Ian Sales's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"

I was thinking yesterday about how much I hate writing first drafts. I much prefer rewriting. Once I've got the bones of the story down on paper, I have something to shape - and it's that process I enjoy doing. And this got me thinking about how many stories I've started but never finished. So I went digging through my various spreadsheets and lists of submissions, and I managed to cobble some numbers together...



This may make me look quite prolific, but I'm a complete dilettante compared to some people I know. There are those who have submitted in one year more stories than I've ever actually finished. These numbers incidentally are mostly for the past few years. I did write and submit some short stories during the early 1990s, but my records from then are patchy so I've not included them. I spent much of that decade focusing on writing novels - which landed me an agent in 2005. It was only in 2008 that I started seriously writing and submitting short fiction, and year or so after that I tried my hand at poetry.

I seem to be much better at starting novellas than I am at finishing them - the only completed one is Adrift on the Sea of Rains, which I published through Whippleshield Books. Most of my poems I've posted on sferse, but I've only tried submitting a handful (without much success, it has to be said). And, while I've finished five novels, I've only submitted two complete ones to my agent; the remaining three were proposals. The above figures do not include the short stories, novellas or novels I plan at some point to have a go at but presently have nothing more than a one-line description in my ideas book.

The past six to nine months I've been focusing on Rocket Science, Adrift on the Sea of Rains and The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself, so I've not had much chance to write any new short stories, or even finish off any of those I'd previously started. I really need to get back into that. So, of course, only a couple of days ago I had a good idea for a novel and I want to get some of that down on paper...

Colum's comment on my previous post, The numbers game, prompted me to wonder how quickly I've placed stories - ie, how many submissions has it taken for each story I've written before I've sold it. So I went back to my trusty spreadsheet, wrangled some numbers and produced this neat little bar chart:

A couple of the stories I sold to the first place I submitted them were written specifically for anthologies. The ones which took seven or eight goes are the older stories... which does suggest I'm getting better at this lark.

Having said all that, I've yet to sell stories to any of the big venues, such as Interzone, Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, or the Big Three US paper mags (though I'm not especially bothered about submitting to the last).