The Bottom Rung

Long-time readers (if any of you are still coming back to check up on this most sporadic of blogs) might remember a year or more ago when I waxed lyrical about getting my lazy butt into action and writing something every day. Well, it might sound strange but after more than a year that little book, which I promised to write in every day, is only half full. It contains what are, in my writing oeuvre, very rare things called short stories.

I haven't written a lot in that book because shortly after writing the above-mentioned post I got said butt into gear and spent a lot of time hammering out novel length manuscripts. Not at just a few pages a day, but aiming for a writing goal of at least 1000 words a day.

All of this, of course, on the computer, or else I'd have needed several dozen of those lovely little notebooks to contain all those many many words.

Some days I didn't hit the 1000 word mark. On many days I wrote a lot more, a really good day being up to about 5000. Since I wrote that blog post, I have completed two full-length novel manuscripts, and have had significant interest in one of them from a small publisher. It's not a book deal - in fact, it was a very kindly written and helpful rejection, which I will cherish for a long time to come - but it has validated the long hours and the carpal tunnel syndrome and the eye strain that all those words have cost me.

But I didn't start writing this post to brag about getting a rejection letter from a publisher, since I know there are plenty of writers out there who can claim the same thing many times over, and I don't want to tread on any toes.

No, I wanted to point out the power of making a public statement.

I said it, therefore I must do it.

Prior to writing these two manuscripts I had completed a very lengthy and, at this stage, unpublishable epic tale. When I researched the publishing market and found out just how unpublishable a 275,000 word fantasy series was for an unknown author, I began to languish. I had a plan, but I had not put it into action.

Telling everyone that I had committed to putting words on the page every day cemented the need to do so in my mind, and the habit was formed. If nothing else, failing to do so would mean that I had lied to you all, and I'm not the lying kind.

Well, apart from writing fiction, which is lying in its purest sense, but we won't get into that here.

And now, a year and a bit later, I may not be a published author but I have my first rejection under my belt and I know that my strategy is taking me closer every day. I have gone from standing on the ground looking up at the ladder hanging mysteriously in the overlit sky, to clutching with all my might to the bottom rung of that ladder and holding on for all I'm worth.

So if I don't crop up here more than once or twice a month (as has been the case for a while now) you know where I am: with my head in another world, thinking of horrible things to do to my poor characters.

Failing that, of course, you can normally find me lurking around on Twitter, with my legs dangling uselessly beneath me.