I’ve talked and blogged a lot about the 2012 Clarion Write-a-thon, which was such a pivotal moment in my development as a writer. Recently, I took a look at my personal records of that experience and realized it was ten years ago!
(I was looking for some old story drafts to revise. My trunk, she is EMPTY.)
Ten years ago, I challenged myself to write 50 stories in 6 weeks. It was the most ambitious, crazy, time-consuming thing I’d ever done, and it was a game-changer to my writing career. It got me to finish things, to focus on “story” as a unit, and to move past my personal hang-ups and fears that were keeping me from writing.
It also provided one hell of a trunk full of stories. Of the 50 stories, 20 have sold, if you count “The Origins of the Stardust Gang” which I expanded into my first published novel, Galactic Hellcats. Five of the remaining stories are still in submission, leaving half, 25, abandoned or never submitted. Of those, 3 were once submitted regularly, but I gave up on them: “The Origins of the Blues” (a time travel thing where a grad student tries to find the first blues musician and is supposed to learn that the real origin of the blues is suffering – 9 rejections), “The Traffic Stop” (flash piece about Earth levying ‘speeding’ fines on aliens out of spite – 25 rejections), and “Killer Nostalgia” (another time-travel thing, to the 1980s, trying to be about how nostalgia is damaging – 21 rejections).
Those are decent, competent stories, and maybe someday I’ll try again with them, maybe not.
The five currently out on consideration: “Leaving Gareth” about memory recording and dating assholes, “The Summer Kids and the Gemini” about roller coaster fairies (actually a complete re-write from a different character’s perspective), “Reading Minds and Crossing Borders” a portal fantasy, “Better Anger Management Through Curses” about a help desk worker who can grant wishes, “Quixote Ugly” about a grad student who reads too much urban fantasy and decides she’s a paranormal investigator (another story turned into a novel draft).
Did I make a chart? Have you met me?
I did not expect 40% of these stories to sell. I did not expect 50% of them to be submission-quality. At the time, I had only one semi-pro sale to my name. I only hoped that perhaps one of them would be good enough to be my first pro sale.
None of them were. That was “DeShaun Steven’s Ship Log” which I wrote after the 2012 write-a-thon but before attending Clarion in 2013. But the work I’d done in the write-a-thon helped me be able to write it. It made me more aware of the shape of a complete story, it forced me to produce so it got me to tell stories I’d been stopping myself from doing. I can’t get over how much it did for me. It got me out of my own way.
I’m looking over my original list of stories and so many of them I don’t remember anything about. I still have all of the documents in a special “Write-a-thon” folder. And so I’ll continue the quest that sent me to look, and I’ll read through them, the 30 that haven’t sold, and see what wheat I can make from their chaff.
