The Leap Day: Let’s Pretend It Never Happened

It always baffles me that more people don’t get excited about Leap Day. It’s not a holiday. In fact, this year it’s just a typical Wednesday. The morning shows might make some casual reference to the calendar oddity, but apart from that it will go largely unremarked upon by the world at large. A much bigger deal will be made of Groundhog Day, which is pretty mind-blowing when you stop to think about it. (Yes, I’ll say it: Groundhog Day is ridiculous.)

Maybe I’m just overly intrigued by calendars in the same way that I’m overly intrigued by maps (I could stare at them for hours, flipping through a 50-State Rand McNally American Road Map like I flip through a hair-raising novel). I mean, think about it: it only happens once every four years!? This is like violating the laws of physics! Every day happens once a year, but for this one awesome exception…

Silence. Crickets.

See, not a lot of people get excited about this. We get really excited about Christmas, which happens annually, like almost everything else in the calendar year does. Shouldn’t Leap Day, by extrapolation, be four times as awesome as Christmas? As New Year’s? As your birthday? And of course, if your birthday happens to fall on Leap Day, that makes it extra anticipatory. Take a moment to raise a glass to all those extraordinary thirty-two-year-old eight-year-olds.

Who’s with me? No takers, huh?

The thing about Leap Day is that it almost doesn’t count as a real day, right? February 28 is the last day of February and March 1 is the first day of March, case closed, but every four years we briefly fall into the twilight zone of Leap Day. I think of it as a day to experiment, to take time to work on or achieve something that might very well fail spectacularly. If it does, well, we’ll pretend it never happened. Kind of like Leap Day itself.

So, shelve that work in progress! Churning out a 200,000-word fantasy doorstopper? Take some time to write a few pages of comic fluff. Be eclectic; try your hand at crafting a stage play. Eke out that Babylon 5 Londo/G’Kar slash fiction you’ve had on the backburner for ten-plus years. Channel your inner Louis C.K. and piece together a stand-up routine.

Remember: what happens on Leap Day stays on Leap Day.

As for me, I’m going put the final touches on my plans for that big quadrennial Leap Year party I’ve been hotly anticipating for the last 1,460 days and leap myself into oblivion.

Brad R. Torgersen: On Not Quitting

A Guest Post by Brad R. Torgersen

One week ago, I got a call from the President of the Science Fiction Writers of America.  He told me that my novelette, “Ray of Light,” was nominated for the SFWA Nebula award — one of Science Fiction and Fantasy literature’s top accolades.

In the week since that phone call I’ve had time to reflect.  Being nominated for a Nebula means my story not only connected with readers, it connected with a readership composed of my peers.  I’m very gratified and flattered by that, and whether I win the award or it passes to someone else in my category, I can say from now on that my fiction is “Nebula quality,” something I find more than a little astounding when I consider the fact that I didn’t have a single word in professional print prior to 2010.

How did it happen?

Simple: I didn’t quit.

You may or may not have seen this piece of advice floating around: those who can be encouraged to quit writing, should be encouraged to quit.

It’s an old saw, occasionally revived by this or that professional.  It comes out of the observation that almost all books and stories that arrive on an editor’s desk — unsolicited — are not up to par.  They don’t cut the mustard.  They are not professional quality.  And the more of this type of manuscript there are, the harder it is to parse out the good stuff.  The stories that are worth a publisher’s time.  The stories that sell.

There is also a bit of elitism happening, in that many writers — having become authors — want to pull up the ladder behind them.  They function from an assumption of finite possibilities.  Ergo, there are only so many pieces of pie to go around, and the fewer people jockeying at the table, the less difficult it is to compete for a slice.

I’d like you, as would-be author, to take such admonishment — the urge to quit — with a grain of salt.

Yes, it’s true, not everyone is cut out to be a professional (ergo, paid) writer.  There are far, far more people competing for paid publication today than at any time in history, and thanks to the miracle of electronic publishing and cost-friendly on-demand printing, virtually anyone able to string three words together on a page can claim to have been published.  Which simply puts the slush pile on display for all to see, whereas it was formerly the editors (and the close associates and family of the unsold writers) who saw such work.

Most of it below the zone.  Not photo-ready.  You may read some of this fiction on Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble and conclude that the author would have been better advised to take a torch to his computer, than e-publish and put his incompetence on display.

