What I Wish Someone Had Told Me in April 2004
(which is when I had been submitting short fiction to magazines for a year)

The great thing about being a sophomore writer (and I'm writing the first draft of this essay right after my first publication in a professional venue, and about three months before the official end of my sophomore year) is that things are infinitely easier and exponentially harder.

On the practical level, everything is easier. The practical level is almost entirely learned (and probably mastered) in the Freshman Year. In fact, I have very little practical advice, and I cover it first, below.

But there is that whole mental/emotional/spiritual level, which has just got harder.

• Polish your cover letter. Most authorities agree that the cover letter isn't really important. And then, immediately after that, most authorities begin ranting about all the totally atrocious cover letters they've gotten, and you realize, it is, perhaps, a little bit important.
  
  At this point in my sophomore year, my cover letters look a lot like this. I don't know how great it is, but it's serviceable, and uses the rules of business etiquette that I learned from a Swiss woman named Dominique who made me practice writing French business letters under the guise of "earning a degree" (once you learn to write letters with effusive, multi-word closings, you can't stop!--but you can at least write them in English and Americanize them). Is this good etiquette for the field of writing? Heck if I know. I'm only explaining what I do because it's slightly weird. (I hope you have equally good justifications for the weird stuff you will inevitably do.)
  
  The point is, in a cover letter, more is less. Leave out irrelevant information. On the point of listing your previously published works: It is generally agreed that you spout off about the respectable and relevant ones and leave the less respectable and irrelevant ones at home. My interpretation of that does mean that if you only have one publish to your name, you mention it. But that's what I did, not necessarily the right thing to do. As with anything, seek other authorities....
  
  
• Some theories on benchmarking and stats gathering--this one's not an imperative. I spent much of last year obssessively tracking how much I wrote, how fast I wrote, how long I spent writing, how long I spent editing, how long I spent doing market research, how long I spent calculating how long I spent writing...
  
  I also obssessively tracked my submissions, rejections and acceptances. I'm not the only one. I got the idea from Jon Hansen, and later found a kindred spirit in Leah Bobet. I still do this, the submissions tracking, but I have largely given up on the wordcount and time tracking. Why? Well, at first I just signed it off as a sign of my lack of perseverence, but if there's anything that a sophomore writer is, its perseverant. (If you weren't, you'd have given up by now.)
  
  I eventually figured out that I just didn't need to track it anymore. I didn't ever quite know why I was tracking it in the first place, you see, and I don't feel some magical thrill when I see that I've written 250,000 words in a year. (I'd much rather go by completed pieces--this is a personal preference). What I did learn from tracking stuff was that I can write, productively, about 700 words of original fiction in an hour. That I go much more slowly during rewriting. That I tend to average 50,000 words a month if I'm producing, and 10,000 if I'm doing a lot of other things, like rewriting and editing. In essence, I spent a year benchmarking, and now that I have a good feel for what I can (and should) accomplish in a certain period of time.
  
  Anyway. I don't think there's a should/should not here, but its stuff I've spent a lot of time thinking about.
  
  
• Learn about rejection. Rejection was the hardest thing for me to get used to. It really got a lot less bitter after I'd had an acceptance, but even then, it only got easier, but it took ages for it to be stingless. I usually don't even have a 30-second feeling of "awww, crap" anymore, which is a vast improvement from spending a week on the couch watching television and not writing because rejections depressed me so much.
  
  From the avid reading of journals and surveying a few other writers, I have gotten the impression that rejection is No Big Deal. Professionally speaking, it's true. Rejection happens: you get a lot more rejections than you do acceptances. Rejections don't mean that the story isn't good, it just means you didn't make it work for the editor in question. And acceptance, after all, is no more than this formula: right story + right desk + right day. All you can do is make the story as good as you can make it, but you can never guarantee that it's the right one; you can aim at the right desk by getting to know the magazine and the editorial tastes thereof--but the right day is just a mystery.
  
  Personally speaking, rejection is a big deal, but unless you want every trip to the mailbox to be a crushing blow, you have to get over it. You have to learn how to embrace rejection. And the best way to do that is to learn about rejection. I probably re-read what's behind that last link every couple of months until I finally got a handle on it. And I look forward to rejections now. I look forward to any communication from an editor, and I lump rejections and acceptances together in that category.
  
  Initially, I didn't like any critique in my rejections. It felt like a personal slam. "We aren't publishing your story, and what the hell? You rushed the ending, you idiot!" (Note, this is not an actual rejection.) Gradually, however, it became apparent to me that a little criticism was a good sign--it meant that the edtior wanted to like the story, maybe almost did like it, but you screwed up, and they're sad about it, so they've decided to say something in hopes you'll get a clue.
  
  
• Give it a go: sharing, networking, and talking with your peers. The biggest thing I learned this year was about networking. I don't mean chatting up Patrick Neilsen Hayden at a con; I mean talking with other writers because you might find someone with sympathy of spirit, who's going through the same things you're going through, and who will share all the things they've learned in getting to the same level. I've gotten a load of advice from various people I've met at cons, all of differing qualities. Someone told me that the best way to get better at writing is to read slush for a year. This is a path I've not chosen (at this time), but the more I read the works of other people at or near my level, the more I learn what not to do.
  
  
• Give up self-doubt. No, really. It gets so much easier if you just stop worrying about every little thing. A pro looks at your self-doubt like my 6th grade science teacher looked at me when I asked her if what we did in 6th grade affected getting into college. It's not that it was a dumb question, it was just a question asked from across such a gulf of experience that it's unrelatable. Right now the little mistakes don't matter, basically, and the things you learn from just going through the process are invaluable. So, stop judging yourself and submit, submit, submit.
  
  I've given up self-doubt like fifteen times now... and each time it gets a little easier, and I'm always glad of the respite until I let it creep back in.
  
  Yes, yes. Easier said than done.