My First Acceptance Letter!

Okay, I can recall the first acceptance letter which was actually an email.
It was concerning a story I had written for inclusion in a sci-fi anthology.
I remember hesitating before opening it up. Steeling myself up for the BIG, FAT LET-DOWN I did finally open it.

The gist was something like: your story seems suitable for inclusion...

okay?! I read it as:

Dear Soon-To-Be Famous Writer,

Thank you! THANK YOU SO MUCH! We are thrilled, delighted and ecstatic to publish your absolutely brilliant, evocative, cutting-edge science fiction story you submitted to us.

Never in the history of publishing have we received such a well-written, highly original brilliant little story.

If it is alright with you we are going to contact the leading graphic designers to illustrate your gem. Naturally we will be submitting their work to you first. Of course we will.

One more thing, the publisher, has instructed me to offer you a six figure advance for any novel you decide to submit to us. Having seen your story, we can safely assume your novel will be absolutely brilliant.

The other 10 stories in the anthology are like baby poo poo next to yours! Words fail, truly.

Just accept our sincere thanks for deeming us worthy of publishing your story.
Again, many thanks...
I felt as if they wrote that. I felt as if I could conquor the world with my fiction!

Remember that scene where Boris the computer hacker cries out in Golden Eye:
'I AM INVINCIBLE?'

I felt I was!

You know what? I'm glad because i have the rest of my writing life to come back down to earth, because writing's damned difficult so a little day dreaming and happy fantasy can't be a bad thing!

Life's tough, getting published isn't easy. So when the first affirmative letter comes through, GO A LITTLE NUTS! ENJOY YOURSELF!

Where and Where Not to Write

This week at Wicked Writers, our prompt was to explain what we considered to be the best places to write, as well as to describe some of the worst.

If one is fortunate, they have a private office somewhere. Perhaps it is removed from the house like a room out back. I always thought that I would love to have an office on a second floor with a marvelous view. I found this photo from one of my favorite films, Love Actually. That view isn't too bad, although I can't remember her name. Sorry, I couldn't resist.

If writing is one’s only job, perhaps a trip to the summer home or a winter retreat, all for the express purpose of getting away in order to remove distraction. Musicians do this all the time, but the successful ones can afford to do that, can’t they? They fly out to the Bahamas for 6 weeks and write and record a new album. Deep Purple famously went to Montreux to record an album and ended up coming up with perhaps the most famous song ever, due to a hotel fire, Smoke on the Water.

Speaking for myself now, I am in no position to go anywhere to write. I do have a laptop, however, so I can theoretically travel from one room to the next in my house as dictated by whatever house noise there might be. I can also take it outside and write while seated on the patio, where only the noise of the Finches will distract as they devour the food that we put out for them.

An issue that I have currently is I find it uncomfortable to write creatively on the laptop. I usually do not write anything but articles and posts on that thing. Both novels that I have written were done on the family PC with its traditional keyboard. I just feel more comfortable with that, so we’ll see. Hopefully it will simply be a matter of getting myself used to writing long works with my laptop. Otherwise, I will be having to share the family PC and that will be good for no one.

As those who have gotten to know me quite well can recall, I am firmly on record as having said that I need music around me at all times. This, however, is the one exception. Music is far too distracting, as some have commented this week. Therefore, the only time I need to resort to music is if the entire family is home and I need to drown them out a bit.

Both of my sons play instruments. I want them to get some practice time in, but when the oldest is playing his Baritone or the youngest his Sax, even if they are doing so down the hall in either their bedrooms or my master bedroom, it can be pretty loud. When my youngest isn’t on his instrument, he’s typically firmly plugged into his Xbox 360 in the first bedroom just off the living room, blowing bed guys or zombies to bits, yelling instructions into his wireless microphone to his buddies who are playing as well. My oldest is in Honor Choir as well as Honor Band, so he’s usually singing wherever he goes. All of these things, not to mention my wife potentially sitting before the television, force me to don the headphones and crank the Classical music.

If one is going to sit down to write with music, to me, Classical is the only way to go. Not only will it drown out whatever background noise you need removed from your creative mind, but it is fantastic at providing inspiration, too. Whether the scene that you are writing is sad, dramatic, horror-inducing, romantic, or action-packed, there’s plenty out there to choose from. I’m a power guy, so I’m usually listening to Holst’s The Planets or something similar.

Well, what do you Wicked Writers and Readers think? Where do we agree? Disagree? Do you have any suggestions for me or others? As always we’d love to hear them.

The Know vs Feelings

This week, Wicked Writers asks the question: Do you write what you know or what you feel?

At face value, it doesn’t seem to be the deepest of questions; however, there really is a lot to digest, if you give it some time to consider. Obviously, if one doesn’t know much about a certain subject, it most likely will prove extremely difficult to write about it with any quality or level of convincing whatsoever. On the other hand, writing only what one knows could prove to be rather limiting as well. Who among us has been chased by a deranged killer, launched into space or swept off our feet by the five foot, eight-inch Amazonian goddess with the long auburn hair and proportioned so perfect that she could induce an old man into cardiac arrest with but a look… I’m sorry, what were we talking about again? Perhaps I have been hanging out with Greg too much.

