Even that seemed like way too much work, actually, so I decided that I was just going to make a copy-editing pass-through and then send it out. I figured that novels really stand or fall based on their totality, and that a little stylistic roughness wasn’t going to hurt the novel.

Then, in July, a friend of mine visited and asked to read the novel. She’s a huge reader of YA and someone who I could trust to be both discerning and sympathetic, so I deviated from my normal practice (of never letting any of my friends read my unpublished work). When she finished it, she said the requisite number of nice things, but when I talked to her a bit more, it seemed like she felt that the beginning was pretty weak.

That’s what I’d been afraid of. Something about the beginning was really nagging at me. I decided that even if the rest of the book wasn’t going to get much more editing (except to ferret out typos), I should at least polish up the beginning a little. By this time, I was taking a writing class taught by Nick Mamatas (at the Berkeley Writer’s Salon) and I asked him to look at the first three chapters. Actually, I primarily wanted him to look at them so he could tell me what genre label I should market my novel under (you put the novel’s genre front and center in your query letters, usually), but he also gave me some really good advice on how I could structure the beginning.

The day after I got comments, I had an epiphany while I was in bed. I realized that one major character could be eliminated entirely, and that doing so would substantially improve the first third of the novel. This epiphany both energized and exhausted me. There was no question that I was going to do it, but at the same time, I didn’t really want to do it right then.

When the class ended, I spent a few weeks revising the stories I’d written, and then I tackled the novel. First I wrote a synopsis of the first nine chapters of the novel (so I’d know what I was deleting), then I pulled up my last draft of it (the one from the end of June), and selected the first third (about 22,000 words from a 75,000 word novel) and deleted them.

I spent about ten days (from October 7^th to 16^th) rewriting the first nine chapters. It came out really well, and I was quite satisfied with it. During the rest of October (in addition to other writing projects), I went through the rest of the novel and made sure it agreed with the new beginning (and made all the other major changes I needed to make).

After that, I was possessed by a kind of madness. I’d put in too much time. It wasn’t an eight day novel anymore. Now it had to be as good as I could make it. So I decided to make a pass for style. A few hours into this pass, something weird activated in my mind, and I started cutting words like crazy. On a paragraph and scene level there was not much that was extraneous. Nor did I cut very many entire sentences. Instead, I just rewrote sentences to make them shorter. At the end of the day, I’d worked for about four hours to cut 600 words. It was mesmerizing.

For the next twelve days or so, I followed that pattern. During four hours, I’d go through about eight or nine pages (twice). The first time, I did really micro-level cuts. The second time, I’d see if there was any obvious chunks of fat that I’d been blinded to. That’s when I cut out whole paragraphs and sentences (I know, it seems like I should’ve done sentence-level second, but that’s not the way it worked out).  At the end of four hours, I’d usually have cut an entire page of the novel.

Halfway through this cutting-room march, I got kind of worried that maybe I was eviscerating the tone of the novel and making everything sound very clipped and stilted and featureless. I tried reading and reading the sections I’d cut yesterday, but I couldn’t perceive the distance. However, I’d gone too far and made too many cuts. I’d also been making numerous tiny substantive changes along with the cutting, and there was no way to separate out the substantive from the stylistic. I was stuck with the cutting, unless I wanted to roll back entirely to a previous version. And the novel couldn’t be half stripped-down and half verbose. That’d be absurd. Instead, I continued grimly onward. It was kind of scary, but very satisfying. By the end of this pass, the novel was down more than 7,000 words from its previous draft (down to about 67,000 words).

That was in mid-November. After taking a week or so to recover, I engaged in the most incredibly, dreadfully boring part of the whole endeavor. I downloaded a program that reads out text (NaturalReader) and had it read the novel to me while I followed along. I found a typo on maybe every other page (much less than I thought there’d be). This part took more than a week. It was utterly miserable. I don’t think I’ve ever been as terribly bored by any other writing-related task.

And then the novel was done. A few days ago I wrote a draft query and sent out a novel query, just so I could say that the novel had been submitted this year (though I still intend to revise my query a little bit).

