A.M.P. Hopefully I was clear. Tor strongly considered Relic Tech. An editor mailed back my first 3 chapters, marked up a bunch of things for me to change (throughout the novel) and then told me which editor to send it to, saying in the cover letter it was sent on his recommendation. You might imagine the full manuscript was an expense to send (USPS). In the end, Tor passed (rejected it). I got a detailed letter and a suggestion I send it to Baen. Which I did, and after a long slog though the slush pile gauntlet and up the editorial ladder, Relic Tech was eventually rejected by them too. So, it's not that they 'wanted to publish me'. They just considered it. Kind of like getting up to bat in the major leagues, taking my swings, getting a couple of foul balls that were almost in play, but in the end, striking out. But that's okay. Relic Tech found a home and a bunch of readers. It's kind of like hitting a double in Triple A. I can only encourage folks here to persevere and do what it takes to get so that they can get their chance at the plate (at whatever level or venue works for them). A lot of people talk about writing, but very few of those actually follow through, putting in the time and effort and taking the chance. Yes, taking the chance. I know some writers that have finished the process and have something of quality, but are so afraid of rejection, they won't send the manuscript out. And even rejection by readers, so they won't self-publish either. Just save it on a file, never to get it's chance to entertain a single reader. So, A.M.P., if it's one of your goals, go for the fences with Tor. The worst that can happen is they say No. And that isn't the end of the story (so to speak). But they might say Yes. True the odds are against it. But the odds are absolute zero if you don't even try.
Even just getting recommended and asked for more is amazing! I am soooo submitting something to them when I am well and ready. Most of thestuff I write is in line with their other books so I got that down. Talent? Check. Just need some luck and a lot of work to show off my skill at its best.
I recently discovered my first ever manuscript (incomplete) from 1993. It's terrible. Really very bad. Just cringe-worthy. I can't read more than a paragraph at a time without descending into madness. My current work? Much better. But still not quite there. Interestingly my first serious novel attempt (1993) was called, "For Want of a World" and featured a displaced young man named Fenrir and his new friend Rat in a fantasy world... The first manuscript I actually completed this past January was called "For Want of a World" and featured a storyteller named Rat and his displaced new friend Fenrir in a fantasy world... Funny how things come full circle.
I was in a humanities magnet school and wrote a lot of kiddie stories for that time and in most of them I was the MC, ha! I was extremely shy back then and that was how I was able to express myself and experience things I either was or would be too afraid to do myself...time travel, battling a villain when sucked into a movie, going on an adventure with my crush and winning him in the end, etc. My most proud childhood work was a poem, Candyland, about what it would be like to be a character travelling through the board game, and it won me an award in a county competition. That was a big deal considering I think we're the 7th most populous county in the US...not sure what it was 20 years ago, though. I did some creative writing projects from high school through college but never anything I took seriously. That was also when I finally came out of my shell and was enjoying an actual social life and not just writing about one. It wasn't until after I was married that I had time to take it up again. I lost some of the finesse I used to have from writing every day and constantly cultivating new ideas...it's like my imagination was out of shape...but I'm regaining steam and confidence now and it feels great.
My first short stories were not so very different from what I write now. Shorter of course, less ambitious, the language a little simpler, but reposting them today, the response to them has not been bad.
When I was 10, I started writing a story about a young man, with telekinetic powers and a sword of pure energy, who, with his brother and two sisters, stumbles into a magical land where they journey through eight realms and defeat the evil overlord at the end of each realm. The one at the end of the eighth realm is an incorporeal being in a land surrounded by mountains and obscured by dark clouds from a giant volcano.
A lot of junk. I wanted to be a writer when I was 8 but my favorite 'books' were Barbapapa so I was stapling together homemade comics based on three characters I created. I didn't write write until I was about 13 and I was still reading Archie comics, Sweet Valley High and V.C. Andrews. I tried to create a children's series with the thought-provoking title of - Boarding School - - eat your heart out Girls of Canby Hall. Lol. And I worked on this on and off for years. My first serious story and my first ever finished draft is about an amnesiac detective who is trying to solve a set of serial murders in a surreal town while trying to recover his memory. However, it reads very script-y. I still write junk but I'm aiming for junque - that's junk with a literary touch.
My earliest writing attempts, some of which I still have, all suck dick. I've been tempted to delete them so many times, but something always holds me back. Still, it's where I made my start, and it's where I learned my first writing lessons.
