2024 Accountability Post

It's time for my annual accountability post where I discuss how many submissions vs. how many works I had published in the preceding year. I've been posting about my productivity of submissions since 2021 (and it can be read here), but really I have been keeping track of my submissions as far back as 1999. I started putting them into an Excel file since 2010, and I have been submitting larger numbers of works pretty consistently since 2017. You can see my 2022 accountability here, and my 2023 accountability here, if interested.

At some point, I realized that the publishing game is at least partially a numbers game. You have to make large numbers of submissions to see any positive results, unless you want to self-publish. And there is nothing wrong with self-publishing. As you will see later in this blog post, I actually self-published my first short story and poetry collection earlier this year and blogged about it last month. It started a few years ago when I read a blog from an author who said they try to reach 100 submissions per year. It inspired me to see how many submissions I could make each year. While I found I could not reach 100, I did find that 50 was an attainable number. Unfortunately, I no longer remember who wrote that original blog.

So this year, I did not quite make my 50 submissions goal. However, this was because I chose to work on longer works this year. I finally completed my second novel-length manuscript, Blood of the Werewolf, and began submitting it to agents. Additionally, I started working on my next novel, a mussy story titled Osiris. Because I spent a good portion of my writing year working on longer works instead of shorter works, I give myself a pass at not quite making the 50 submissions goal.

So, here are the numbers. I had a total of 41 submissions for publications, which is not too shy of my 50 submissions total. This includes seven book submissions to agents and small presses total, including my first completed manuscript, The Sorcerer, the aforementioned Blood of the Werewolf, and my first completed short story and poetry collection, Classic Camp's Classic Horror Emporium, which I submitted to myself for self-publication. Yes, I am counting that one. This exercise is supposed to be motivational after all. It is available on Amazon here, in case anyone is interested.

The rest of the list includes 22 short story submissions, which was the largest number as usual. I had 11 poetry submissions, and one essay or non-fiction submissions. I had only two successes, and it was a tough year for me for fiction and poetry, especially considering one of the successes was my self-published collection. My other success this year was my article on Fay Wray, which was published at Ravenous Monster.

There you have it. Fee free to see how you measure up. I have a relatively low bar this year for anyone to compare, but that is what I have been up to. I am still out there writing and submitting, but like last year, so far I am concentrating most of my time and energy on longer works. Hopefully, it starts bear fruit soon.

Three Things I Learned About Writing From Roger Corman

 

The world recently lost who I would name as the single most influential figure in the history of motion pictures, Roger Corman, but I am not here to substantiate that claim (perhaps I will one day). And before I get too far, let me say I've never actually met the man, but have admired him and his work for a very long time. He and James Whale are my two all time favorite directors, but Corman did much more than just direct film, he also produced and yes, he even sometimes wrote the screenplays. So today's blog is a collection of information I've learned about writing from stories about his work and interviews I've read and seen with him and how he has influenced my own work. Perhaps you may learn something from it as well, or at least hear some neat tidbits about Corman you did not previously know.

Sometimes you need to write a lot very quickly. In case you don't know, Corman is probably most famous for his Edgar Allan Poe adaptations from the early 1960s, which he produced and directed. One of my favorite stories about him concerns filming of The Raven. He had three weeks to complete filming The Raven, and he finished several days early. Instead of breaking up production, he wrote the script for another film, The Terror, and filmed most of it with the same cast and sets for the remaining days of the shooting schedule. In order to do that, he had to write the movie script very quickly, so he stayed up and wrote that entire script virtually non-stop for an 80 minute movie in just 48 hours!

I understand that a novel is much longer than a film script, in most cases, but it inspired me to see just how productive I could be when I really set my mind to it. So I once set myself a schedule to try and punch out a rough draft of a novel within Corman's film shooting schedule of just three weeks. That was one of the most productive writing bursts I have ever had before or since. I wrote up to four chapters per day. And I succeeded in (a very crappy) completed rough draft in just three weeks time. It had to be edited heavily before I could send it out to agents or publishers, but eventually, that rough draft became The Sorcerer, my first completed novel-length manuscript, which has at least garnered some interest with a publisher, but as of this time, is not yet published.

There is no writer's block. Roger Corman did not believe in writer's block. I believe there is such a thing as writer's block but it can be overcome, and anyone who wants to be a writer must find ways to overcome it. That does not mean that I do not occasionally sit in front my of computer staring at the scene for hours during a writing session. But I have my own methods of overcoming that. Corman's take on overcoming writer's block was actually quite simple, and would probably work for fiction writers in most instances. He once said (and I am paraphrasing here), if you are suffering from writer's block, simply watch a movie and change all the nouns. I would modify that to reading a book or a short story. Chances are, in my experience, when you are done "changing all the nouns" as Corman put it, you will end up changing a lot more as well. You will not be able to help changing other attributes about those characters and locations and other nouns and events in the story as well. In other words, you will likely wind up with a completely different story that was simply inspired by the story you set out to recreate.

Now, I'm pretty sure your next question is whether or not I have ever used that method of overcoming writer's block. My simple is answer is that those files are sealed and marked as highly classified.

Follow your passions. Look at Roger Corman's body of work and you will see he did a lot of genre work, mostly horror with some science fiction, but also some westerns, biker films, gangster films, etc. He even did a number of parodies, sometimes parodying his own work. You can see what his interests are from his body of work. It is no secret. He wrote about his interests, his passions. His passions were known to all, just by looking at even a small portion of the body of his work.

One of the things that first drew me to Roger Corman was that I have similar interests, particularly with horror and science fiction. It is also easy to discover my own interests by looking at my body of work, or by looking at my Facebook group, Classic Camp's Classic Horror Emporium https://www.facebook.com/share/h6TNimwEL5Zh8DxQ/. 