In summary, my revision included:

• 3 weeks – One passthrough to clean up the rough edges from the eight-day novel-writing binge and make everything cohere and actually look like a real, completed novel
• 3 weeks – One passthrough to totally rewrite the beginning and then make the rest of the novel agree with the new beginning, as well as fixing continuity problems and other niggling little things
• 2 weeks – One passthrough to  cut 10% of the novel’s word-count, fix any remaining stylistic problems, and take a final look at all the substantive issues
• 1 week – One passthrough for copy-editing.

Last year, I surpassed every writing-related benchmark of my life, except for two (most words in one day and most words in one month). Today’s blog post was going to be about how I’ve surpassed last year in every benchmark except the one which is perhaps the most important: quality of sales. As of yesterday, I hadn’t yet made a sale that exceeded last June’s sale to Clarkesworld in goodness.

I mean, Nature and Daily Science Fiction are great markets, but (rightly or wrongly) they don’t receive any critical attention. My Clarkesworld story got more reviews and notice than anything else I’d ever published in my life.

Furthermore, I hadn’t yet sold a story that I’d written this year. With the exception of one Nature story, all of this year’s sales were written last summer. I’d started to worry that maybe my stories were getting worse.

The anxiety was getting pretty heavy, and it made me realize that no sale is ever really going to satisfy me. Even if I did sell stories to all the big magazines, I’d immediately start worrying about how none of them had been chosen for Year’s Best anthologies or been nominated for awards. Even if I do sell my novel, its sales will inevitably disappoint me. Even if I do get awards, I’ll worry about the years when I don’t get them. A writer is always going to find something to worry about.

It was a lot to think about, and it made me start to do some pretty heavy thinking about how I was going to build some psychological defenses against this kind of disappointment

But then I got an acceptance from Clarkesworld yesterday. My story “What Everyone Remembers” will appear in the January 2012 issue. And this story is recent. I wrote it in July of this year. I’ve had four near-misses with Clarkesworld this year (stories held for 20+ days and then rejected) as well as ten or so less encouraging rejections, so it’s good to hit with them again.

The only bad part about this is that now I have to wait six months before I can submit again to this really good magazine that’s demonstrated that it really likes my stories.

In other news, I also sent out my first novel query today. The novel is completely and totally done. Nothing on hell or earth is going to make me revise it further. The query might still need some polishing (ugh, and the synopsis still needs to be written). But otherwise, this is the end of my journey with this novel. I’m happy to have finished and submitted a novel, even if I am dreading the dozens of rejections that will inevitably arrive.

Finally, this year in writing has been really good. I’m attaching a table below that shows my yearly progress (with the caveat that my word-count includes words spent on revising, so it self-consistent but not consistent with other peoples’ yearly totals, i.e. my 2011 total of 500,000 really does represent more than three times more effort for me as 2009’s total of 150,000, but it does not necessarily represent twice as much effort as your total of, say, 250,000).

*Statistics are through 12/19/2012; I hope to hit 500,000 before the year is done.

**Prior to 2010, I didn’t track when I finished revising a story and submitted it for the first time.

Additionally, the best writing day of my life was June 7^th of this year (the day I finished the first draft of my novel), with 11,450 words. My best writing week was the week beginning on May 30^th, when I wrote 53,050 words (the first 5/7ths of my novel).

I made seven short story sales this year: two each to Daily SF and Nature, and one each to Clarkesworld, Brain Harvest, and Polluto. Of these, four have been published.

I also completed my first novel revision this year (which I will talk more about tomorrow).

In case it’s not obvious, my new productivity this year is largely a result of me moving to California and having to put less time into my job (I work long-distance now). I think that last year I pretty much hit the limit of what I could do with a full-time office job (I was writing about 2 hours a day). Now, I still have many 2-hour writing days, but I also have 4, 5, and 6 hour days (which I never had before).

I think the best things to come out of this year were two writing techniques that I’ve already discussed: one-week novel writing and iterative short story writing. One week novel writing is great because it only takes a week…and then you have a novel.