But this is the case for virtually all writers, when they are starting out.  And even when they are well advanced into their “learning years,” during which they slog through book after book and story after story with little monetary or professional success to show for it.  I know.  I spent 17 years in unpublished obscurity, barring a tiny handful of token sales in unpaid venues.  I generated somewhere close to 870,000 unpublished words, en route to my first professional-level sale — “professional” being defined according to the SFWA standard of $0.05 US or better, per word.

It’s probable that had a person seen my work at the two year mark, or the four year mark, or even the ten year mark, (s)he might have concluded with confidence: this fellow simply isn’t any good.

Lord knows when I look at my 870,000 unpublished words, I see a lot of stinker manuscripts.  Some of them I’ve been able to mine for recent projects: total re-drafting, as new manuscripts which preserve the core characters and/or concepts, while draping these in entirely new prose.  Last year I sold two stories which began life as resurrections from the bones of a single, much older story.  Which is probably a good lesson in how ideas for stories are plentiful; it’s the execution of those ideas that counts.

Ten years ago I couldn’t execute very well.  Ten years ago I was still waist-deep in my “wading pool” practice period.  And if I’d had someone come up to me — a real professional whom I admired or esteemed — and he told me I was no good, that I should save my time and trouble, and quit, I might have been persuaded to do it.

Much as it would have killed me inside.

Thankfully, that never happened.  I have a spouse who has been married to me literally as long as I’ve wanted to be a professional Science Fiction writer.  A few years ago she put her finger in my chest and declared, “You’d better get off your ass and make this thing happen, or you won’t be able to look at yourself in the mirror.”  She knew then, as she’s always known, that I was born to do this.  That it was in my blood to do it.  That even if I tried to quit, I’d unconsciously find excuses to keep doing it any way.  In some form or other.  And since anything worth doing well, is usually worth doing well enough to get paid for it, the path was clear: shoulder-to-the-wheel, no going back, no turning around, only forward.

Professional, or bust.

Now, some people just think they want to be pros.  Having read or enjoyed fiction, or having gotten it into their heads that being an author is a good path to prestige, notoriety, or glamour, they sit down and embark upon the project without realizing that fiction-writing is more like playing a musical instrument, than it is like doing a term paper for school.  Good fiction has to be engaging and emotionally transporting in ways term papers or other kinds of non-fiction writing are not.  Just as the music we enjoy listening to every day is often several cuts above the barely-passable recital pieces of the technically-able (though passionless) player.  Even blog writing isn’t necessarily comparable, because blogs tend to be repositories for stream-of-consciousness expression.  Not constructed narrative of the sort that typifies fiction as we know it in the English language of the 21st century.

Most importantly, these people don’t yearn for it in their hearts.  It is an aspiration that arises from places not rooted in their souls.  Their egoes, perhaps?  Or their pocketbooks?  But not the very core of their being.

And every once in awhile someone of this type does make it professionally, managing some degree of monetary or critical gain.

But almost always, these people find a reason to put their writing away.  And they move on, and are happier for it.  Life has prepared them to accomplish other things.  And this is absolutely fine.  If you find you don’t have the proverbial “fire in the belly” for this work, that’s an important thing to discover and know about yourself, and it’s going to be part of your path to sleuthing out what does inspire and excite you.

But for those writers who discover — often at an early age — that there is almost nothing as satisfying as creating stories, the admonition to quit is a death sentence.  Not literally.  But a psychic and emotional death.

Many writers who fall into this purgatorial category don’t have the stamina for the long, long haul of the learning curve, but they can’t walk away from writing either, nor can they convince themselves to attempt new ways or new approaches which will help them overcome blockages in their craft.  From this pool you can usually draw our critics — people who know something of the art, and may even practice it occasionally, but cannot or will not make the necessary final effort to become totally committed to what is (for me at least) a lifetime vocation.

Don’t be that person.  Don’t be the writer who knows deep down in his or her soul that you burn for the stories inside of you, they excite and inflame your spirit like nothing else, but you’re too lazy to put in a 120% effort to overcome your amateur tendencies, fallacies, foibles, and short-sightedness.  So you settle into being a sniper against other writers.  Or, almost as bad, you become a bitter-ender.  Someone who haunts writing forums or conventions and complains endlessly about how the game is rigged, success is about who you know, not how good you are, or that only random, pure luck determines the winners — everyone else gets to be a loser.

That’s horse shit.

The truth: winners across all competitive arenas of popular culture have this one thing in common — they never quit.

You might be deep into a literary adolescence that seems endless.  When does it get easier?  When do the rejection letters stop?  Why aren’t your Kindle and Nook books and stories selling?

