This weekend, we finished prepping the second short story we wrote for a specific call for submissions. This one had a limit of 12,000 words, which was a huge challenge. We decided to write a rough draft without obsessively checking the word count and pare down as needed when we were finished. As it turns out, we had to trim about 4000 words. Ouch…

But we were ruthless, and we did it, and the result is a tight story with a good pace. We’re both learning a lot about tightening up our prose by writing for these shorter calls, and I think it’s been good for us, overall.

Anyway, it’s finished and submitted, so now we have to wait until the deadline passes, which means we have a couple of months to wait and keep our fingers crossed.

For now, we’re taking a break before starting something new in order to tackle some revisions. We have a rough draft of a novel to revise and polish; it’ll probably be between 60-65,000 words by the time we’re finished revising. We also have another short story that we need to finish and pare down. Given we have rough drafts of two different works, one of which is novel-length, we figured we ought to hold off on starting anything new until we get what we have cleaned up. And we’ll definitely be running the novel past another set of eyes before we start prepping it for submission.

Coming up with ideas and getting them written quickly is definitely not our problem! Having enough time in the day is our problem. We’ve been writing together on a regular basis since 2004, so we’re pretty well-synced; it doesn’t take us long to generate ideas, characters, and plots, and once we start writing, the draft goes quickly. As a result, we’ve managed to complete two stories and a novel and have a third story almost finished since getting our first rejection letter back in January.

I found this image shortly after we received that letter, and it motivated me to stop angsting and get back to work. I think it’s still rather appropriate. 😀

Between getting distracted by fanfiction and various real life busy-ness, it took well over a year for us to finish our first original manuscript. I think part of that delay was due to our reluctance to move away from the fandom comfort zone; we’d been writing fanfiction for so long that we had our niche and were comfortable there, but at the same time, we could tell our enthusiasm was waning bit by bit, and there really wasn’t any other fandom that was interesting both of us enough to write for it. It seemed an ideal time to transition to original writing, but making that jump – letting go of the comfortable old shoe in favor of something new and unknown – was daunting.

But we did it at last, and we got feedback on the draft and made considerable revisions accordingly, which we both agreed made the work much stronger. Finally, on December 5, 2011, we submitted our manuscript amid much squeeing and virtual high-fiving over having actually gotten to that point. Whether it was accepted or not, we had turned a major corner, and we were both aware of the significance of what we’d done.

Both of us agreed that we loved fandom and writing for fandom, and we feel like writing fanfiction has been beneficial in countless ways; it let us hone our skills together and separately, and we learned and improved through practice and through the feedback we received over the years. But when we started to realize we were running out of things to say in fandom, we thought maybe it was time to start developing our own voices and our own worlds. Making the break was difficult, rather like taking training wheels off your bike for the first time, but writing – and more importantly, finishing – that first manuscript opened the flood gates for us. We now have an ideas list that numbers in the double digits.

On January 10, 2012, we got our first rejection letter. After a bit of wallowing (okay, I wallowed), we rebounded and regrouped, and we made a new plan. Instead of trying to submit our novel, we would write to specific prompts on the Call for Submissions pages for various publishing companies; that way, we would be writing something we knew the company wanted, and if it was accepted, we’d get our foot in the door with one company and have a success to list on our resume when we start shopping the novel around again.

The challenge for the first prompt we selected was keeping it short. The maximum word count was 18,000. To quote Arionrhod’s response at the time, “That’s a chapter for us.” But we decided we’d devise a simple, straight-forward plot and rein in the characters if they threatened to get talkative. We decided to write the draft without keeping an eye on the word count, and in the end, we came in comfortably under the limit at about 15,000-some words, pre-editing. We revised and edited that work and sent it off on February 11, and the publishers said we could expect to hear something before the end of March. Fingers crossed!

After that, we tackled another, shorter prompt which forced us to pare down to under 12,000 words, which proved to be much more of a challenge, but we got it done. That story is being looked over by outside eyes (we were concerned we’d pared it down so much, it didn’t flow as well), and we’ll get it edited and submitted in the next few weeks.

Currently, we’re back at work on a full-length manuscript, also written with a particular Call for Submissions in mind. This one is a historical piece, and so far, it’s going pretty well. We’re about 20,000 words in, and we’ve got a rough outline for where we want to go with it.

After we finish the historical, we’ll have to see where we are. There are a couple of other Call for Submissions prompts that we’re seriously looking at, and depending on how successful we are at getting our current prompt-work accepted, we may try shopping the first novel around again. If our current prompt-works aren’t accepted, I’m not sure what we’ll do with them: save them for submitting elsewhere another time or throw them up here as freebies. We’ll have to discuss it. Either way, they won’t go languishing!

Mainly, our goal is to keep writing. We want that first sale – oh, how we want that first sale! – but it’s not about the money so much as it’s about receiving the affirmation that yes, we can do this. We can write for publication. We can get paid for this. Maybe not enough to quit our day jobs and write full time, but still. So we’re going to keep writing and keep submitting, and eventually, something will stick. Eventually, we’ll get to see our work in print and be able to say, “We did it”.

-McKay