I don't need any more courses

I subscribe to Writing Magazine, and I usually  buy Writers' Forum too each month.  And every time I read these magazines my eyes stray to glossy adverts for writing courses.

Over the thirty plus years I've been writing I must have attended hundreds of them.  Go back fifteen years and you would have found me, and most of my local writing friends, eagerly preparing for the annual Writers' Conference at the University of Winchester.  Some years I even booked for the Friday all-day workshop as well as the weekend.  My Friday would start at ten in the morning, and not finish until ten-thirty that night.

When I knew nothing about the publishing industry, or the business of writing for publication, I learned a great deal from course tutors and fellow writers. I did courses on creating powerful characters, pitching to agents, the state of the publishing industry, and self-publishing.  And I've lost count of the times I've walked out of a one-to-one session with an agent feeling dispirited.

On one occasion I cut short my fifteen-minute interview with an agent after she suggested that there should be a romance in the book between the male and female leads.  Considering that the female is a cat-shaped half-human and the male is full human, I thought it was the stupidest and weirdest comment I'd ever heard from an agent.  I think that has to count as one of the lowest points in my search for publication.

I've sought regular feedback on my manuscripts, read them to countless critiquing groups, and had my self-published books rigorously copy and line edited.  I've learned to think in terms of a commercial product.  Then in 2008 I had a book taken off the slushpile by a major publisher.  They read the whole thing, and liked it, but didn't offer me a contract.  But to have got that far from an unsolicited approach was a real boost, and they gave me lots of positive feedback on the novel .  More recently, an agent kindly critiqued my  cover letter for the novel I'm currently submitting, telling me she couldn't improve on it.

So I've decided I don't need any more courses.  I've learned my craft.  Now my quest to get published has shifted to finding the people who believe in my vision of the future, and don't try to turn my female characters into sexy airheads.  Courses can't help with that search.  It's down to numbers, self-belief, and perseverance - and a whole lot of luck.

I haven't failed, I've just found 100 editors and agents who don't believe in me

When i got four rejections on the same day recently I had a massive downer.  It was time for some swift self-esteem boosting measures.

And then I remembered the famous Thomas Edison quote: "I have not failed.  I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." And it occurred to me that this was just as relevant to trying to get published, albeit in a slightly altered form.  What an inspiration that quote is!  And it gave me a clue to a new way of dealing with faceless rejections.

Because, of course, every rejection that comes in is a failure.  It's a failure to convince another person of the brilliance of our prose, or the brilliance of our ideas.  And it hurts.

But, having got picked off the unsolicited slushpile once, I know I'm not deluding myself that I can write.  That was a major publisher, and the submission was made without an agent.   A tiny, tiny, proportion of scripts get followed up from this source.  I had the whole manuscript read, and received some fabulous feedback on my world-creation and characters.  A serious publisher thought my writing was good.

Since then I've had lots of this type of infuriating feedback on my short stories.  You know the sort of thing, "I love this character, she's really spunky... But we're not going to publish your story anyway."

And that brings me back to Edison's quote.  The most important thing in engaging with the brutal edifice of publishing is to make sure we keep our self-esteem intact.  And Edison's quote gives me the lead to doing that.  I haven't failed, I've just found a hundred editors and agents who don't believe in my writing.

Some will, some won't.  Next!  Their lack of belief in me is their problem.  It isn't going to destroy my self-belief.  Because the publishing process is all about belief.  It's about finding people who believe in me and in the world-visions set out in my novels.  And when I get downhearted I remind myself that even people like NASA fail.  Twenty of their first 28 attempts to send a rocket into space failed.

But now we have the International Space Station, and NASA is planning to go to Mars.  So persistence pays off, and i intend to follow that lead.  And one day, I will find the agent and editor who do believe in me and my work.  Watch out then, for I'll take off like one of NASA's rockets.

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Aim for the top

Over the Christmas break I spent several hours updating my list of paying magazines that accept science fiction stories.  It was tedious hard work, but the outcome was a pleasant one.

The first thing I noticed was that there were a lot more magazines to submit to than last time I did a list.  The big difference is that a lot of them are purely digital, or digital first with an anthology or possible paperback publication later.  This makes their overheads smaller, and gives the magazine a better chance of surviving in tough times.

The next thing that struck me was that the big magazines were still there, even after the toughest recession for a generation.  Asimov's, Analog, Fantasy and Ścience Fiction, all the magazines I'd grown up reading, were still there.  And these unchanging bedrocks of the SF short story market still welcome new writers, a reassuring business as usual. 

What has changed is my attitude towards submitting my stories to these magazines. When I first started magazines like Asimov's and Analog were worshipped as gods.  There was a feeling that you could only send stuff to them if you'd been published elsewhere.  They were "big" magazines, too good for the beginner writer.  I no longer believe that advice.  Take at look at their submission guidelines, and both magazines explicitly state that they're always on the lookout for new talent. This is an invitation a writer rarely gets.  It's more usually 'we don't know you, so you're not welcome here'.  So I've changed my way of thinking about these bastions of the SF scene.

I now know my writing is as good as any published author's.  The thing which will bring a sale or not will be content of the story.  Looking back through some old ones, I see how I fudged the science in them.  I didn't try and explain how something worked.  Now I've realised I can't dodge the challenge.  But equally, researching is so much easier now with an iPad and ready access to the vast resources of the Ihe internet.  I can put in the science, because I can easily research it.

I have set a goal for 2015 to submit five short stories each month to magazines. I've done January's submissions, and yes, two of the stories went to Asimov's and Analog.  My mindset is different.  Instead of thinking "why would they be interested in me?" I now think "why shouldn't they be interested in me?"  2015 is going to be my short story publication year.