In which I provide sundry reflections on being a writer and getting published which turn out to be quite irrelevant to your own situation, and we all laugh merrily…

Let’s start with the cheerful stuff. It’s a harsh game, writing; an unreliable ‘you may get lucky, you may not’ sort of business. It doesn’t generally pay well, nor is it a reliable income when crisis looms. And don’t be fooled – no one really needs your work, even if a few might occasionally want it – ‘occasionally’ being the key word there, and ‘want’ being rather relative.

Despite your inspiration, your commitment or your craftsmanship, the finished product will frequently not achieve the quality level you yourself set when you started. Fine ideas on envelopes turn out to make pedestrian short stories and aimless novels. Those tales of yours that you do like are too literary, or too pulp, or too ‘not what we’re looking for at the moment’. Oh, and they’re also too short, or too long, or too in the middle – whatever isn’t required right now.

As for publishing deals, editors may make unreasonable demands, and contracts may be bizarre or unfair. Agents won’t reply, or will send you a form email ‘no thanks’. Smaller presses will fold, go on hiatus or implode; larger presses will go off you and abandon the third book of your trilogy. Everything will take far longer than you’d hoped, and sometimes it won’t even pay in the end anyway.

Someone popular with the literary critics and the media influencers will receive far more headlines for less skilful work than yours. Productive authors will use the same idea/theme/character as you came up with, but they’ll be in print before you got round to even picking up your pencil; most people will never know your best work exists anyway, so won’t be able to buy it or comment.

Decent targeted marketing will be too expensive, random marketing will achieve nothing, and most of your review requests and press releases will be ignored. Your friends and family won’t read much if any of your work, despite what they say on the phone. They’re already bored listening to you rattle on, and it’s probably not their sort of thing…

I, greydog, am nobody. A minor constructor of weird fiction and period supernatural stories, plus the odd pastiche – and an awful lot of nonsense and parody for amusement (mostly my own). An ephemeral fish in an ill-defined pond… but here I am, on the fourth anniversary of getting into print in the weird/supernatural field.

And I feel fine.

Because this is not a Council of Despair. It’s the Call of Reality. Part of the reason I feel fine is precisely because I know all the stuff I just mentioned. I live alongside it, rather than beating my head or my fists to a pulp against the nearest wall. After all, I’m the one who would have to mend and clean the wall afterwards. I’m not a very good stoic, but I do like me a bit of Seneca:

No man has been shattered by the blows of Fortuna unless he was first deceived by her favours. Those who loved her gifts as if they were their own for ever, who wanted to be admired on account of them, are laid low and grieve when the false and transient pleasures desert their vain and childish minds, ignorant of every stable pleasure. But the man who is not puffed up in good times does not collapse either when they change. His fortitude is already tested and he maintains a mind unconquered in the face of either condition: for in the midst of prosperity he has tried his own strength against adversity.

I was fifty eight years old when my first weird tale first published, in 2016. I must have had some forty or fifty paid stories published since then, almost all of them substantial pieces, plus a novel and a novella. I’ve also edited four anthologies, and seven issues of Occult Detective Magazine. Which means that if you are twenty eight, thirty eight or forty eight years old, and still relatively healthy, but believe it’s too late to get anywhere, shut up (I mean this fairly politely, of course). You don’t know. You can’t know. You could abandon writing completely for a decade or more, and then find yourself in my position. You darn kids…

As for meticulous planning, my first sale was the first story I submitted, a YA horror story, to a Texan press I’d never heard of, for $25. I had no intention of writing YA horror – it was an opportunity, and I had a suitable idea. It wasn’t a bad story. I followed that with a Lovecraftian weird tale set in Alaska, and a 28,000 word Last Edwardian novella set mostly in Yorkshire. I knew right from the start that it was a Good Idea to get paid for being seen, rather than working for the old ‘exposure’.

Speaking of knowing things, if you’re a white male, don’t piddle on about there being no markets, all your chances being wrecked by inclusiveness, political correctness and so on, also shut up (not so polite). I may have a somewhat quirky and colourful approach to life, but if an unknown Yorkshireman the colour of an uncooked pork chop who was almost sixty could get published, that bit probably isn’t the issue.

But whatever I say about getting a load of stuff published, those two or three stories of yours which someone else reads, and genuinely gets, may be the ones which matter. Despite the fact that I write for money, there are personal messages or comments I’ve had which encouraged me more than a hundred sales. After all, there are tripe and trite pot-boilers on Amazon which have multitudes of high star reviews; that status may be good for awareness or income, but it’s not a quality mark in itself.

I’m fairly sure that I was lucky – and I was there at the right time, and flexible. I really am no authority on being a writer (this isn’t that sort of article), but if you play the game at all, you should know what you need to do already:

1. Read lots of decent prose, plays and verse by other people, especially not in the field in which you write;
2. Observe and/or interact with real human beings rather than relying on media portrayals and stereotypes;
3. Learn at least basic grammar and punctuation;
4. Sit down and write;
5. Pause, think, then go back and do it properly this time;
6. Send it to a market that might want it, in the format they want, by the due date.

Those six not-so-stunning secrets are likely to get something of yours into print, somewhere. Eventually. They’ll give you at least the two or three stories that someone out there appreciates. Whatever else you do – writing groups, creative writing courses, panel attendance – is extra, and up to you. Useful for some, less relevant for others. Oh, and buying extra software packages won’t solve your problems if you can’t manage the above.

We live with images of writers – scraggy drink-and-drug-riddled recluses in attics; tiresome literary sorts sharing their latest manuscript with Jocasta, their charming wife, in their airy home; disaffected householders slamming out twenty novels a year and gaming the review systems… whatever. You are the sort of writer you make yourself.

I’m pretty much the sort of writer I was four years ago, but more aware of the potential disasters, the flaws in the system, the cruelty of the game – and better for it. And should you meet with Fortuna, and be briefly blessed by her, I shall be there to borrow a fiver before she changes her mind…

The seventh secret of getting published, by the way is: Don’t be an arsehole.

Veteran author Tim Waggoner has many, rather more useful comments on being a writer, and writing in general, on his blog, such as this one here: http://writinginthedarktw.blogspot.com/2019/11/let-it-go.html

John Linwood Grant is a pro writer/editor from Yorkshire, UK, with some fifty short stories published in a wide range of magazines/anthologies over the last few years, including Lackington’s Magazine, Vastarien, Weirdbook, and Space & Time. He writes disquieting dark fiction, particularly Edwardian supernatural tales. ‘His Heart Shall Speak No More’ was picked for Best New Horror #29, and his novel ‘13 Miller’s Court’ (with Alan M Clark) won the 2019 Ripperology Books award. He is the editor of Occult Detective Magazine (with Dave Brzeski) and various anthologies. He is fanatical about lurchers, and owns his own beard.