So there you have it, three writing tips I learned from film director, producer, and screenwriter Roger Corman. I think they can be useful to any aspiring, or perhaps even a few experienced, writers. Feel free to leave comments below on your thoughts about this, Corman, or anything else.

How Long Have I been Editing My Current Novel? (It's Complicated)

 

Not long ago, I was in a monthly meeting with the HWA - Virginia Chapter when I was asked how long I had been editing my current work in progress (WIP), and I was not ready with an answer. I am sure whatever I said sounded evasive, but honestly, I had to think about that question for a while, and was not quite sure what the answer was. The more I thought about it, the more I felt it may make for an interesting blog post about my process and since this is apparently going to be my second completed manuscript ready for submission to agents and / or publishers very soon, it may also make for great promotion for this labor of love.

The current project is titled Blood of the Werewolf, and as the title suggests, it is a werewolf tale. The setting is the early 1800s Great Britain (with a few key scenes in Tibet), which places it in the same universe as my first completed manuscript, The Sorcerer, which is still under consideration at a small press publisher at the time of this writing. I will one day blog about why I have chosen that location and timeframe, but the short version of that answer is, it is the era of literature I studied in college.

Anyway, I began my college career in the mid-1990s and it was around this same timeframe that I started thinking about becoming a author. It turns out to be a very long, hard, and slow process. One thing I did for fun and practice was to write novelizations of some of my favorite horror movies, such as those from Universal Studios. I had no intention of getting these published, but it was a way to try my chops at writing something of some length.

It made me start to think about writing my own stories about vampires, werewolves, and mummies, so I started writing a few longer pieces, more so for my own amusement once again than with any intension of trying to get it published. Once I had a few of these under my belt, I started thinking more seriously about writing a full length novel and hopefully one day getting it published. I decided that with some major revisions, these projects could be made into full length novels.

Those who say writing for yourself is very different from writing for publication are certainly correct. These stories needed a lot of work. In their original form they were only the length of novellas and novelettes as they ranged from 12,000 to 17,00 words. Most publishers like novels to be around 80,000 words. They needed extra scenes, backstories, more thoughts and emotions from characters and other elements to flush them out into full-length novels and make them much better stories in the process. At their heart, they were already novels, really, they just needed to be flushed out to reach their true potential. The first of these stories I did this with was what is now titled The Sorcerer, and in its final form it reached the industry standard for a finished novel at 80,000 words. The second is the one I am working on now, Blood of the Werewolf.

So to finally return to the question above (You do remember the question above, don't you, "How long have I been editing my current novel?") The original 17,000 word version was completed sometime in the late 1990s. Then it was placed in a drawer for a very looooong time. I completed The Sorcerer, and edited it I don't even know how many times, until I decided I could no longer edit it. I finally put what at the time were the finishing touches on The Sorcerer around 2017. And I finally started a major revision of Blood of the Werewolf. But the question now is, does revision count as editing? I would say that since this revision was so massive, it is probably does not count as true editing. It became practically a new story.

But then in 2019 I received a mentorship from Tim Waggoner through the Horror Writers Association. He gave me some good feedback on that novel and insight as to why it was not attracting agents or publishers yet. In order to make Blood of the Werewolf come out right, I had to put it down once again and edit The Sorcerer one last time. This took about another year, which brings us to 2020, the year of Covid. I did work on it some during the pandemic, but like many other authors and publishers, no one was as productive as we wanted to be during those odd two years.

The editing process for Blood of the Werewolf I believe started around 2020 or 2021 (not counting the major revision years). I am now very close to getting this one finished and should have it done very soon. I'm editing page 306 out of 363 and it now totals almost 79,000 words. I will make sure it reaches at least 80,000 words by the time I am finished. It may need one more pass through before I am comfortable sending it out to publishers and agents, but that should only be a light edit to clean up a few things and ensure continuity throughout the novel.

I feel as though I am getting faster and better at this, and I've never missed a deadline when I've been given one. I am also getting excited to write more follow-ups to these stories, as I have one more, Osiris, that is in a very rough draft at about 13,000 words, and I have notes on numerous others in the series. The fact that I have been able to publish more short stories, poems, and non-fiction articles in recent years also shows I am improving. And keep in mind that I also wrote many of those short stories, poems, and non-fiction articles in between revising and editing these novels. Wish me luck with these and other projects in the future, so that I can post this self-made meme once again:

My Latest Short Story Sale

I am particularly excited about my latest short story sale for several reasons. For one thing, it is always exciting to make a short story sale, obviously, but this sale is particularly exciting. My latest short story sale is "Beheaded" (I love that title, by the way, but again, that's not why I am particularly excited about this sale). It will appear in the anthology Madame Gray's Poe-Pourri (cover pictured above) with the publisher, HellBound Books.

I have submitted to other anthologies with HellBound Book, but this was the first one they have actually accepted so far. All these are great reasons to be proud of this short story sale, and they are all reasons that I am proud of this short story sale. But there is one reason that makes me particularly proud of this specific short story sale.

The thing that makes me particularly proud of this short story sale is the fact that I consider this story, "Beheaded," to be part of the same universe as my first completed novel-length manuscript, The Sorcerer and my current work in progress, Blood of the Werewolf. That proves to me, and hopefully one day to a publisher, that stories in this universe can and will sell.

That universe is Romantic England (note the capital R in Romantic). It is similar enough to Victorian England that fans will be able to identify with both eras. It is the era just before the Victorian Era, usually noted as 1800 to 1835 in England. It is also my favorite literary era, with its love of nature and "spontaneous overflow of emotions." And it is the literary era I studied in college.

For more information on these works, you can see my previous blog-post on Shameless Self-Promotion. And for more information on this anthology, here is the link to HellBound Books.