One More Thing

Because I know all of my readers need another thing to do. Do any of you submit to Writers of the Future?

For all I know all of you do. If you don't, I think I'd like to throw the idea out there that we do it. It is a contest started by L. Ron Hubbard and carried on by big names like Anne McCaffrey, Orson Scott Card, and Kevin J. Anderson. The pot is huge and the winners and top finalists are published in annual editions of Writers of the Future Volume Whatever.

So here is my reasoning in this:

1) It is quarterly, ongoing, and there are no entry fees. That means that there is a deadline every three months to shoot for.

2) It is judged by successful writers, not given-up writers turned editor.

3) It helps establish a habit of getting your stuff together and shipping it out, and building your Resistance to rejection notices. There is more to our business than just being an artist. For more on that I recommend Holly Lisle's site which is packed with eye-opening info about the business from someone very particular about their status as a "full-time writer."

The longest works that they accept are 17000 word novellas, and I have the impression that most of the word buddies are working on novels. I will share two thoughts and then mind my own business. As much as I am able anyways. First, Ender's Game was originally published as a novella and later expanded into the very successful novel that it is. No, that had nothing at all to do with WoTF, but it goes to show that sometimes it is easier to get a foot in the door with a less risky smaller piece than a novel. Second, hugely successful writer George R.R. Martin says on his website that if he were trying to break into the fantasy author scene that he would start sending short stories to the many short-works fantasy publishers out there, and that after getting a few of those published the big presses would be begging for a novel. I might also point out that Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series was preceded with a novella which introduced readers and publishers to his world.

On the downside, I do get e-mails from them regularly offering me deals-of-a-lifetime on back issues of the books, but they aren't that bad. The other thing is that I bought a few volumes and did some very crude word count calculations and I found that virtually all of their published stories fell between 15 and 17k, and there were none shorter than 12k in the volumes I picked up. So besides the habitual skin-thickening benefits I mentioned earlier, if you actually want to win you have to get your story as close to the 17k limit as possible without going over and without crappy filler.

I obviously am not there yet, but in the most prolific writing period of my life I worked around the quarterly deadlines (March 31, June 31, September 31, and December 31) to keep my momentum. I actually had a four-step submission plan where I sent the new story to WoTF first, then another publisher next, a third, and finally a fourth as it was rejected to keep my name out there and increase my odds at selling some stories. It was just as I really got the system working that I reached critical mass with school and turned all efforts into completing my bachelor's degree. Now I am thinking about getting back into that and would like to invite you all to come along.

R.