Personally, I have been known to write with some strong emotions at times. These can be very powerful, especially when I am writing about love that has been lost, anger or jealousy. I don’t know about you, but I have done quite well harnessing those emotions in some of my writing, especially jealousy and feelings of loneliness. I was a late bloomer when it came to all things romantic, so I had all too many hours listening to sad songs bunkered down in the bedroom of my adolescence.

I would submit to you that we write with a combination of both. Just because a painter has never been to the mountains, does not preclude him or her from painting a mountain vista. Just because someone has been single their entire life or, conversely, married for forty years to their high school sweetheart, does not mean that such a writer couldn’t craft the most heart wrenching and captivating of romance stories, such as An Affair To Remember. Or even one after another. My first two novels are about vampire. Now, I’ve been bitten by lots of people*, but never a vampire: does that mean I should know nothing about crafting such a scene?


Wouldn’t everyone agree that good fiction should simply captivate and transport the reader to another place? Whether that is outer space, the old west, along White Chapel joining the hunt for Jack the Ripper or the boudoir of a lover, depends solely upon the tastes of the reader. I don’t know that we care whether the author has experienced any of these examples or is exceptionally qualified in one subject or another, so much as we hope that he or she is extremely skilled at making us believe that we are there with the action. It might take a ton of research or a healthy dose of emotion; just please take us there. There’s nothing worse than a ticked off reader.



* Author’s Note: I was just kidding about the bitten thing. My wife was the only one to ever bite me, and I assure you that I deserved it. ;)

Learning As I Go

As with my fellow Wicked Writers, I’ve enjoyed thinking back on all the great advice I’ve received over the years and am inspired and recharged by my trip down memory lane.

The first best piece of advice I received came from an old boss. I was new at my first reporting job for a national magazine in Washington, D.C., and dying to prove myself. Soon after starting the job, I'd ended a particularly challenging week of juggling multiple tasks and deadlines and wanted my boss to know all about it, in plenty of rich detail that she could perhaps save for a future personnel evaluation. So I composed a long interoffice email summarizing my accomplishments. Within minutes of sending it, she was in my office, a concerned look across her face.

She took a seat across me and seemed to search for the right words, which ultimately were: “Supriya, your email had not one, but several typos in it.”

Huh?

I countered with, “But I checked all the work that’s going into the magazine, the actual work, and there are no typos there.”

“That’s great,” she explained, “but you’re a writer so everything you write in a professional setting, even casual correspondence, affects our perceptions about you as a writer.”

I probably wasn’t grateful for this advice at the time but over the years, I’ve learned she’s right. Writers should always triple check the work we send out, not only to agents and editors, but to fellow writers and potential readers as well. All of them are likely to make assumptions about the caliber of our writing, our level of professionalism, and how serious we are about our craft based on careless typos or poor grammar. Some would say this isn’t fair, but it does happen and is easy enough to correct.

The second best advice didn’t come in the form of actual advice as much as a sharing of an experience. A few years into writing, I had reworked Breathing in Bombay several times already, and although I knew revisions would be necessary, I felt a long way off from getting it right. A writing friend of mine told me she’d spent years working on her first novel yet had thrown away close to a thousand pages of previous rewrites. I’d read her book and it was terrific, making me realize that while the work isn’t always easy, the journey and the potential results are well worth it. The friend went on to rewrite that terrific book at least once that I know of, write several others after it, and now has a contract from a major publisher that would fill any novelist with envy.

And finally, I probably wouldn’t have made it this far on my own writing journey without CJ Ellisson, who is far more than my writing partner but also an incredible role model. She’s turned a lot of conceptions I had about writing, both the process and the journey, on its head. Though she’s a fairly new writer, what she lacks in years of experience, she makes up for with sheer raw talent, high energy, dedication to learning the craft, and her generous support of other new authors. I learned various aspects of craft from her, such as an efficient technique for outlining, ending a chapter at the start of a new scene rather than at the end of one, and so on.

More important, she showed me how writing fiction today involves more than just spending year after year mastering the craft but also a disciplined approach with an end goal in sight. I could have been writing for another 10 years before I felt comfortable enough even telling non-writers I’m working on a novel. Following CJ’s lead, the journey became practical−and fun.

Beyond all the useful writing advice, what CJ has taught me most of all is something all novelists require–an unwavering belief in one’s self and one’s work.

CJ jokes to everyone about being an “aspiring New York Times bestselling author.” The fact is that only a year after beginning her journey, she’s written a phenomenal novel AND acquired representation from a successful literary agent who recognizes what CJ has accomplished in such a short time and how vast her potential is. It’s no surprise that her new agent represents a number of NYT bestselling authors. If you can dream it, it will happen. Watching CJ succeed by believing in her abilities has given me the confidence to believe in myself and make my dream reachable too.