What Am I Doing?

It’s a question I find myself asking more and more these days. But not so much in terms of my career, my relationships, or my future. No, this query is directed at something far more important: my writing career.

This reflection is a rare piece that I start with no clear objective, so we’ll see if I even end up posting this.

Still, the fact that I’m writing this after sending out six different submissions and am now using this exercise to get a break from typing out the age-old cover letter email is a sign that perhaps I’ve let some things go a bit too far. A classic case of the means becoming the ends.

A Novel Beginning

About a decade ago, something changed. I’d been writing all throughout high school, culminating in a few awful short stories and dozens of false starts (the start of a novel that I never picked up again). History appeared all geared up to repeat itself when I typed out the first chapter of The Coming Tide.

Then I wrote a second chapter. And a third.

It took a year, but I ended up completing the whole manuscript by the end of my first year of college.

Over the next two years, I started the arduous process of editing a manuscript that I wrote with essentially no plotline, just a starting and ending point.

Also during those two years, I took the term “productive procrastination” to its logical conclusion by avoiding the more onerous parts of revising The Coming Tide by writing its sequel Storm Surge. I also line edited the entire first manuscript by hand.

So now I had a polished first book and a working draft of a sequel. So now it was time to figure out how to get them out into the world.

As was true of just about every writing endeavor back then, I started by reading advice books. One particular favorite that I still think back on to this day is Thanks, But This Isn’t For Us, written by a publishing house editor who goes through every single way a writer can get their manuscript rejected in exacting detail, from small language infractions to high-level issues with story structuring and pacing.

Besides all these pitfalls to avoid, I also picked up a general game plan for how I could break into the cutthroat world of traditional publishing. Publishing houses like to see writers who come to them with an existing following. The best way to build a following is through publishing novel lite. AKA the short story.

Short Story Short: I Did It (Eventually)

So, I set out on a multi-year quest to figure this whole other part of the publishing world out. For a while, I was publishing poetry, but the elusive short story contract remained out of reach.

Then, Abyss & Apex took a chance on my story “Land’s End Light,” and the momentum built from there. It wasn’t the floodgates opening like I thought it would be, but it only took another four months before I sold my second story.

Nowadays, I spend as much time attempting to sell reprint rights as I do original story rights. I can now hold my work in hardcover and paperback. I have even had the privilege to see one of my Vocal challenge rejects find new life in an anthology (this would actually be the second time if Black Ink Fiction ever got their act together, but who’s counting 😉). More on Vocal later.

I still have yet to reach the new peak of being paid a professional rate for one of my stories, and I still end up paying more for print copies than I earn most times, but my work is getting out there and these are far from vanity publishers. I even have an established relationship with a publisher, to the point that they told me I no longer need to send queries because “We very much enjoy reading your work.”

So, I can definitively declare that I have figured out this side of the publishing industry. But I dove into this endeavor with no defined bar for mission accomplished. No point at which the machine should switch gears.

All I knew was that I needed to publish short stories, so I set out to write, sell, and market them, applying every lesson learned along the way to build greater and greater momentum.

Now, I look back at my novels and question this conventional wisdom. How well are my dark fiction, thriller, and action/adventure short stories laying the groundwork for my two novels about a war between talking seagulls? I suspect there’s a fundamental disconnect in the topics of these two content offerings.

And, yes, that is the subject of my two books. I drew a lot of inspiration from my favorite childhood series Guardians of Ga’Hoole and the book One for Sorrow, Two for Joy.

Regardless, I enjoy the successes I have achieved with my short stories, so I have no plans to stand down this operation. I just wish that I spent less time sending my pieces out and more time writing, especially since most of my remaining writing time goes to Vocal challenge entries.

I Am Become Vocal, the Destroyer of First Publish Rights

I promised we’d return to Vocal, and I am a man of my word. Strap in for some contract speak.

Vocal did not invent writing contests (though they do like to act like they can slap the name “Challenges” on them and that’s enough to make them distinct), and these were not the first I had entered. So I knew that I probably didn’t stand a snowflake’s chance in hell of winning twenty grand for my post-apocalyptic story involving a locket.