Back in 2nd grade when we got a new spelling list one of the set exercises was to write sentences using each of the words. I got the idea one week of writing a whole short story using them all, a humorous semi-fictional take on the Sunday morning chaos in my house as my mother tried to get us four kids ready for church. I remember I had one of my siblings running to our mom with a cut finger and crying out, "Look, Mommy, it's blugging!" Unfortunately I ran out of time and inspiration before I could finish. My concentration was mostly on visual art through my school years, but in my junior or early senior year in high school I started writing (and again, didn't finish) a satirical tale involving a Handsome Prince (yeah, I used lots of Capital Letters. On purpose) who lived in the town of Hotzeplotz and sallied forth with his Lackeys to perform whatever derring-do I wanted derring-done. It was a sendup of some of my classmates inspired by the stories I was reading in Russian class and by Leo Rosten's nonfiction. It included a boatload of Yiddishisms. In high school I wrote mostly poetry and short skits (blackouts, we called them). Embarrassingly, my dating life was so pathetic I had ample time to make up fantasies involving myself and my favorite rock star (later to be replaced by the classmate I was crushing on). At first they were total fantasy, sometimes involving time travel and magic. Worse, they made impossible heroes out of the young gentlemen in question. But I grew ashamed of that and made it a rule that I wouldn't make them do anything in my scripts (as I now called them) that they wouldn't do in real life (other than be in love with me, of course ). Not a bad principle when you're trying to write authentic characters, I believe . . . These fictions were long, elaborate, and serialized, but I never wrote them down. Too busy keeping a daily journal, which to this day is famous among my HS classmates. There was, however, one project I did write down, starting in my junior year and finishing when I was a senior. It emerged from a fantasy I was weaving involving my rock star crush, where I projected us eight years into the future. He'd quit his band and had gone back into acting and I'd graduated from art school with my degree in Fashion Design. And here I go out to Hollywood and land a job with Edith Head's studio. And I'm put in charge of designing the costumes for the historical film my actor crush is starring in. And I meet him. And we fall in love. And save each other's lives a time or two. Etc., etc. But that's not what got written down. No, I wrote down the entire screen play for the movie I had him making. Yeah. It was a melodrama set in some large East Coast American city in the 1890s, involving an ambitious man who resents his put-upon wife because she won't give him a son to whom he can pass on his booming business empire (he's the one with the gun firing blanks-- ). He has no grounds for divorce (as I understood the laws of the time), so he conspires to make it look like she's committing adultery. The Ironic Thing is that he has a mistress himself!!! Fate plays into his hands when his wife is befriended by a young British barrister come to the US to study our legal system (the role played by my rockstar/actor crush), and away we go. The script involved marital rape, a fire (in which my hero loses his life rescuing the villain husband's mistress--sob!), and a murderous attack in a hospital ward. It had a strong feminist message; I called it The Double Standard. I went on to design a lot of gowns for my leading lady. I may still have some of those drawings, but I'm 99% sure my script was lost in a previous move. After that it was journaling and poetry until 1983 when I wrote the novella that's morphed into my current Work in Revision Free Souls. I think I've littered these forums often enough with my admissions on how poor the characterization was. But the storyline is salvageable, so I'm working at it. (If anyone's interested in how it's going, check out my Progress Journal.)
I tried writing a mystery as a kid, but didn't plan out the clues and just got stuck. The whole premise was a group of kids who found various clues to other clues that lead to a treasure. This was probably influenced by the movie "The Goonies" and the "Three Investigators" books. I also wrote a short story about three identical triplets that was influenced by the Sweet Valley High books. My sister called the later book stupid and I didn't write again for about fifteen years.
Great topic! 1) My first novel I tried to write was in sixth and seventh grade, called The Medallion Wizard, I still hope to repurpose the idea some day, as it's central concept was very well received by my peers. However my writing really wasn't matured enough (at that age) to try such a long work. 2) My first completed novel I wrote in my freshman year of college, Jack Siltheng and the Celestial Gate; a derivative mess that took from a variety of sources. Yet, I still learned so much while writing it and it was invaluable in my development as a writer. Not only did I lean a lot from the writing side, but I also learned a considerable amount publishing, editors, agents, and industry taboos. So even though I consider the story junk, it was worth a lot in the long run. 4) My next project was Last Fable, which I released as a web series. It was a lot of fun to write, more original, well received by readers, and but I'm glad I never tried to polish it, as it was interesting to learn the self-publication side of the industry. 5) My current work is A Changeling's Hunt. A novel idea that has grabbed me like none of the other have. I've been working on it for three years and on my third draft. This one I am hoping to polish one day for publication but its got a long way to go before I feel its ready.
I love this topic! When I was 7 or 8, my parents took me to Toys R Us to look for a birthday present. For some reason, I focused on an electric typewriter and asked them to get me that. I remember it being somewhat expensive at the time (maybe around $100?), so after some haggling they finally got it for me as a combination Christmas/birthday present. I spent the next two weeks pecking at the keyboard, writing a story about two friends in school that got in all kinds of mayhem. It was meant to be a comedy, but of course was just awful. Skip ahead to college. Despite being in an engineering program, I took a creative writing class; this was probably my first real attempt at writing. I did well in the class, the instructor and other students seemed to enjoy what I wrote. I wish I still had some of the assignments, just to see how I wrote then versus now. The only one I remember was a paper about assisted suicide, which was in the news a lot at the time because of Dr. Kevorkian, and held some additional meaning to me due to a myriad of health problems my father was going through. Though I enjoyed the class, I didn't know how to make a living at writing and was pretty focused on getting my engineering degree so I basically stopped writing. However, I frequently thought about getting back into writing and had numerous ideas, generating a full file folder of notes on plots, characters, etc. This went on from college until...well, now. In 2010, I saw a post looking for a writer for a football (NFL) website. Unpaid, at least at first. I submitted some samples, was "hired" and proceeded to write 12-15 articles for them. Right up until they fired the new editor and got bought out by a bigger site, at which point they brought in professional writers. Finally, after reading yet underwhelming book, I decided it was time - either try to write something, or give up the hope and get rid of the folder. With a lot of encouragement from my wife, I sat down around Thanksgiving of last year and started a novel. By the end of February, the first draft was done. By the end of March, I had completed the third review/draft and while I'm proud of having written it, it is not yet a finished product...and honestly, I'm not sure it ever will be. Perhaps sometime in the future I'll go back to it and do more of re-write. However, the lessons I learned while writing that were invaluable, and I've tried to make some changes to my style to make me more effective. For practice, I've been writing & entering the short story contests on this site. Though I'm far from a finished product, I feel as though I've learned enough to try my hand at something longer again, so today I began work on my second novel. I'm excited to see how it goes!
