I have an offer from Nature to buy "Fine-tuning the Universe," and a contract in hand, and that means... my third pro sale.

Well, at least the gaps between them are getting shorter...

When I started thinking about this endeavor, back in my twenties, sometime around 2002, SFWA eligibility seemed impossible and yet so simple. Surely, getting the first pro acceptance must be hard. But equally sure, getting the second and third must be easy. Momentum, eh? It's a thing. Or so I hear.

Or, not so much.

Back when I threw my shoulder into novels and gave up on short stories--last June, so about a year ago--I had pretty much figured that I was going to have to sell a novel to become eligible to join SFWA. Any short stories I've written since then, I've written for funsies. (Granted, submitting them isn't so much fun, but I have a near-Pavlovian response to typing "The End" anymore. I start salivating in order to lick the envelope.) And in writing for funsies, I have the highest acceptance rate of my career.

Anyway, it's not like I thought (much past the first few months, anyway) that SFWA was the end-all, be-all of this shindig. It was just... that's how you knew you were There.

Interestingly, I'd pretty much decided earlier this year, for good or for ill, that I was as Here as I'm going to get. I decided I couldn't really call myself a Neopro anymore, if only because of the passage of time, and not so much due to credentials. But a funny thing happened on the way to accepting that I might never be more than a name one occasionally saw in the table of contents (I had even painted myself into the scenario where I was That Convention Panelist who talks about writing Scads o' Things You've Never Heard Of): I kept writing.

I think I mentioned pretty recently how much patience figures into this writing career thing... like how long it was between first draft and publication for one particular story (five years). That, I would call specific patience, and is not applicable to the story of this story. (I finished "Fine-tuning the Universe" in mid-April. I sent it out. It is now accepted, twenty-four days later. This is no Scalzian thirteen minutes, but at least I don't have whiplash.) But general patience is also very important.

My general patience is what allowed me to stop firing so many blanks with my short stories. I realized that being in it for the long haul meant that I could continue to be Nobody in Particular at conventions (as long as I kept writing), that I could write novels and not worry about the gratification short stories provide--yes, even rejections provide a kind of gratification--(as long as I kept writing), that I could accept that my career seems to have a long fuse that may very well never ignite anything (as long as I kept writing).

Anyway, lessons learned: it doesn't come fast to most of us. It always looks like it's happening faster for other people. And momentum is a tricky thing.

I have an agent.







!

beth_bernobich posted about her news already, and I was having such a crap day yesterday and now I'm having such an awesome day today, so I'm going to post too:

Neil Clarke emailed to say that Rich Horton has selected "The Girl-Prince" for inclusion in Unplugged: The Year's Best Online Fiction, published by Wyrm Publishing. This story appeared in the YA issue of Coyote Wild edited by sartorias/Sherwood Smith earlier this year, and I am so far beyond happy, it will be a miracle if all the links in the preceding paragraphs actually go where they're supposed to.

This is the story that starts:

Once upon a future time, in a spindle-tower held high by antigravity and the will of engineers, a woman slept, a poisoned trap for princes.

And, you know what? I have some betas to thank! splash_the_cat was the first to read this story and say it didn't suck. And this was the first story I put through Excelsior, where it was read, I believe, by Sarah Zettel, Elizabeth Bartmess, Christine Pellar-Kosbar, Karen Everson and Johnathan Jarrard. (I might be missing someone. Let me know if I am!)

Yesterday was so bummery that I failed to write; today is so nice that I'm failing to write. It's a conspiracy, I tells ya.

So, after my onward post last night, I woke up this morning to an email that the Russian sci-fi mag, ESLI, wants to translate and reprint "Almanac."

Uhm, I didn't contact them first.

How do I count that?? Not a submission! But a sale!

As some of you may know, I intermittently submitted stories (and poems and novels) with varying degrees of competence (no SASE in my first one!) to a few markets and contests when I was between the ages of 15 and 25. I have no real records of this, and retained only a couple rejection slips. It was probably somewhere between 4 and 8 subs.

They don't count, if for no other reason than because I can't count them accurately, and also... I so didn't know what I was doing.

April 9, 2003, however, was a different matter. That's when I submitted "One Million Years B.F.E.: Diary of an Anthropologist in Exile" to Fantasy and Science Fiction. I got my rejection on April 15th. (B.F.E. was eventually published by The Town Drunk; you can also find it in podcast format). That was the first day of the new era.