You just have to remind yourself of the 10,000 hour rule: it takes roughly 10,000 hours for a person to go from being a raw beginner, to possessing what more or less passes for competence.

Competence in the speculative and fantastic literary field being defined currently as: able to sell regularly to the SFWA-recognized publishers and editors of said field.

At about the 7-year mark in my adolescence, which I date to roughly 1999, I had expended a huge sum of effort and energy on a sizeable raft of short fiction, plus two or three aborted, rather meandering novel projects.  I’d racked up a nice wad of rejection slips, a tiny handful with hopeful words on them, usually hand-written from editors: almost made it, or, close but not quite.

I was so frustrated I could taste it.  Every day.  My youthful idealism about writing had given way to an encroaching cynicism.  Was I a permanent second-class citizen in the writing world?  How come other people seemed to be leaping out into the vanguard of Science Fiction and Fantasy while I seemed utterly unable to penetrate?  Was I a life-time wannabe?  What more did I have to do to prove to the editors that I was worthwhile?

Several more years passed.  I abandoned short fiction almost entirely, in favor of several newer, more focused novel projects.  But here again I hit a wall: the novel (in my estimation) proved an entirely different animal, compared to the short story.  It was impossible (for me) to navigate my way from point A to point Z in a book, by the seat of my pants, as I’d been able to do going from point A to point E in a short story.

I also got busy with life.  I was still married.  I had a full-time civilian career, and a new secondary career in the Army Reserve.  I was also a new father.  Whatever free time I’d been used to devoting to writing up to that point, vanished in the blink of an eye.  No more could I rely on keeping “hobbyist hours,” it was either find a way to write, or the writing wouldn’t happen at all.

So, I did what a lot of writers at that point are prone to do: I lapsed into a state of near-quitting.  If not in my heart, then in practice.

At which point my wife rescued me — good spouses are hard to find, but made of solid platinum.  I highly recommend getting one.

In 2005 I had to come back to the effort almost like a beginner.  Start from scratch.  Clear the stable of old stories and ideas and prejudices and concepts and habits.  Be bold.  Go in new directions.  Try things I’d never tried before.

It wasn’t an instant difference.  The rejections I was getting in 2006 and 2007 weren’t any different from the rejections of 1996 or 1997.

But I was a different person.  I was older.  I’d lived more life.  I’d had some scales fall from my eyes, and I’d been humbled by many setbacks.  I’d seen some tough times and ridden out a few very rough spots.  I’d learned the value of dogged, stubborn persistence in the face of almost overwhelming obstacles, thanks to my military experience.  And I’d learned a thing or two about how people truly work, inside, thanks to my marriage, and raising a child.  Both of which required me to subsume or subjugate my ego for the sake of more important things.

In 2009, it finally happened.  Writers of the Future called to inform me that my story, “Exanastasis,” had won placement in the third quarter of the 26th annual installment of that anthology.  60 days later, Stanley Schmidt — editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine — wrote to inform me that my story, “Outbound,” was being purchased for publication.  A double-win, considering that both stories had been focused efforts to secure a spot with Writers of the Future.  “Outbound,” has since gone on to do wonderful things for me via re-sales and gathering the attention of Hollywood people, a top agent in New York, as well as a readers’ choice award.  While the Writers of the Future Contest exposed me to a troupe of highly-successful professionals, some of whom — like Mike Resnick — have gone on to become important mentors, as well as good friends.

And that was just the start.  Stanley Schmidt wasn’t the only editor buying.  Other editors liked me too.  Or at least, they liked my stories.  Suddenly there was real money flowing into the family budget.  Thousands of dollars!  And success began to build upon success, sale upon sale, until I’d managed to grab the attention of a major novel publisher too, thus positioning myself to make the crucial (in my mind) expansion into that lucrative arena.

Now, the runway lights are lit — I just have to land the airplane!

An thus comes the call, for the Nebula nomination.

Oh wow.

Could I have planned on it?  No.  In fact, I would highly advise you to keep awards like the Nebula off your bucket lists, because the Nebula is a voted award (not blind, in the manner of Writers of the Future) and you could be a very successful, financially-lucrative author and never come close to either a Nebula or a Hugo — the other major award in Science Fiction and Fantasy.  These things cannot be won through hard work or effort.  Success can be won in this fashion.  But the awards are entirely beyond your control.

Which is why it’s a unique surprise to discover that someone has decided to put you in for one.  Or that enough someones have put you in to actually get you onto the short list, from which the eventual winners are to be picked.