But iterative short story writing is what has really revolutionized my writing. Because I rewrite each story 3-5 times now, I’ve stopped writing a number of different kinds of bad stories. The most notable of these is the story that sort of slinks along for 3,000 words and then quickly wraps up in a way that’s both abrupt and predictable. Now, I take the time to figure out what my story is actually about. I don’t settle for the first ending (or beginning) that occurs to me.

This has resulted in a new way of thinking about writing difficulties. Now, when I am having trouble with a story, I don’t spend time trying to think it through (which was often a waste of time, since stories don’t come from the thinking parts of the brain). Instead, I just write my way through it. My cognitive input in stories is limited to discrimination: it’s just me saying, over and over again, “This doesn’t work,” until I finally write something that does work.

I don’t think that the resulting stories are a quantum leap better than the ones that I was writing before (although these stories are never as awful as the worst of what I wrote before). However, I do think that I had reached a plateau with my old technique. My new technique will eventually result in stories that are much better than anything the old technique could’ve produced.

My concern for most of this year was structure. In the upcoming year, I think I want to focus more on tone and language. My language feels too thin and flat to me. When I love some other author’s story, I usually love it from the very first sentence, because that sentence distills down everything that is good about the story. I don’t think that people get that feeling very often from my own stories. I want each of my stories to construct its own dreamscape and to describe that dreamscape using its own rhetoric.

• 600 – March 17, 2011 (seven months ago)
• 500 – June 22, 2010 (fifteen months ago)
• 400 – September 13, 2009 (two years ago)
• 300 – August 8, 2008 (three years and two months ago).

Clearly, this is an accelerating pace (which is due, mostly, to increased submissions volume). At this rate, I can expect 800 to come in around 5-6 months.

Saleswise, this has been my best century so far. From rejections 501-600, I sold exactly nothing, but from 601-700, I’ve made 5 short story sales (3 of them at professional rates), so that’s definitely something.

Every time I make this post, I am somewhat astonished at these ever-growing statistics: 105 stories of mine have gotten at least one rejection, and 165 markets have rejected at least one story of mine.

I feel pretty good about where I’m at, and I have reason to believe that my next century will be even more successful than the last one. However, I am looking forward to the day when my rejection rate slows down, not because my productivity has decreased, but because editors are buying my stories at a rate sufficient to slow my submissions volume (since frequently-rejected stories are better for submissions volume than quickly-accepted ones). It will be nice to reach a day when years–multiple years–pass between rejection centuries.

For me, the things I am anxious about are usually the things that I can only somewhat control. Things that are entirely out of my control don’t tend to worry me. And things that are fully within my control also don’t worry me. It’s the in-between things that are horrible. That’s why one of my biggest fears is getting into a car crash (because it’s something that can only be averted by constant vigilance and constant suspicion).

Similarly, good stories are built out of blind intuitions that are ruthlessly subjected to second-guessing. For long periods of my writing career, I haven’t practiced the rigorous quality control that was necessary. A few weeks ago, I wrote a story so bad that it made me ashamed (luckily, no one has, or will ever, see it). It’s not that the story would’ve burned out the eyes of an editor, it’s that the story was worse than what I could do, and there was no reason for me, at my skill level, to have written something of that quality. Halfway through the story, I could sense that it was not what I wanted it to be, but I finished it anyway, out of momentum.

Now, most writers would say, “Don’t worry about writing a terrible first draft. You can fix it in revision.” But I know better. For me, once a story is done, it’s done. I can cut it down in revision. I can tamper with its balance or heft. But I can’t reinvigorate its rotten core. Revision, for me, can bring out only limited quality improvements.

So I lay awake that night, thinking, “What can I do to avoid writing stories that are this awful?” And while I was lying awake, I came up with what I think is a truly great writing process.

For years, I’ve been hearing about how typewriter-era writers were so great because they had to physically retype the entirety of each draft and, in doing so, transform every sentence and paragraph of it. For a time, I even experimented with doing the same thing, but I found it to be of limited worth since I would just stare at the last draft in another window and slavishly retype it (except for changes in a few places). It was not a transformation, the changes in the end amounted to nothing more than what I would have done during a normal revision.

