I have been negligent
For the past ten (nearly eleven, now) years I’ve kept track of all my fiction submissions and rejections in a simple text file. After ten years, this got cumbersome, so in July I started using a spreadsheet to keep track of things. Of course, I didn’t want to lose all that accumulated data, so I started importing it into the spreadsheet as I had time.
The results were…rather disturbing. Actually, they were extremely disturbing. I’ve been lying to myself and not even realizing it.
An example. I finished “Ghost in the Flames”, which I consider to be my best novel (it has Caina), in May of 2008.
It has only been rejected thirteen times. That’s it? Thirteen times? In two and a half years, I only found the energy to send out my best book thirteen times?
It got worse.
In 2004, the year I sold “Demonsouled“, I made a total of 46 submissions. In 2006 I did 62. In 2007 I did 52. An average of about one a week. Not too bad, right?
In 2008, I did 23. Total. For the entire year.
In 2009 I managed 18. That’s it. Maybe one or two a month.
For the first six months of 2010, I did a grand total of nine.
Looking over the hard data like that, in black and white, was…really rather chilling. It was like the first time I recorded how many calories I ate in a day – I expected the number to be about half of what it actually was.
It is disturbing how easily and completely we can lie to ourselves. I think at some point I decided – if only subconsciously – that if failure was inevitable, why go through the motions? Except, of course, that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I’ve been acting like Screwtape’s one patient, the one who spent his time “doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. I’m not a bad writer – but I haven’t been using those abilities as well as I should have been.
I suppose I could make any number of excuses – I had a car accident in 2007, I was depressed for a big chunk of 2008 and 2009, I spend the last thirteen months losing 135 pounds (which, if you’ve been fat your entire life, really messes with your head, let me tell you), and so forth.
But, enough! Excuses are meaningless.
In August I sent out twenty fiction submissions, and I would have done more, but I ran out of stuff to send.
-JM