Since that day--which was also the last day I was 27 years old--I have:

• sold 11 stories for money
  
  • sold three of them twice
    
  • sold about thirty-six thousand words of fiction, but that counts twice the things I sold twice
    
    • for an average of about $.03 a word
  
  
• (sold 1 story for copies, so I don't count it)
  
• made just over $1100 from writing (I present this figure without inflection, but no, it's not very much)
  
• made 191 submissions
  
• had about an 8% success rate
  
• made 2 SFWA-qualifying sales
  
• not yet sold to the same market twice
  
• seen about a quarter of the markets I sold to close up shop not terribly long after publishing me
  

I have not, sadly, counted the moments of self-doubt. The moments where I've had no self-doubt number exactly 14.

It's been five years and a few weeks. When I'm hard on myself, it's because I know exactly how many months of those five years I was slacking. When I'm self-deprecating, it's because $1000 is chump change for what has been 5 years of basically having a second job, in terms of the time I've put into it.

Honestly, I am as positive as I can be about selling.

But here's the thing--I'm not writing to sell. I'm writing because it makes me happy. I can't not write.

Of course I want fame and money and groupies glory. That's about 50% of the reason I schlep things around, because I know you don't get the money unless someone pays you. (Still not sure how you get the fame and groupies. I mean, glory.)

The other 50% is that I remember all those times when the thing that saved my life, my mind, my sanity, or my soul was something someone wrote. Robin McKinley, Tamora Pierce, Sherwood Smith, Gillian Bradshaw, Patricia McKillip, Lloyd Alexander... these are my heroes, because at some point, they all rescued me from myself. I'm well aware that the writer doesn't know what three pages are going to keep someone from despair or provide the great escape--and it's that not knowing that gives me at least half my impulse to seek publication. On the off-chance I pass on even a little bit of what I've gotten from reading, then it's worth all the rejection.

Anyway. Five years, come and gone. Five years of trying. Five years of 8% success. (My goal is 10%, if anyone cares.)

But the important thing to note is... the only things I wouldn't have written anyway are all those cover letters.

All right. Onward, to the next five years.

I was running about on time this morning. Just enough on-time that I thought if I tried, I could be late. So, I sat down to check my email. A compulsion of some sort--I probably check my email before work about once a week, and only if I have time. Mordred-the-cat usually comes for a visit then, so I think there's that attraction to it as well. (Look at him in the icon! Wouldn't you want that on your lap, assuming it didn't turn you into a quivering mass of histamine?)

I answered a work-triage email--a slightly hysterical secretary who somehow got saddled with overseeing the implementation of the on-line resources for three profs is not having the best day evah--and then looked at the email I had been avoiding for 30 seconds.

From Jed Hartman. At Strange Horizons. "Here's my rejection," I thought pessimistically. Not unhappily, just pessimisitically.

Only it wasn't a rejection, it was an acceptance, and I ran all the way upstairs screaming, "Pro sale! Pro sale!" which Dann couldn't hear because he was in the shower, but when he did comprehend me he just asked how much that paid. I love my miserly husband, I really do. But right now, I love my sale even more.

Yes... "Huntswoman" was accepted for publication in Strange Horizons. It's my first pro sale. I'm as excited as you'd expect.

I'm also remembering with utter horror that clunky paragraph in the middle that I found the other day and thinking: "God. I hope they let me fix that." Or, maybe they'll fix it. Either way. But that's where the hysterical-edge comes in.

Otherwise... (bounce!) Ten apparently is my lucky number. (grin)

Just sold "Reparations" to Fortean Bureau.

Self-proclaimed rumors of my being a hack were greatly exaggerated (fortunately, most of you missed that whining; I got a rewrite request on "Her Kaleidoscope Eyes" that made me feel, at best, incompetent, earlier this week).

I don't know how the rest of you feel--and I am proud of my previous acceptances, don't get me wrong--but in my view of the world, this one counts. This one is like the quarterback of the football team asking you to prom. (And that metaphor works best if you consider I think of myself as a sophomore writer.) Next stop: college boyfriend. But first, I'm going out to buy a pink taffeta gown and dance all night. Metaphorically.