In the last post, I mentioned that I had gone from 1977 to 1983 without a short story sale, after selling two stories in 1976.  Truth, but for a little discussion about writing here, the truth is not the entire story.

In the fall of 1977 and the spring of 1978, while still writing some poetry and a few short stories, I wrote my thesis for my degree in Architecture.  In the fall of 1978, I started law school and wrote nothing but legal stuff for that first year, as would be expected.  In 1979, I wrote and mailed two short stories while still in law school, and then in 1980, I wrote and mailed four short stories, including two to the Twilight Zone new writer contest, which I expected to win.  Of course, I didn’t know that thousands of others had done the same, including my future wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch.  Neither Kris nor I won.  Dan Simmons did.  But I was very discouraged not winning and I stopped writing for a time.

So, from 1977 to January 1st, 1982, I think I only wrote about seven short stories and I doubt if any of them got more than three or four rejections, if that many.  In other words, I wasn’t working very hard at becoming a professional writer, but I was sure talking a good game.

On January 1st, 1982, while working three jobs, I decided to quit talking and get serious about actually doing the writing.  So in a challenge with Nina Kiriki Hoffman, I wrote and mailed one new short story every week.  And I kept the stories in the mail when they got rejected.

By the start of 1983, I had 45 different short stories in the mail and had not yet sold another one.  So I kept going.  One story per week, and keeping all the rejected ones in the mail.  By May and June of 1983, I had over sixty different short stories sitting on editor’s desk when the dam broke and within two weeks I sold three.  One to Damon Knight, one to Algis Budrys for the first Volume of Writers of the Future, and one to OUI Magazine.

I didn’t slow down, and by the end of the year, I had sold seven professional stories total.

So, when I say it was six years between selling stories, that was the truth, but not the entire story.  A thesis in Architecture, a divorce from my wonderful first wife, three years of law school, and building a business were all in the middle of all that, not counting running a bookstore I owned most of that time.  I actually spent all of 1982 and half of 1983 really working hard at it, really pushing and learning and writing and mailing before things started to happen.

So, if you are wondering why you are not selling short stories or novels, do what I did in the fall of 1981 and look at how much or little you write, how much or little you mail to someone who can write a check and publish you.  If the answer is just not much, like me, you have discovered your problem.   Time to do something about it.

I honestly don’t know how many of all those stories I ended up not selling.  I had a house fire in May of 1985 that destroyed just about everything, so my records of what happened to many of those stories in those years are very sketchy.  I do remember I kept writing at the story a week pace through 1984 and then wrote my first novel in 1985.  On a typewriter.  No carbon.  All of it was lost in the fire except for those that were published and that I have been able to find a copy of, or that came back rejected.  So I have no way of knowing what percentage of those I wrote in those early years eventually sold.   Maybe two in ten.  But still, in those three years before the fire, I sold almost twenty professional level short stories because I was writing one per week and mailing them and keeping them in the mail.

If you are looking for the secret to writing, it is simple.  Write, finish what you write, mail what you write, keep it in the mail, and then repeat over and over and over until you learn enough and get good enough to start selling.  Very simple, almost impossible for most people to do.

So how did I manage it in 1982, even while working three jobs and fresh out of law school?  Easy.  I figured that for three years I had busted my butt to get through law school, for something I would never use or wanted.  But I wanted to be a writer, so I figured I could work just as hard, spend just as much money writing and learning how to write.  So I went at it exactly the same as I did going at first year law school.  And within three years, I was a professional writer selling regularly.

It’s that easy and that hard.

Cheers,  Dean

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