I’ve never subscribed to the image of the anguished author slumped at his desk with his head in his arms as he contemplates the human condition and wonders how the hell he can express the existential horror of it all in mere words. Writing for me has always been joyful, like a car trip through the back roads of my mind.
In an interview about her famed husband, Joan Lee once said, “He enjoys being Stan Lee.” It really struck a chord with me. I’d never thought about it that way before, but like Stan Lee, I enjoy being me. I love my life both in front of and beyond the keyboard. I have as many problems as anyone else, sure, but I’m an eternal optimist. As my grandfather (who is 96 this year) put it: “I want to see what happens next.” Life to me is all about the next adventure. If you really believe we’re all alone and happiness is just a temporary illusion, why not throw yourself off the nearest cliff?
That optimistic attitude has served me well in my fiction writing career… but from time to time I get downhearted and ask myself the question that every author who doesn’t make a living from his work must ask:
Why do I bother?
A couple of months ago, I began to ask myself that question with a vehemence I never had before. My romance novel Hollywood Hearts Ablaze had not, to indulge a pun, set the Amazon sales charts on fire. Since the arrival of my daughter, I had found it increasingly difficult to write regularly or at all; my computer was littered with incomplete projects. And it felt like forever since I had opened an email to find an acceptance rather than a rejection.
In happier times, I had always seen story writing as an act that fulfilled its own purpose. A story could be created, so it should be. But with my 40th birthday not far down the passage and so many other things vying for my time and energy, I began to wonder if that was enough. What was the point of writing something if only a handful of people – or no one – would ever read it?
Oftentimes it has only been when I’ve reached the depths of a mental crevasse that providence has thrown me a rope. In this case, it was an acceptance letter from Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, the respected Australian speculative fiction anthology. The editor of issue #62, Terry Wood, said he would like to publish my story ‘Teething Problems’.
That acceptance letter was the culmination of nine years’ of submissions and God knows how many rejections (many of them shortlist rejections, the most painful kind). Such patience and persistence are often unfathomable to anyone other than another fiction writer; when I told a friend about it over a beer one night, he could scarcely credit that I would grind away at something for so long with only the faintest sniff of success to keep me going.
But that’s publishing. It’s all about the ‘long game’. It can be hard not to get down when you’re suffering one crushing defeat after another, but you have to try to remain philosophical, keep working, and remind yourself that a victory, however small, is also inevitable.
In recent days, I achieved a second hard-fought victory to join the Andromeda Spaceways one. Back in the summer of 2006-2007, I wrote a horror novel with the working title of Commune. It was ill-conceived, in as much as horror was then out of vogue in a way that it hadn’t been for generations. An agent to whom I sent it in late 2007 explained that in the past 12 months, only one book of horror by an unknown author had been sold to a major US publisher.
I left Commune alone for a long time, then came back to it, rewrote it and gave it a new title. Not much has changed since 2007 – few big publishers are interested in horror novels (and certainly not one set in the 1960s) – but I’m pleased to say that a small press has offered to publish it and I hope to make an announcement once contracts are signed.
It’s a novel I love, and I had always been disappointed that no one else would ever get to know the characters in it and to share their lives. In the end, that’s why I bother, even though true success still eludes me. I want my stories to be out there and at least have the chance to affect someone in the way that so many of my favourite authors’ stories have affected me.