Still, I was a bit more disappointed since I had surrendered first publish rights to enter “King of the World,” and I quite liked what I had come up with. Multiple times since I’ve seen publish opps where I would happily have submitted it, but they didn’t take reprints. Other writing contest rejections are at least tempered by the fact that I still have the story to sell elsewhere.

From this lens, writing for Vocal challenges is a bit more of a zero-sum game. Still, having surrendered (or retained?) first publish rights has then allowed me to explore other angles with how to give these challenge rejects more life. For example, starting a podcast of recorded readings and selling them to publications as reprints. Plus, it’s nice to have some work that’s not behind a paywall to point the curious toward.

I also would likely never have started my two character series without the Vocal challenges that inspired their original stories. And where would the world be without the adventures of Martin Williams and Dick Winchester?

Even so, I know the writer of a couple years ago would look at me today and go “What the hell are you doing? You’re giving up perfectly good stories to this platform?”

It’s a bit of a chicken and the egg scenario. Sure, I’d love to have these stories to sell as original pieces, but would they exist at all without the challenges that inspired them? And if I wrote it, I’m going to enter it. I want to know if I wrote a winner.

Either way, I’m too close to the coveted fifty-story mark to stop now. Let’s get that bread.

Now to Act Like I Learned Something Along the Way

So, the means have become the ends. I started out writing short stories to lay the groundwork for my novels, and I ended up continuing with short stories while my novels twiddle their thumbs on my hard drive.

And Vocal continues to exist as a second line of effort where I chase after challenges for the added clout I would gain as a writer with a win. There’s a certain satisfaction in taking the prompt and using it either to develop my skills with new experiments OR to write more installments in my character series. Plus, the coveted $500 would be great to help fund a few anthologies I’m looking at launching in the near future.

But screw it, I like short stories, I like the submission hustle, and I like all the knowledge I’ve accrued. Just need to do some thinking on what the larger goal is here. Or does it need a larger goal? Can the act be its own purpose?

A Sidebar Rant on Vocal Challenges Written at 2 a.m.

One final note on Vocal: there have been some opinions I’ve read recently that those who only write challenge entries are missing the point of the platform or perhaps gaming the system.

Granted, me describing my mission statement as being a “Vocal mercenary” chasing after challenges in comment threads probably hasn’t helped.

Well, guess what? Your derision only emboldens me. Vocal is clearly happy to have our content or they wouldn’t keep launching challenges.

I also make an effort to write challenge entries that can stand on their own outside of the context of the challenge prompt, so a random reader landing on my profile wouldn’t go “Wow, there’s only challenge entries on here.” Granted, a trained Vocal member might spot a story that incorporates elements specified in a challenge, but I view my pieces as short stories first and challenge entries second.

Hopefully that puts any fears of the “quality” of the pieces on Vocal when they’re only written for challenges to rest. Or, perhaps, that then shines a light back on the person making the allegation. Do you say this because you view your own challenge entries as lower quality versus the rest of your writing 👀👀

(And perhaps that’s why this draws my ire so much. My short stories, whether they live on Vocal or elsewhere, are a reflection of my professional reputation as a writer, so any allegation that they’re “cheapening” the site gets my hackles up.)

There was another suggestion that all the other writing that happens on Vocal is what forms the “cake” that can then support the challenges, the challenges being the cherry on top.

But, actually, the cake in this metaphor is the paying subscriber base, and since a huge draw for writers to the platform is these contests (it’s what got me on here), I think they’re perfectly satisfied with us only writing challenge entries if it means we keep our Vocal+ subscriptions to continue entering them.

Heck, they’d be just as happy if we wrote no challenge entries. Or wrote nothing at all, so long as we keep paying.

So, actually, the challenges are the cake and all other writing is the cherry on top 😏

If you made it this far, then I just wanted to say thanks for sticking with this piece. This is not my usual content for Vocal (obviously given my mission statement above), but for some reason it felt right to post this here. Who knows, maybe you found something to relate to in here.

Or perhaps this has revealed how tenuous my grip on reality really is. Only time will tell ¯\_(ツ)_/¯