The Ten Commandments of Writing #10: Thou Shalt Never, Ever, Give Up

I get quite cross with people who imply that I write 'for fun'. Or 'for pleasure'. This generally comes into a conversation where I'm trying to explain why the writing is not my full-time profession. I'm trying to explain that I don't make enough money from the writing to do it for a living, and so they say, "oh so you do it for fun then."


There is nothing fun about writing. Yes there are moments of exhilaration, like when the WIP is going well and words are flowing, when you're in that stage when you can re-read the words you've written and think to yourself, "actually this is pretty good. And I created it." But you know this is going to be followed by a period of crashing self-doubt, when you are absolutely convinced that everything you've written is a steaming pile of turds and you should give up deluding yourself that you're a writer and go and spend your time watching TV instead. This bit of the process is not fun. Neither is the constant lurching from self-confidence to self-loathing that I am convinced absolutely every writer, no matter how successful they are, experiences.


No, we don't do it for fun. So why do we do it? It's more a need, an urge. We need to write to keep on living, the same way we need to breathe.


You need to remember this once you have accepted the fact that you are a writer, because the road will not be smooth. There will be rocky patches. There will be times when you want to crawl under the bed covers and never come out again. Every time you submit something to an editor, you will spend the next few hours, or days, or weeks, on tenterhooks. You will be checking your email every two minutes to see if you've had a response yet. When you discover there isn't one, you will experience conflicting feelings of disappointment and faint hope, because no response at least means no rejection. Yet.


And then when the email finally comes you'll be afraid to open it, trying to put off the inevitable rejection and the crashing self-doubt that follows for as long as possible.


But then one day it won't be a rejection. It will be an acceptance. And it will all be worth it. On the dark days, it can be tempting to just pack it all in. But it's important to keep on going. When each rejection comes, give yourself a few days to pick yourself and dust yourself off, and then send the story back out into the world again. And carry on working on the next one. Whatever you do, you have to keep at it, because being a writer is in your psyche and no matter how hard it can be sometimes, it will always be who you are.

THE WHISPERING DEATH Finds a Home

I am pleased to be able to announce that my new horror novel, THE WHISPERING DEATH, has sold to British small press horror publisher Kensington Gore. There's an exciting announcement about it over on their website.

THE WHISPERING DEATH is about a group of live action role-players who unwittingly release an ancient evil loose upon the world during a game. I am particularly fond of this novel because it is effectively about a group of geeks, and I was able to incorporate all the geeky things I love into the novel. LRP. Dungeons & Dragons. Video games. Zombie films. And it's got a kick-ass heroine who's also a geek girl. I had such a good time writing about her.

And it's a novel that at one point I lost faith in. It had gone through several rewrites when I first started subbing it, last year. After getting fairly consistent feedback along with the rejections I decided it needed rewriting. But the rewrite took it to a place where the ending I wanted wasn't going to work and I got quite depressed about it.

But it just goes to show you should never give up. Have faith and keep collecting those rejections. Eventually, acceptance will come. And sometimes you have to believe in your own writing, even when it seems no one else does.

THE WHISPERING DEATH is scheduled for release later this year, which means I am expecting edits to come my way very soon. And this one will be out in paperback as well as electronic format. Yay!

Still Got That Champagne Bottle?

Last week, I mentioned receiving good news which I couldn't share because it wasn't official. Well, the contract has been signed and I can announce my short horror story "Family Tradition" was accepted for publication by MuseItUp Publishing.


"Family Tradition" originally started out as a flash fiction piece that I expanded and revised. I'm influenced by shows like Night Gallery, Thriller, and The Twilight Zone and by writers like Serling, Beaumont, Arthur, and others.

I like to say this is the year of the short story for me. And it's also about coming full circle. I started out writing short horror stories. But why not write what I love to read? (That includes mystery and fantasy.)

Now I need to write that mystery short story.

Pop the Virtual Champagne Cork

Okay, so most of you know today and tomorrow is the Transit of Venus, right? A rare phenomena that will not occur again for another 100+ years, the Transit has fascinated me ever since I came across it while doing research for my angel UF. (The Transit plays a significant role in my short novel.)

