career

I’m not much for superstitions, and the concept of a New Year falls under that category. I love any excuse to have a little party, of course, but let’s face it: A year is an artificial concept in itself, something we invented in order to keep track of our shit. There’s nothing mystical going on when the calendar flips over to a new number.

Still, there’s a utility to picking a moment to look back and look forward. Did you achieve your literary goals this year, artistically and professionally? What will the goals be next year? This is as good a time as any to consider both areas. I’ll start.

2017: The Writing Year in Review

I’ve been writing professionally for a while now, so my goals tend to be pretty static. I went into 2017 with a few basic goals:

1. Increase freelance income (always, that Cost of Living increase is no joke)
2. Sell a book to a publisher
3. Write 12 new short stories, minimum
4. Sell a few short stories
5. Launch an author newsletter
6. Write 3 new novels

So how’d I do? I did in fact increase my freelance income by about 30% this year, mainly by picking up a new client while maintaining all my old ones. In fact, I’m making more money as a freelance writer than I was when I had a Day Job, which kind of amazes me. I did sell a book—Writing Without Rules will be published by Writer’s Digest Books in May 2018. I wrote my monthly short stories, and actually had a hot streak where three of them are actually pretty good and will be in my submission cycle next year, after a bit of polishing. I sold one new story and saw two others published. I did in fact launch my author newsletter, which is awesome and you should sign up for it pronto.

And I did in fact write 3 new novels, though 2 were reboots of projects I’ve tried to write before (and one of those is being rebooted again), and started 2 others.

So, 2017 goals achieved. My 2018 goals are basically the same. Writing is a long game—instead of concentrating on one project, I just keep my head down. I write. I submit. I talk to my agent and listen to her sage advice. I take the opportunities that come my way and make the best of them.

So what are your writing goals for 2018? The key to achieving them, I think, is simple: Put in the work. There’s no magic spell, and there’s no One Way to publish and sell work. But at the core of the infinite ways people succeed as writers is that one simple rule: Do the work. Write, revise, submit. Repeat.

Happy New Year, folks!

I sold a piece of fiction recently. I used to think when someone bought a story I submitted that the purchase was the end of the interaction—an editor read my work, liked it and thought it would bring eyeballs to their platform, and offered to pay me for it. End of story. In fact, way back in the early, early days I published a short story (for no money) and got very bent out of shape when the editor proceeded to engage in what I considered excessive editing, coming back at me with questions and suggestions over and over again. Why in the world would you publish a story you obviously thought needed so much work?

Now I understand that selling a story is often just the beginning. Being published is a relationship, and that means you’re going to be challenged even though you’ve already cleared the hurdle and gotten your work ?approved’ on some level. The lesson is simple: Be ready to be challenged.

Good to Great

Editors often see potential in a story even if they believe there are flaws. Sometimes those flaws are purely mechanical and it’s just a thorough copy-edit that’s needed, but sometimes even though they like a story (or even a full novel) they’ve got concerns about certain plot mechanics, certain character motivations, or other aspects of the tale. In other words, they see a good story that could be great with a reasonable amount of work.

As an author, you have to balance out a knee-jerk rejection of any further changes simply because you considered the story finished long ago with the fact that you’re the author and thus the ultimate judge of whether edits are improving the story or not. In other words, when you sell a piece of fiction you should expect to be challenged, you should expect the editor to push you—but you also have to decide when to plant your feet and decide their suggestions aren’t right.

It’s not an easy balance to strike, sometimes. But being prepared for the push back is half the battle. Knowing that selling a story or book doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done is half the battle.

I sold Writing Without Rules this year and submitted what I thought was an excellent manuscript. I got feedback from my agent and revised accordingly. I got feedback from my editor, which ranged from mechanics to conceptual suggestions, and I took or left those suggestions as I saw fit—but I still wasn’t finished, because I currently have copy-edits to review, and the copy editor is also challenging me throughout questioning assumptions I’ve made and highlighting what they see as flaws. Half the hard work, in other words, comes after you sell something. And you just have to be prepared to defend all of your decisions. In my experience, no one’s going to force you to make a change that you disagree with—but they will want your reasoning, and it had better be good.

None of this is why I drink. I drink because after you publish the book the reviews and feedback from readers comes in—and it’s too late to make any changes.

“Writers write, every day” is one of those things you’ll hear a lot when you’re coming up as a writer. It’s one of those easy bits of advice that every single writer seems to throw around, implying that if you ever let a 24-hour period go by without putting some words down, your writing ability shrinks like some sort of role-playing character attribute afflicted by a mysterious roll of the die.

This is bullshit.

You know what? If you don’t feel like writing today, don’t. I guarantee you it won’t have any ill effects.

Making Writing a Chore

Look, as with most common advice in the writing world, there’s a kernel of goodness in the “write every day” scold. You do need to commit to writing if you’re going to finish everything, and getting words down on paper or pixel requires discipline. Boiling that down to the one size fits all admonishment that “writers write every day” takes the complex issue of how you can get work done and turns it into a flashy bit of pithy advice. In my experience, the pithier the advice, the less useful it is.

Only you know your schedule. Only you know the state of your mental exhaustion. Only you know whether you’re inspired or not tonight. And if you’re exhausted, or uninspired, there is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t take a day off and go play some video games, or read someone else’s writing. Plenty of famous, successful writers take time off from writing, sometimes going a very long time between projects. When it comes to your writing schedule, you do you.

