I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where I want to take this writing gig. Honestly though, it’s not just lately; it’s actually something I think about often. I started this whole fiction writing thing fourteen years ago. In that time, I’ve written fifty-seven stories. I’ve submitted many to Writers of the Future. I’ve submitted many to professional and semi-professional markets: Clarkesworld, Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine, Analog, Abyss & Apex, Flash Fiction Online, Asimov’s, Escape Pod, Strange Horizons, Stupefying Stories, and so many others. I’ve received a lot of personal rejections. I’ve received a lot of nice comments and helpful advice about what did and didn’t work. I’ve received honorable mentions and semi-finalist certificates from Writers of the Future. I’ve received a lot of encouragement. What I haven’t received were any sales. No one (so far) has been interested in buying the sweet, sweet potions I’m selling.
Which leads me to often wonder, Why am I still doing this? And also, Where do I go from here?
Why am I still doing this after fourteen years and fifty-seven stories and zero magazine sales or contest wins? Coupla things, I think. One, I’ve been so close to a sale and a win so many times that I have to believe I’m not a total hack. I think I’m close, but how close? I really can’t say. It’s impossible really to know because there are just too many variables I have no control over. All I can do is keep writing and keep submitting and keep hoping that one story comes along and connects with the right person at the right venue at the right time. Keep throwing those bottles out into the ocean and hoping one lands somewhere and gets picked up. Two, I always come back to asking myself that self-reflective question: If I never sell a single story or win a single writing contest, will I still continue to write stories? The answer, I believe, is yes, I will. But then that brings me to my second question.
If that happens, where do I go from here? And that brings me to my crossroads. There are several paths ahead of me. I can take one fork and continue submitting to traditional publishers and try to get my foot in the door. I can take another path and self-publish, heading into the cold dark murky waters of Amazon. A third option is to keep pushing for traditional while also self-publishing; there’s no rule saying I can’t do both.
There are risks of heading off in any direction of course. Every year, traditional publishers release roughly ten thousand new titles. Many of those stories are from already-established authors, although there’s always a handful of new break-out authors who manage to slip through too. Who am I to compete with any of them? There are literally thousands of submissions each quarter to magazines and contests, each of whom only have a handful of openings available in their anthologies and publications. So many authors competing for such a limited number of pages, and only the best of the best get selected. Online titles are even more inundated. In 2023, there were five hundred thousand self-published books that hit the web. And that’s just in the United States. Globally, there were more than two and a half million self-published titles. Even if I manage to self-publish a collection of my favorite stories, how in the world is anyone ever gonna find it? A sales and marketing professional, I am not. Traditional authors are big fish in a little pond. Self-published authors are tiny fish in a ginormous ocean. And tiny little me, a microscopic slice of plankton just trying to outswim the whales.
There’s one more factor to consider in all this: I’m bored with writing. Actually, now that I write that out loud, I wonder if it’s really true. Am I really bored? Do I really find writing stories uninteresting anymore? Or is it that I’m just frustrated with putting so much effort into something and seeing so little success? Maybe I’m not really bored. Maybe I’m just disappointed, and maybe a little disillusioned. Also, how am I defining success? If I’m being honest with myself, I don’t think I’ll be happy doing all this work and spending all this time and not seeing my work published somewhere. As much as I love writing, as much as I love the process, as much as I love seeing where my imagination takes me, I ain’t just whistling into the wind here. I’m doing this for me, yes, because I love it. But I also want to share these stories with other people. I want them to love my stories too. I want to gift these ideas out into the world and share my experiences with other humans.
So here I stand at a set of crossroads, wondering which paths to take. No matter which way I go, I’m certain to come across more crossroads ahead, and more after that. My life has been full of crossroads. Some of my choices have led me in circles. It’s hard to stand at an inflection point and see up ahead where it will lead. There’s usually a hard wind blowing and kicking up dust, or the view ahead is blocked by trees, or maybe you can hear the roaring of unseen wild animals off in the distance, and you can’t remember if you packed any weapons in your bag.
So many possibilities ahead. So many options. How do you know which is the right path to take? If the road becomes too difficult and we don’t get lost, we can always double back and choose another way, right? All we can really do in this moment is make a brave choice, straighten our spines, and push boldly forward.