Now, I'm not saying that the Transit has anything to do with the following news, but it sure is coincidental. :-) Today, I received a couple pieces of good news, one of which I can't share yet. But the other one is my poem "Ophelia Lies Dreaming" is now published in the digital magazine Indigo Rising UK (Issue2). If you're interested in checking it out, here's the link: http://indigorisinguk.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/issue2.pdf You'll have to enlarge the text and you might have to use the horizontal scroll bar, but it's there. Promise. :-) My poem is supposed to be on page 32.

Besides the aforementioned news, I have another short story that just came out. "Family Heirloom" was published in the digital anthology Scared - Ten Tales of Horror. Any time you think you have an idea that isn't worth merit, don't listen. I thought my idea about a cursed kris (a dagger usually with a wavy blade) was a silly one no one would want. I came across stories about krises coming to life and killing on their own during my research on weapons. I jotted my idea down and filed it away.

When Rayne gave me the opportunity to submit a story idea, the kris story came to mind. I didn't know if it would fit the anthology's needs but it couldn't hurt to try. And it didn't. :-)

If you'd like to find out more about Scared, go to:
http://www.amazon.com/Scared-Ten-Tales-Horror-ebook/dp/B0088IBG0E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338937600&sr=8-1

Writing Lesson #12: The Publishing Contract

At the point at which the publishing contract for SUFFER THE CHILDREN arrived from Lyrical Press last year, I had two finished novels working the submission/rejection circuit: my horror novel SUFFER THE CHILDREN, finished in 2004, and my amateur sleuth novel DEATH SCENE, finished in 2007.

SUFFER THE CHILDREN took ten years to write. I was somewhat dismayed to discover, when I did finally finish it and send it out on the submission circuit, that in those ten years the popularity of horror fiction in the UK had taken something of a nose dive. When I consulted my “Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook” for 2003 (knowing the novel was nearly ready to go I decided an up to date version would be in order), I discovered virtually no agents that were listing horror as a genre they dealt with. I decided to start describing my horror novel as ‘dark fantasy’, and began to send it to anyone who said they looked at science fiction and fantasy.

America still seemed to have a horror market, however, so I also sent it to American agents. I kept my eyes on the independent press market, as every so often a new small publisher would pop up, willing to consider ‘dark fantasy’.

But it kept racking up rejections. At one point I almost got a bite, when I sent it to a new editor, formerly an agent, who was starting up her own publishing company. She was very enthusiastic, and wanted SUFFER THE CHILDREN to be one of her first books, but sadly before her publishing company got off the ground, she became ill and the project never happened.

Eventually, I ran out of people to send SUFFER THE CHILDREN to and I got discouraged and put it back in the drawer. I decided to focus on the amateur sleuth novel instead. I reasoned that with the number of crime novels on the market, there had to be plenty of places to send that.

It turned out I wasn’t quite right on that point. The big market in crime novels - at least in the UK - is for police procedurals and thrillers, featuring gritty alcoholic loner detectives. What I had was a ‘cosy’ crime novel featuring an amateur sleuth.

I started sending it off to agents who said they dealt with crime and mystery novels. The rejections started rolling in. Some agents said there was no market for amateur sleuths, and although they liked the novel, they felt they wouldn’t be able to sell it. At least one agent said it wasn’t actually a ‘cosy’, as cosies are historical, preferably set in the ‘golden age’ of mystery novels (ie 1930s/40s). My sleuth is contemporary.

And then, at some point, horror seemed to take off again, but wearing a new face. In the guise of urban fantasy, featuring kick-ass female protagonists and sexy vampires, suddenly undead beasties were trendy again, and all over the place new publishers were popping up wanting to look at horror novels.

