Louis Shalako
While we never quite know what the future holds, it’s
not a bad idea to set some professional or artistic goals for 2016.
It would be a very good idea to write at least one,
and probably two books in the Inspector
Gilles Maintenon Series. With six already out, a couple more wouldn’t hurt
the passive discoverability of the series.
This year I wrote five novels ranging from 60,000 to
70.000 words. With effective time management, simply by working on a project,
(any project), every day, we can probably do the same again. I published four
of those myself and the fifth one is currently under submission.
With five pen-names, it isn’t always possible to go
strictly by the roster. If I had an idea for a Harold
C. Jones story, and maybe Constance
‘Dusty’ Miller’s turn is next, I would probably go with the idea I had
rather than stall and delay and wait for inspiration to hit just to keep things in proper rotation.
I read something recently on boredom, and how a writer
might reveal it in the work without being properly aware of it themselves.
There might be something in that.
There are times. Having taken the exciting leap, and
having written some erotica in various sub-categories, it no longer feels risky
to write for heterosexual women, gay men, or the more macho, he-man stuff that Ian
Cooper is known for.
It’s just not that hard to write military fiction. Not
once you learn how to produce routinely, not after reading history all my life,
and watching a thousand documentaries over the years. The ideas are there. You
just have to create some fictional characters and put them into play and see
what happens. Zach
Neal has been doing pretty well for us, outselling all the other pen-names
and the thing to do is continue to support that side of the operation. (That’s
not exactly the same thing as saying I have a production schedule.) Over the
course of the last year, I regularly wrote one or two thousand words a day, and
yet getting much more than that was pretty rare. In that sense, writing has
come down to a routine. Being retired, it gives me something to do, which isn’t
always the best motivation. Also, for me it’s more of an end-of-life thing.
Look, I’m not dying, but I have a place to live, a car, a bit of food in the
fridge. I’m not a youngster trying to break into a tough industry—and as far as
the industry goes, I can kind of take
it or leave it.
That kind of objectivity is a new thing.
Rejection isn’t nearly so bad as when I first started
submitting stories and there were rejection slips in the inbox, ah…several
times a week. Back then we had some pretty high hopes.
The other thing is sales. To write a novel, and then
see it quickly die, only to sell a handful of copies a year is very
un-motivating. How do we stand it? I don’t know, but some of us are stubborn
enough to find other reasons to do it. Even then, yeah—there are days when it’s
definitely drudgery, sheer misery in some of the administrative jobs like
pricing, proofreading, blogging when you have nothing to say, or whatever it
is, that one job that really sucks.
The risks are still the same, but nothing really bad has
happened, and maybe it’s just a matter of perception. It might be a good time
to load up on some additional risks. That’s probably one reason why I wrote a
novel to submit this time. It ups the ante if nothing else. Being productive gives us that luxury.
There have been times when it seems as if I have lost some of the early enthusiasm. Let’s
be honest, sometimes it really is work to write a story. To work at it is the
only way to produce anything.
Way back when, I was jamming them out just as fast as
I could. I was also submitting them.
Some of those submissions were
inappropriate to the magazine, the market or the genre.
Some of them were just
plain shit stories. They weren’t going anywhere, and maybe that’s the
difference a few years later. I’m still spending just as much time sitting in
the chair, but (possibly) putting more time into the quality of the original
idea. If you don’t have an idea, you have essentially nothing to write. Where
would you possibly begin, right?
Our goals for the year are guided by a few years of experience.
In 2016, it might be a good idea to write more short
stories. Generally, I finish a novel, and then write short stories for a while
until I get another substantive idea, something that might come in at book
length.
Last year, I didn’t place a single short story,
although I have sold some small ones in the past.
While the professional markets are one thing, very
competitive, with thousands of submissions a month, picking off a few stories
for one or two or three cents a word wouldn’t hurt my feelings too much. All
you have to do is to wait until their publication license expires, and then you
can submit it elsewhere as a half-price reprint or use it yourself, in which
case I make a cover worth about $8.00 and publish it. Once you have the stories
in the can, they are your property and you can do anything you want with them.
We answer only to ourselves.
I see lots of people having fun with their poetry, and
I have been sort of neglecting it. No promises on that one, but.
Other than that, we’ll see what happens in 2016 and
just try and have some fun with it.
END
Editor’s
Note: We need to give Ian a middle initial, and then his
author page would have a dozen titles anyway. So just cleaning up certain
aspects of the operation is another goal.