Of course, if you always give yourself permission to do something else, you will fall into the trap this pithy advice is designed to prevent: You’ll never get anything done. The point though, is that you have to figure out how to defend against that. Maybe making yourself sit down and write every day works for you. Maybe it doesn’t. It’s up to you.

For some, the whole “writers writer every day” thing is more about identifying as a writer and less about actually creating great stories. If forcing yourself to write every day without fail works for you, great. If it doesn’t, don’t fret. You’re still a real writer.

Life’s funny. When I was younger, I never imagined I’d someday be a Contributing Editor at Writer’s Digest Magazine with a book on writing coming out (Writing Without Rules, natch) and a solid freelance writing career going. There was also a time when I didn’t see myself as a science fiction guy, and yet seven of my nine published novels are SFF.

On the other hand, I also never saw myself married and living with five cats. Make of that what you will.

FIVE GODDAMN CATS

The point is, your writing career may not go exactly as you imagine. When I sold my first novel, Lifers, I thought it was the first step in a very literary career; I saw myself as writing a series of realistic novels with subtle genre twists. When the book got reviewed by The New York Times I thought that was the next step. And then literally nothing much happened until I sold the sci-fi cyberpunk novel The Electric Church that I didn’t even tell my agent about until it had sold.

Every time I thought I knew where my career was going—or where it should go—I’ve been pretty much wrong. I’m at a point where I’ve stopped trying to guess—I just follow my opportunities combined with my imagination and passion, and hope that the combination of the two leads to something interesting. There’s just no point any more of trying to figure out whether a certain book will sell, or some kind of master plan for literary domination. I’m just along for the ride.

It can be frustrating to realize you’re at the mercy of forces. Forces like the market, which may or may not be buying what you’re writing. Forces like your agent or editors, who may or may not like your latest project. Forces like the fact that you need to make a living and therefore take writing jobs you might not have ever imagined yourself taking—which in turn lead to unforeseen moments of grace.

So, just write, submit, revise, and say yes to opportunities. No other strategy makes any sense.

I’d also suggest “drink heavily” as a way of blunting the horror that is writing for a living, but that seems like something y’all will figure out on your own.

I don’t know about y’all, but I always liked to imagine I was in charge of myself, of my life. That while I might not have a lot of influence on global events or the future of mankind, I did have total control over my own creative faculties. If nothing else, I could write anything, and write it well.

That’s true to a certain extent, but one area it’s never worked out is when I’ve tried to write a novel solely because I think it’s the right move career-wise, or a novel that will sell. This doesn’t work out for one simple reason: Whenever I write a book because I think I’m going to sell it it, it turns out to be a really, really shitty book.

Shitty Books, I’ve Written a Few

If you’ve written more than one novel, chances are you’ve written a shitty book or two (and sometimes all it takes is one novel, sadly). It can happen at any time, for any reason—you lose purchase on the concept or the characters or the plot, and the whole thing staggers towards the finish line as a stinking mess. You finally stick a disgusted “THE END” on its ass and stuff it into some dark closet, ignoring the smell.

Sometimes it happens just because. For me—and I’m not speaking for any other writers here—it happens most often when I try to write something for reasons other than pure inspiration. The more calculated I am, the less successful the book is. The nine novels I’ve sold have all been the result of pure inspiration instead of canny marketing speculation, and the times I’ve tried to be “smart” about the book I’m writing have always turned into abject failure.

Which is frustrating. Unless you’re selling books at a brisk pace and always signing new contracts with publishers, the thought will enter your mind that maybe you need to be more calculating. After all, the last few books your wrote in a fever of inspiration didn’t sell, or your Beta Readers didn’t like it, so why not look at what’s trending and go for that, or look back at your own past successes and try to replicate them?

And maybe for some writers that works. For me, it always ends in tears. And drinking binges.

One thing they never tell you when you decide to be a writer is how the definition of success shifts and changes over the course of your career, often without your permission (and sometimes without your even noticing).

Everyone has a different experience and evolution of thought, of course. For me, it went something like this: When I was but a young’n, success was just finishing something that resembled a novel. It didn’t matter how good it was, or if I might ever sell it. Just writing 50,000 words or so that made sense was enough.

When I’d done that, the goal posts shifted: I wanted to write something good. Something original. When I felt like I’d done that, the goal shifted again. Now I wanted to be published. Then I wanted to be paid for my writing. Then I wanted a contract with a major publisher. Et cetera and so on.

The Ladder

Every time I achieved my current definition of success, the definition shifted on me, so I never quite made it all the way, and still haven’t. But you have to remind yourself sometimes that writing a book is in and of itself an achievement—most writers who intend to write a novel, or even begin one, fail to finish it. And most that finish that novel never revise it. Or never try to publish it. Or never write another one.

Noted weirdo Woody Allen once said that success was 99% showing up, and he’s right—whatever your current definition of writing success, it all comes back to putting in the time and the work, producing material, and getting it out there somehow. The goal posts might shift, but the ways of getting to them don’t—you write, you revise, you submit.

And you should keep in mind the shifting nature of success in this business, and remind yourself that there was a time when the thing you did yesterday in an almost routine fashion was once your definition of success. The world is a machine designed to prevent you from writing, so just getting words on the screen is success, sometimes.

The world is also a machine designed to murder us, but that seems like a topic for a whole different sort of blog.