None of it would be possible, if I’d quit.  If I’d looked at myself in 1995 or 2000 or 2005, and concluded, “Nah, it’s a waste of effort, I will never be a writer,” and slammed the closet door shut on my dream.  There was every reason to quit at those times.  I wasn’t selling a word.  I wasn’t making a dime.  There were many, many things which were all far more immediately important to myself and my family, on which I could have devoted all of my time.  And nobody — save my wife — would have blamed me if I’d been practical, sensible, pragmatic, and tried to stop being a writer.  After all, everything up until then indicated I wasn’t any good at writing.  That the best choice would be for me to stop wasting my time.

I never made that choice.

I hope you don’t either.

If you’ve got the stones for the project — whether male or female — and if you’ve concluded (either through long experience or perhaps through rare, personal insight) that you simply cannot walk away from it, then you owe it to yourself to keep going.  To keep trying.  To not give up.  To absolutely refuse to fail.

There is far more of my new-found success rooted in persistence and long-suffering, than in talent.  There are thousands of far more talented writers in the world.  Yet I am the one with the Nebula nomination.  And it’s because I didn’t give up or let myself make excuses.  Also, my family didn’t let me give up or make excuses.  And now I’m seeing the rewards of my labor, and I can state with conviction that there have been few greater or more satisfying experiences in my life, than seeing my stories — my words — reach professional print, and go on to some measure of professional acclaim.

Oh, and the money’s cool too.

Guest Writer Bio:
Brad Torgersen has sold his fiction to Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and has launched several novelettes on both the Amazon.com Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook platforms. He has collaborated with award-winner Mike Resnick on a short story for Ian Watson’s The Mammoth Book of SF Wars anthology, due out in 2012, and they are currently collaborating on a second military SF piece for a different anthology. He also has serial collaborations in the works with old friends from the Searcher & Stallion graphic audio drama. His novelette, “Outbound,” won the Analog “AnLab’ Readers’ Choice award for Best Novelette of 2010, and his novelette, “Exanastasis,” won the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award, appearing in the Contest’s 26th volume. You can read more from Brad at http://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/.

And the winner is …..

And the winner is ….

Not you!

What happened? You’ve worked on your craft for tens of thousands, hundreds of hundred thousand words. You’ve gone to workshops, read every blog, every book on craft you can find. By now you know what the pros say and you can teach the writing courses just as well. And yet, the podium still eludes you.

Then there’s Writer X gracing the podium. Her writing isn’t as crisp. Her wrinkles of profound thought aren’t as deep. And she’s much newer at the game. So why was her work chosen over yours?

As co-editor of the Shanghai Steam Anthology, I’ve had to read well crafted and poorly crafted stories. Some writers had great ideas but needed to hone their writing skills. Others wrote prose well enough but the story lacked tension, the story arc was incomplete, the dialogue didn’t work, it lacked theme/focus or the historical homework wasn’t done.

Then there were the stories which survived the first round of cuts. Those which had that extra something. Some would need some revision, others editing while the best ones required no work.

What!!!!!! you exclaim. Some needing revision are in the final round? What about the ones with the well crafted prose that you denied? Why weren’t they chosen for editorial revision?

The answer is simple – besides being decently written, these stories are memorable. Despite their flaws, I was engaged to the end. Every story in the last round evokes an emotional response whether it’s of laughter, amusement, bitter sweetness, feeling defeated, cheering a hero, being horrified, melancholy, elation, and so on. It may be quietly engaging as in a romantic tragedy or a simple rendering of a thought provoking moment.

The emotional response I’m describing is not about liking or disliking a character. It’s about the story itself. Am I left feeling optimistic, laughing, amused by the clever turn of events or am I saddened, horrified, forced to reflect on the human condition? And does that story stay with me long after I’ve read it? Does it have emotional resonance?

The story, like every character in it, has its own voice – its own drama, its own growth, its own ability to draw readers in and not let them go. That voice carries the story’s emotional resonance which is framed by the promise made at its beginning and is concluded or addressed by the end.

We understand that the story arc is an important backbone for a story with a beginning, middle and end which includes challenges, climax and denouement. Characters cleverly doing their thing without purpose or meaning is not enough. How do you want the reader to understand the world you’ve created when the story is done? How do you want him to feel? Happy? Sad? Thoughtful? Hopeful? Depressed? Scared to death? Satisfied for running a marathon? Cheering that the good guy beat the bad guy?

Once you understand what emotions you want the reader to experience, your writing voice will be clear and the story’s emotional resonance will reflect that. Emotionally, the reader is compelled to read the story through to its bitter, joyful, triumphant, tragic or thoughtful end. You don’t want them feeling emotionally flat and wondering so what?

