story for an anthology (not quite an invite, but I've been given the go-ahead to submit), and to write four novellas. I worked on my little Excel schedule chart this morning, and got everything spaced out properly, with time for research, writing, and edits/revisions before the delivery dates. On top of that, I'll still be working on The Ruins of Love - it's not abandoned, but will now proceed at a more leisurely pace, maybe a page a day or more until it's finished. Stories will be on the backburner as well, unless I get an anthology invite or decide there's a market/anthology I really, really want to write for.

I'm very excited. It's one thing to love what you write, but when people in the industry want to see what you write, and when there's the possibility that they will pay you (and pay you well) for your work, it makes it that much better. Yes, it's validating. And frankly, I can't imagine what will happen if the novella trilogy is accepted. Just that, it will be a very big deal, and possibly open up some new opportunities for me.

But: I'm getting ahead of myself. For the rest of December, I'm going to work on finishing at least one more story, and go over the outline and what little I've written for the new version of TGOTW. I'll probably post that "what I did in 2007" list closer to the end of December. For now, though: three weeks to go, and I still have a lot to do.

Labels: "the girls of the world", tacoma steampunk

"Nothing complicates our existence so much as that we so frequently believe in definitives, and thereby lose time being ashamed of a mistake instead of admitting it and simply starting our lives over."
--from The Road Into the Open by Arthur Schnitzler



So, this is where I ended up by November's end - and that's pretty much how it's going to stay throughout December. I decided that I need to spend this month doing more research, and just letting what I've written sit for a while, to give me distance and perspective. Deadlines are so important, it seems, for genre writers, but I can't allow myself to get all worked up over the fact that I thought I'd finish "Ruins" by the end of the year but I was wrong. Hey, I was wrong. No big deal. The words won't disappear, nor will my ideas. And if I decide that I need to scrap all of the words above, and start over again? Well, see the quote above. Besides, all good things take time. :)

I've also been giving some thought as to next year, and what I want to accomplish in terms of output. Part of this is because I have many stories that are half-written or so close to being finished, and I need to take care of them and get them out into submission. But I'm also thinking in terms of how much potential income they represent - income I'm denying myself because I've been a bit lazy, I'll admit, and haven't taken the time to finish what I started. As I was saying to someone a few days ago, I thought I'd escaped the "bad year after Clarion" curse that so many students have - but again, I was wrong. This has been a year of largely no output, with only two finished stories. However, both stories sold to pro markets. So: I need to step it up a bit next year.

And I realize that as a writer I'm supposed to talk about how much I live for the writing, and how that's all that matters, blah blah blah... Well, I don't believe that holds true for people who want to be professional writers. And I don't believe that wanting to make money off your art makes you "impure" or crass or greedy. I need the income, because it all goes back into the writing process. I need money for those Herbert Hunt books on Tacoma - so I can write my steampunk novellas. I need money for a 2009 trip down to Central and South America (and probably an additional one in 2010) - so I can start researching the first volume of the Archipelago Quartet (the quartet's world geology, geographies and various cultures are based on those that comprise the Pacific Ring of Fire, where I was born and raised). I need money to go to at least one convention next year so I can meet editors and writers who might help me find out about anthologies and markets I wouldn't hear about otherwise. All the money I make from writing goes back into writing. Circle of life - really!

I also firmly refuse to use the income from my day job to finance my writing. I did that for many years as an actor: buying costumes, taking expensive classes, handing over fistfuls of cash to any and everyone who might be able to help my career. All it did was screw up my credit and completely demoralize me - because people were obviously interested in my money, not in my talent, and they used me as a convenient cash machine. And I let them, because I wanted to act. Well, never again. Clarion was the exception - but I knew that going to Clarion would be a sound investment, one that I'd make my money back on, and I've been right. But other than Clarion, I have no intentions of destroying my 401k or my savings and credit in order to advance my writing career. It's suicide: I don't want to find myself destitute at 67, retired and without a penny to my name, unable to pay for medical bills or housing or even food. I've seen that happen to far too many writers, and it won't happen to me. I'm keeping my day job money for that day when I do retire, so that I can continue to write when I'm older, instead of holding down a bunch of miserable part-time jobs in retail so I can cover my rent and bills. If I want to spend money on writing-related things, I need to write stories that people will pay professional rates for, and do that on a fairly regular basis. So, yeah: next year will be a little different. A bit more intense, but better for me in the long run.

Sorry for the rambling post. I think I put too much sugar in my coffee this morning. :P

Labels: "archipelago quartet", "the ruins of love", "writing and money"