I took my story Rust in the Sunset, gave it a good once-over to whip it into shape, then put it into standard manuscript format, and submitted it to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Pretty nifty, huh?

I mean, it’s the exactly the sort of thing a real writer would do!

Well, you know what they say. Fake it till you make it!

I was reading some of Robert Sawyer’s advice for wannabe writers when it occurred to me to do this. He says that there is probably no point in trying to sell a book until you have a short fiction track record.

Makes sense to me. Good thing I have a bunch of unpublished short stories just kinda hanging around!

So I looked at my folder of getting published relating stuff and there it was, the link to the online submission gateway for my favorite science fiction magazine, Asimov’s.

It is my favorite for purely sentimental reasons. We had a subscription when I was a kid, so I got a lot of my new science fiction exposure from it.

It was there when I was an impatient reader in elementary school who would open a book of science fiction short stories and decide which one to read based on which one was the shortest.

I would actually sit there and do the math to figure out how long a story was based on the page numbers. If Story A is on page 126, and story B, the story after that one, is on page 140, story A is 24 pages long. And so forth.

Stories that were too long were too much of a commitment, I guess. Yet I read full length books, too. I guess it makes a difference whether you were given an option or not.

Anyhow, so that’s why Asimov’s is my fave, and likely always will be. I know the odds are very much in the favour of rejection, but seeing as I have done very little of this in the pass, even getting a rejection would seem like progress at this point.

At least I am trying!

After all, tons of super famous, critically adored, and financially successful writers started out by getting nothing but rejections for years and years.

So if you are not getting rejected, you are not really a writer yet, in my opinion.

And I know rejection does not necessarily mean the editor in question hates my story. It might just not be the kind of story they are looking for at that moment. Or it might be too much like another story they have already committed to publish. Or it might just not be the sort of thing they like. Or maybe they are just having a lousy day and hate the world. It can mean all kinds of things.

And I know that, as marvelous as I am, I still have a lot to learn before I am good enough to play in the big leagues. Nobody is perfect right out of the gate. There is raw talent, and then there is skill. Talent you start with. Skill you acquire. But skill, in many ways, is made of talent.

If you get my drift.

Hopefully, eventually my work will be good enough to get personalized rejections that tell me what the editor did not like about my work. That will prove invaluable advice for improving my work so that the next thing, or maybe even the same thing with fixes, stands a better chance of making it.

All this makes me feel like a real honest to goodness writer! Keen gear.

Putting the damn thing into manuscript format was the hard part. That is some particular shit, manuscript format. I am glad to learn it (I learned it from here, if you wanna know) because I want my work to have every advantage over the competition I can give it. If editors want manuscript format, they will get it. It’s the least I can do. I want to do as little to annoy them as possible, for obvious reasons.

But I think, from now on, it would be easier if I tried to write things in said manuscript format in the first place. I am not looking forward to that, because I find it visually ugly. Monospaced font, double spaced, ick. I like my words to look at much like they are already in a book as possible.

But it’s not about what I want, it’s about what editors like. Putting things in proper manuscript format is like wearing a suit to a job interview. It show you are serious and that you are paying attention and that you care enough to want to make a good impression.

So unless I find some marvelous macro for Open Office that does all the work for me, I will be stuck with either doing the writing in the ugly format, or doing the work of reformatting later.

Oh well, such is life. Life is work. Might as well get used to it.

Other than that, I didn’t do much today. The reformatting took most of the afternoon. Since then, I have been sleeping or eating. You know, the usual stuff.

Got a little bit more editing done on The Book. That is still proving one tedious mountain to climb. I need some way to break it up into pieces, or otherwise make it less of a dauntingly tall hill of text.

Or I need to seduce someone into being a proofreader and editor for me for free. Then I can just hand them the rough draft and be done with it.

Heck, as long as I am dreaming, I might as well make them my agent too. Efficient, competent, dogged, and incredibly dedicated to me and my amazingly deft and magical talents.

And what the hell, throw in a pony, a PS3, and a mansion near the beach.

Well, I guess that’s all for today. Thanks for reading, folks. It means the world to me to know that somewhere out there, my words are heard.

Who knows, someday you might all get to say “I knew him when…. “!