by Neil Clarke
My point is there are a lot of ways to get noticed. The best, in my experience, are those where you don’t even realize you’ve committed an act of self-promotion until after the fact. (I’m flashing back to an elevator ride in the Port Huron courthouse, just after my sentencing, when the scary-looking dude behind me sized me up and said “I don’t know if you just set this whole thing up to get new readers, but I went online the other day and found this story you wrote. I think it was called The Things…?”) You don’t have to embarrass yourself at parties or pimp yourself on Twitter or hack your own finished novel into pieces, only to stitch it back together into something your publisher can sell as Young Adult. (Yes, I know people who have done this.) You don’t even have to be especially good at prose; the bestseller lists are infested with people who can barely write their way out of a fortune cookie.
And I haven’t even mentioned self-publishing.
This would be the point where I bring it all home with my own set of rules, my own path to success. But I can’t. You’d be crazy to follow my example: it was more accident than design, there were too many flukes and butterflies flapping their wings along the way. Only an idiot would list “nearly succumb to weird space disease” on their twelve-step plan for literary success.
But the thing is, it wasn’t just a fluke (or a bacterium, or a beat-down) here and there. I did everything wrong, things that should have sunk my career half a dozen times. I’m nowhere near bestseller status and I doubt I ever will be, but I’m still standing, published in nineteen languages. I don’t know if you’d describe it as success. There’s no security in this job; for all I know everything’s going to come crashing down tomorrow. Maybe I’m Wile E. Coyote two seconds before he looks down and realizes there’s no ground beneath his feet, but I’m making a living at this, for now at least. I’ve been making a living at it for most of this century. If this is success, then I achieved it by failing at pretty much every benchmark that’s supposed to matter.
The only thing I can conclude from that—the closest thing to advice I can offer—is that Rules matter a lot less than anyone told us. They’re statistical descriptors at best, curves, and confidence limits designed to reduce a million data points down to a few manageable parameters. They’re next to useless when it comes to predicting the trajectory of a single point.
There are a million points in this cloud. There have to be a million trajectories.
Surely that’s cause for hope.
* * *
Length-of-rejection (used as an index of editorial interest) from Analog, over time. Empirical support for the claim that my writing gets worse with practice.
About the Author
Peter Watts—author of Blindsight, Echopraxia, and the Rifters Trilogy, among other things—seems especially popular among people who don’t know him. At least, he wins most of his awards overseas except for a Hugo (won thanks to fan outrage over an altercation with Homeland Security) a Jackson (won thanks to fan sympathy over nearly dying from flesh-eating disease), and a couple of dick-ass Canadian awards you’ve probably never heard of. Blindsight is a core text for university courses ranging from Philosophy to Neuropsychology, despite an unhealthy focus on space vampires. Watts’s work is available in nineteen languages.
Editor’s Desk:
What is it with Readercon?
Neil Clarke
July marks my annual pilgrimage to Readercon, a literary genre convention in Massachusetts, that this year has moved from Burlington to Quincy. No matter how amazing the new location turns out to be, I’m still going to have a special place in my heart for the old one. It was there, ten years ago, that Clarkesworld Magazine was born. Even though we will publish our ten-year anniversary issue in October, for me, the celebration starts now. Although I never would have guessed it at the time, the decision to launch this magazine was a life-changing event. It’s introduced me to some of my closest friends, provided countless hours of enjoyment, and opened a path to a new career doing something I love.
Readercon, however, wasn’t satisfied with me having merely one life-changing event! Four years ago, on the first day of the convention, I suffered a near-fatal “widowmaker” heart attack that no one could have seen coming. I was lucky. A few hours earlier and I would have been driving alone on a highway from New Jersey to Massachusetts. Instead, I was at the convention hotel, conveniently located one block away from Lahey Clinic, one of the best hospitals in that area of the country. They saved my life and forever have my gratitude. You don’t face something like that and not come out changed, however.
Those first few hours in the hospital were the most frightening time in my life, so it was only natural that I’d experience some dread about returning the following year. So, in an attempt to try to take back the date and location, I decided to have my first Kickstarter campaign end on the anniversary of the heart attack. The project: Upgraded, a cyborg anthology inspired by the defibrillator surgery I needed to offset the damage to my heart. It funded and now, there’s another anniversary for Readercon.
And now it is time to let some other month have some fun. A few weeks ago saw the publication of the first of my The Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies, so that’s a good start. In August I turn fifty, which I appreciate now more than I would have before the heart attack, so that’s something else to look forward to. There’s also Worldcon, where I’m up for a Hugo, for Best Editor Short Form; and a Chesley Award, for Best Art Director. Then October gets our ten year anniversary issue and somewhere in there, Lisa will get a job and I’ll quit mine. Yeah, I think that’s enough excitement for now.
Going to be at Readercon this year? Stop by and say hi. I’ll be the one relaxing behind the Clarkesworld table, trying to stay out of trouble . . .
About the Author
Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a four-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). The innagural edition of his Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series was published by Night Shade Books in June. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.
Cover Art:
Alien Invasion
Lasse Perala
About the Artist
Lasse is a freelance concept artist and illustrator from Vantaa, Finland.