So I hauled out SUFFER THE CHILDREN, dusted it off, and prepared to send it out once more. I can’t remember how I first came across Lyrical Press – I think perhaps it was mentioned on one of the online writing forums I follow. But I took a look at their website, as I always do before I submit something, and was reassured to see that they had a number of horror novels on their list already. And their submission criteria was to send the entire manuscript as an email attachment. So, no queuing up at the Post Office, and no printing out of pages required. Another bonus.

I sent off the email with the required atachment and cover letter, made a note on my submission database, and continued researching other places to send SUFFER THE CHILDREN, for when it got rejected again. I was, at this point, keeping one list for places to send the crime novel and another for places to send the horror novel and my aim was to have at least one of them, preferably both, out on sub at all times.

A couple of weeks later when an email from Lyrical dropped into my inbox, I opened it fully expecting it to be another rejection.

I was at work at the time. I had to read the email three times before I digested what it said. It was not, in fact, a rejection, but an acceptance. With contract attached. There were a couple of conditions attached to the signing of the contract, the most significant of which was the fact that Lyrical wanted me to raise the age of the main character to 18 and not 14, as they felt it was a Young Adult novel as it stood, and they don’t publish YA. But the contract was real. I printed it off and stared at it for quite a long time, trying to digest the concept of what it meant. I don’t think I got much more work done that day.

I had been working 30 years towards getting a publishing contract for a novel. Sometimes the dream had seemed so unobtainable, I had begun to believe it was never going to happen.

But it did. There it was. And I knew that in that moment, life had changed. Not in any outwardly noticeable way – I wasn’t being offered a huge advance, and I wasn’t about to become rich and famous overnight. But in a hundred tiny ways, initially imperceptible ways, life did change.

And that is the subject of the next post in my Writing Lessons series.

Writing Lesson #5: First Acceptance

Note: Sara is on holiday so I'm posting this on her behalf.


When I finished school in 1988, I moved back to England, and began in earnest my quest to get my short stories published. I learned two things fairly quickly. First of all, the short horror story market was a rich vein (no pun intended) in the late 1980s, and there were a lot of magazines around – pro and semi pro – publishing the sort of nasty little stories I was writing.

Secondly, I was now in the grown-up world and things were very different. As a minor, everyone had been terribly supportive of my writing – presumably not wishing to crush my fragile adolescent soul. But once I passed the age of 18, I was an adult – at least in British law – and I was just one of many people writing and submitting. I was not a special little snowflake, and my form rejection letters reflected that.

It was a harsh lesson, but I’d been researching the whole process of submitting, and I’d come to understand that one must expect rejection, and not take it personally. I’d also been researching where to send my stories. One day browsing the newsagents in my lunch break (as I’d left school and entered adulthood, I’d also entered the scary world of Working for a Living), I came across a magazine called FEAR. As well as articles and reviews on books and movies in the horror genre – and covers that would offend most people of a fragile nature – they featured short stories by new writers in every issue. Aha, a market for me, I thought, and after buying and studying an issue, I sent to them a story called “The Top Floor”. I’d written it at age 17, and it was about a young man who goes to visit his friend in his new apartment, and stumbles across a ghostly re-enactment of a murderer who butchered his family in the apartment block years before.

It was a story with flaws, there is no doubt about that. But it was set on Friday October 13 (yes, it was also full of clichés) and 1989 – the year I submitted it to FEAR – was a year that October 13 happened to fall on a Friday. I think this appealed to the editors. They accepted the story, and it appeared in the Hallowe’en issue that year. They also paid me £50 for this.

I admit I got a little smug. I was 19, I’d just sold a story for what was, I thought at the time, a considerable amount of money, and I thought I’d got it made.

Sadly, reality swiftly crept in. That £50 was a lot of money. It’s more than I’ve ever made, collectively, from my writing in the 21 years since then, including all the royalties I’ve had from SUFFER THE CHILDREN.

I learned I couldn’t give up the day job if I was to continue writing. But I also learned that what I was writing was publishable, and it paid to be persistent.

The rejection letters continued to come, but I framed that first acceptance letter and to this day it hangs on the wall in my ‘writing corner’, to remind me of the day I first became a ‘proper’ writer.