Things can change in a hurry. Life’s funny like that.
I walked out of 2024 riding high. While work and personal life weren’t perhaps where I’d like them to be, when it came to my writing endeavors, I was absolutely on fire. Last year ended as, by far, the most successful I’ve had since I started submitting stories for publication way back in the late 1980s. After some starts and stops and lots (and lots) of failures over the years, I’d finally found my niche in the great big literary world.
Or so I thought.
I started 2025 with several really great stories out to various publishers, confident that most of them were going to be picked up. I also put the finishing touches on my latest novel, “Dragon Day,” which I started sending on its rounds back in late January. I felt really good about it, too. It’s fun, it’s action-packed, and it’s a good story — at least I think so. Then, the rejections started arriving. I’d gotten used to signing contracts. I had five of those in 2024, compared to only two rejections. The first “not thanks” didn’t bother me a whole lot. I’d written that story hastily, and I knew it was the weakest of the ones that I’d submitted. But then came the next, and the next, and the next. Pretty soon, I’d collected six rejections without a single contract. It was, honestly, devastating.
There was a small moment of brightness amid the deluge of rejections when I got word that my story “The Birds and the Beasts,” which is the absolute craziest thing I’ve ever written, earned honorable mention recognition in the Writers of the Future Contest — my second time to achieve that, the last being the late 1990s. But that obviously doesn’t come with publication or payment.
Compounding my frustrations were personal life. Without boring you too much, suffice it to say that March was awful. That will happen when a waterfall sprouts in your living room and a chunk of ceiling lands in the middle of the floor. And that was just the tip of a very large iceberg. My 62,000 words written through the first two months of the year turned into a grand total of just over 1,600 for the entire month of March. That’s one good session for me. My next novel, “No Man’s Son,” has been sitting in the home stretch of a completed first draft for about four weeks, but I just haven’t had the energy or mindpower to devote to it.
At one of the lower points of the month, I was even beginning to have second thoughts about whether trying this writing thing again was worth it. But then, I got some good news, a bright ray of light to end the month. Suddenly, the roller coaster is coming out of the dip and climbing back upwards. Something big (for me, at least) is coming. I’m excited to share it with you and promise that I’ll have a lot to say about it when the time is right. In fact, you’ll probably get tired of me talking about it.
That’s really the way of the writing business, though. Just when you think you’ve got everything figured out, it smacks you in the face and reminds you that you’re an idiot. When you’re starting to think that maybe you don’t have it and what successes you have seen are a fluke, something wonderful happens. It’s a huge angry roller coaster, and all you can do is hang on for dear life and hope there are more ups than downs.
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