The long, drawn out, (hopefully not too boring) beginning, or, as they call it in the craft of fiction, the setup.

I sat down to attempt to write the first draft of a novel just over three years ago. I had little idea what I was doing, though, growing up, some part of me always felt that I should at least give writing a shot because I had been a decent writer when I was younger. I had read Stephen King’s “On writing” as well as a few other non-fiction books on the craft of writing fiction. “If you can picture it, describe it,” King had written and that’s pretty much what I did. Being an English teacher, I did have the foresight to follow scene and story structure as I outlined/wrote. I finished the first draft a year later, shared it with my wife, a few good friends and close family members who were awesome enough to be my beta readers then stepped away from the computer for several weeks to read like crazy and begin learning from successful horror and suspense writers.

On one hand, I learned quite a bit in the sense that I read much differently after I’d attempted to write fiction myself. I was able to analyze not only what other writers were doing, but how they were going about doing it. On the other hand, much of what I learned was that I hadn’t done it quite right. My writing was missing basic elements. It was almost all description and dialogue and had very little narration. I don’t blame my past self for making rookie mistakes. I was a rookie after all. But I realized rather quickly that I had a lot to learn and a lot of editing to do if I ever wanted to publish my novel.

The story was good though. I believed that then and I still believe it, but I had to improve as a writer if I wanted to publish a novel. It was wounding after working so hard to complete my first draft to realize that I had a ton more work ahead of me if I wanted to achieve my goal of publishing that first story, and diving into the business side of publishing only salted those wounds as it was all just so unfamiliar and overwhelming. Though I’d learned from reading a lot, received helpful feedback from my beta readers, edited the story and molded it into something that more closely resembled other published pieces of literature, I came to realize that it was extremely unlikely that any agent or publishing company would look at my work until I had some sort of writing resume, which of course I did not have.

I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t feel a bit deflated at that point, and though I didn’t give up, I did step back and take a little break. I had come to understand that I was going to have to write several short stories and figure out how to get them published before I could get someone in the industry to read my novel. It was winter again around that time, and though I did keep reading a lot to continue learning, I stopped writing for several months.

I allowed my sense of defeat to melt away as spring came back around and I began looking into the short story side by doing basic google searches and connecting to random e-magazines through social media. I came across a few publishing opportunities with either general descriptions of what they were looking for, like stories similar to Tales from the Crypt for example, to more specific prompts like "mafia horror stories", or vaguely specific writing prompts like “glitter”… Hmmm…

I wrote my Tales from the Crypt story, but it was not accepted by that magazine publisher. Jesus, I even came up with a story prompted by “glitter” then realized I had written a longer story than what they were looking for (still learning… still learning…). But I’d come up with what I thought was a good mafia horror story. I’d learned more by then and I felt that what I’d learned was starting to show up in my writing. So, I felt good about that third short story that I wrote, thought I had a really good shot at getting it published, and I still remember feeling confident when I hit “send” almost a year ago today.

That confidence balloon that had risen inside of me popped rather quickly when the story was not accepted to be part of that anthology. With that final rejection, having struck out 0-3 last summer, I again shut down my computer, my writing life along with it, then hunkered down for another winter as I felt that I needed a break and had to regroup. Still, my mindset wasn’t that of giving up.

Late this past winter, I came across “the submission grinder”, an incredible website/search engine for writers trying to publish anything, including short stories. As I began exploring, I grew excited while simultaneously shrinking in embarrassment. There was so much more out there that I just didn’t know about, so many e-magazines and online journals that publish short stories, probably fewer than there used to be, certainly fewer print magazine than I imagine there were back in the day, but there were opportunities out there. The embarrassment I felt was a response to the realization that I had been kinda stupid and naïve to send each of the three short stories to one place and one place only when I could have been sending them out to dozens of places.

I got to work, not writing fiction as I’d set out to do three years prior but on getting organized in regard to the business side and coming up with a plan. It took many, many hours but by the time I reached summer break this year, I had a list of several e-magazines, journals, upcoming anthologies, etc. paired up with each of my three short stories and quickly sent them out there in hopes of finally getting them published and building a writing resume.

As I waited for responses, I came up with other ideas for short stories and got to work writing them and sending them out as well. I’ve gotten some rejections this summer, yes. But as of early August this year, four of the six short stories that I’ve written have been accepted somewhere. The other two are floating around out there in email query land waiting for responses. It was an exciting summer. I’m not gonna lie, I was really affected by each of the acceptance emails I received this summer. As exciting as it was to receive those emails, nothing was more exciting than sharing the news with my wife who has been so supportive of my writing journey and who has been extremely helpful along the way as well.

My response to the world around me is generally to sit back and observe, take it all in slowly, make calm and collected decisions about how to react. But my wife is more straightforward, lives on the surface and rushes to embrace and appreciate exciting moments. I don’t think any of the acceptance emails seemed real to me until she got all excited and forced me to realize there was something to celebrate.

So, the goal was to build a resume and that seems to be happening right now. It all took a long time, though that’s normal in the industry from what I’ve come to learn. As far as my original novel goes, it has also benefited from time. I don’t think, in its original form, despite the story being good, that I would have been able to get it published. But I’ve gone back and edited it several times over and I think it’s getting close to where it needs to be. I look forward to sending it out there this coming fall and hope to be sharing more good news in the months to come. Though as I’ve clearly learned, there’s no guarantee, and these things take a while, so I’d better take a deep breath, sit back, and relax.

I’m curious to see if I take another break this winter or if some of this recent success keeps me tapping away at these keys. Time will tell, as they say. And I suppose it will.