Writing Update
5 minutes
I wanted to share a few thoughts about my writing goals, and where I stand in relationship to them.
I’ve wanted to be a professional fiction writer since I was a kid, and have been working seriously at it for the last decade or so. That means getting up at 4:00 a.m., doing my prayers, and then writing until 6:45 a.m., before leaving for school, teaching all day, and then writing after school until it’s time to drive home at 4:30 p.m. My first big writing project was my first novel, Tredder’s Quest, and Tredder’s War followed that. I am in the process of developing a third Tredder book, which will bring that saga to a definitive close. I’m still in querying Purgatory with Tredder’s Quest, but have submitted it to Baen Books, a sci-fi publisher that I really like, and one of the few who wants manuscripts submitted directly to them. As I see it, publishing Tredder through Baen would be ideal, because they publish the kind of manly, swashbuckling sci-fi that I love. After that, getting an agent and going through some other publisher would be my second preference, and, last of all, indie publishing.
In the meantime, I’ve spent the last few months working on short stories. Originally, I’d planned to submit the best of these for publication, but have recently learned that one usually can’t submit stories already published on one’s own site. This is bizarre and unreasonable to me, for reasons I mentioned in my previous blog, but so be it. The general consequence for me is that it changes how I will approach fiction on this site. It means that I will, at some point in the near future, self-publish some of the stories I’ve posted here. I also plan to go forward with a podcast promoting those same stories, and which can help attract readers here. However, to continue posting here the kind of time consuming, full-length short stories and novellas that I’ve heretofore done makes zero temporal and economic sense. Instead, the Short Stories section will feature flash fiction going forward.
My most recent short story, Bean Brains, turned out well enough that I submitted it for publication in a leading Science Fiction magazine. If they take it, I’ll let you know. If not, I’ll try to the next magazine, and the next one, etc. It is irritating that I’ll have to write both flash fiction and longer short stories in order to keep this site going, and at the same time forward my writing career, but there is an upside. Flash fiction doubles as a daily writing workout, for one. Also, the prose and storytelling has to be much tighter when you’re keeping a story at 500-1500 words. That can only help my writing, and it will help you, my readers, to finish a story in one sitting.
In any event, this is how things stand at the moment. This writing thing is not easy, but I firmly believe that all of these efforts will eventually bear fruit. As I sit here tapping these keys on a Sunday afternoon, my laptop rests on a thin picture book about the adventures of Ernest Shakleton. If you’ve ever been tempted to quit something you loved doing, then I recommend looking into his story. Like Shakleton — may it please God — I will never quit. I will treat my stories as Shakleton treated those men with whom he was stranded on Elephant Island after the Endurance went to the bottom of the sea: living beings, loyal to me, and holding on for dear life, while I cross the angry waves, and scale mountains in order to bring them safely home — to publication, that is.
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