 Good writing counts for a lot in submissions for contests, anthologies or publishing. But no matter how well crafted the words are, how strong the plot and characters appear to be, without emotional resonance the story isn’t memorable. It’s the little aha! I get it!  or what a ride! feeling a reader experiences that makes it memorable. That aha! may be a good chortle, a reflective moment, celebration of the protagonist’s victory or grumping at a character’s stubbornness.  Whatever the aha! is, every reader craves it and every story needs it to be memorable.

 Now when you revise and edit your work or when others critique it for you, ask them: How does the story make you feel?, Does it stay with you after you’ve finished it?, If you had strong feelings about the story, tell me why. If not, what does it need/why does it feel flat to you? These are hard questions to ask and answer but knowing this will take your story to the next level and make it resonate with readers.

Publishing Options-As I See It

I used to see getting published as something similar to a game of roulette. If I learned to write well and finished a short story or novel, I’d place a token on the table. With each rejection, I had to remove my token and place it on a different number. Of course, as I put more tokens on the table, my chances of winning went up. It would take a long time and a lot of tokens before the odds would be worth measuring, let alone in my favor.

Having recently published a short story in an anthology, the odds should be going up, right? I’m not so sure. And here’s the rub: New York is still the respected place to publish, and they’re still the people with the money and the resources…when they choose to spend them on their authors. So here are the options, as I see it, with their pros and cons:

The increasingly difficult option of getting an agent and publishing with a big New York publishing house doesn’t appeal as much as it once did, but they still have their plusses. They don’t seem to have more promotional power in the e-world as anybody else, not in terms of e-world shelf space, but they have more money for promotion. The likelihood they’ll put out that money for a new author? Slim to none. So what’s the point of going there? Some of the brick and mortars are still the place people go to find books, word spreads from there, and sells go up. They’re also one of the best places for book-signings and personal promotions. Only NY is truly effective in that field. But the big wigs are all about business. The author’s share of profits is low-understandable when you consider all the costs they cover, but still low. There has been talk of interesting accounting practices among the NY groups; I don’t know if it’s true, but it makes one wary. And their distributing efficacy is starting to waver.

So, let’s go through small publishers, right? Maybe. My anthology is through a small publisher, it’s available in hardcopy and through Amazon, but it’s not being distributed in bookstores. At least, not last time I checked. I’m still waiting to see how this model plays out. One very important point to note, some small publishers are giving a much larger portion of their sales to their authors. The downturn in sales numbers may very well be offset by that percentage of writer profit. But there are a million small publishers, and while most of them are good, some exist to rip you off, and others are incompetent. Makes me think of trying to find my way through a swamp.

So, let’s all self-publish. The author makes all the profit, has complete control over his/her property, and doesn’t have to worry about bossy people. Sounds great, right? Not so much. If you self-publish, the stigma still exists that your book must be crap. For a reason. Have you looked at the mountain of self-published works out there? Much of it wouldn’t make it past the slush-pile warehouse let alone into the possible considerations pile. How does anyone sift through all of that to find your gem of a story…or is it? A writer’s group is great, but without professional critique, acceptance, and editing, how do you really know if your story is truly good enough? It’s like throwing your time, money, and reputation at a wall so you can see if it sticks. Unfortunately, if it falls flat enough times, you’d better find another name.

So, is the conclusion to give up hope? Absolutely not. I think we’ve entered a wonderful new era where any model can work if we’re aware of the pitfalls.

New York can do a lot for a beginning author, but you’d better read the fine print, have your wits about you, and be prepared in case they stick you on the back burner and you’ve got to super-manage your own publicity. They have a lot of power; they can hurt you, or make you a star. You have to be prepared for the gamble.

Small publishers give you the critique and the gatekeeper, but find one with a good track record or at least a business model you believe in. That will take research, and you’ll still have to manage most of your own publicity. They don’t have tremendous distribution power or the funds to do a lot of publicizing, but a good independent company will back you up and give you the personal help you need to kick off your career.

And self-publishing can work, but you’ve got to make a reputation for yourself. From the very beginning you’ve got to be the promotion guru. If you have the guts to throw yourself out there, garner publicity, and spend a lot of time on the publishing process, go for it. One thing, though…make absolutely sure that what you’re selling is of comparable quality with your New York competition. Not in your opinion, but in MULTIPLE, reliable peoples’ opinions.

So pick your venue, keep writing, and do your best to succeed. The chips will fall where they may.