But my new writing process was a simple variation on this typewriter style redrafting, except instead of looking at the previous draft while I retyped, I would start fresh, and just start writing the story again. The previous version of the story would be nothing more than a very detailed outline held entirely in my memory. As I wrote, I would be actively re-imagining every word of the story.

So far, I’ve written two stories using this method. For the first, I wrote the first 1000 words of the story. Then on the second day (without looking at the first day’s production), I started over and wrote the first 2500 words of the story. On the third day (with only small glances at the first day’s output), I started over and wrote the first 4200 words of the story. On the second day, I started the story in a different place. On the third day, I made fairly major adjustments to the main character’s motivation (and in doing so, changed the expected ending). On the fourth day, I was so ridden with the anxiety at starting over again that I just started off where the previous day had left off and wrote straight through to the end (another 4000 words). However, I was extremely pleased with the story that resulted.  I ran it through a critique group, and found that it won’t need that much revision.

For the second story, I wrote 500 words the first day, then started again on the second day and wrote the first 1900 words. Then I started over the third day and wrote 2500 words in order to complete the story. Again, my conception of the story changed significantly during each rewrite. Yesterday, I revised that story and sent it out. Again, I felt that it was about as good as it could be.

It’s an interesting technique. Oftentimes, I would struggle to recreate a passage from the previous draft, and feel that in the current draft I had produced a much-inferior replica. However, after comparing drafts, I usually found that the newer passage was better.

In the finished stories, I didn’t have the sense of gappiness that I often get from my stories, where some initial conception of the story was abandoned halfway through and then the hints of that conception were excised in a way that left scars. Oftentimes, I’ll feel (in my revised stories) that the paragraphs don’t transition smoothly, but I won’t know how to fix it.

I also feel like I am finally treating my subconscious with some level of respect. In a previous entry, I wrote about my writing process (writing dozens of beginnings in order to find one story worth writing). But I had never felt satisfied about how I would spend days writing these terrible, boring story fragments and then, when  I was finally presented with something worthwhile, I’d blow through it in one or two days. Now I feel like I spend the right amount of time and effort on these stories. Maybe there is a puritan strain in me. Maybe I just feel like if I don’t suffer to produce something, then it’s not worthwhile.

And there is a kind of suffering to this process. Oh, it’s not breaking rocks in the hot sun, but it is harder than what I was doing before. When writing a story straight through, it gets easier after about halfway through. I know how it’s going to end, and I just need to get there.

When rewriting from memory, it gets harder. It’s hard to struggle to write something that came easily the day before. It’s hard to keep forcing my imagination to work, long after it feels like it should shut down.

But it’s worth it.

So yeah, those are the kinds of rewards that anxiety can give you. Sometimes I read a blog post like this excellent one by Tobias Buckell (which approaches writerly anxiety from a different angle), and think, “Man, I need to stop worrying about all these carrots and sticks. I need to just sink down into the adventure of the writing process. I need to focus on saying what I need to say, and just getting it down there. The destination is less important than the journey.”

And that’s fine. But the destination influences the journey quite a lot. If all I cared about was writing for fun and companionship, then I would just put everything up for free on the internet. I wouldn’t care about quality. I’d probably write terrible fan-fiction or something.

If all I cared about was writing for myself, then I wouldn’t subject myself to even the possible of rejection. I’d write in my journal. It’s worrying about the reaction of that wispy, near-fictional reader–someone like you–that drives me to produce something that might be worth reading.

But…I am going to keep trying to find a way to internalize that voice in a less physiologically and emotionally destructive way. Sometimes I think that what I need to do is think of writing in more spiritual or abstract terms. I am not trying to please an actual reader. I should instead try to conform to some Platonic ideal of quality that can only be approached asymptotically. Then this writing gig would not be a struggle to please an actual person; it would be an internal odyssey. It would be entirely under my own control, and hence less nerve-wracking.

Yeah, sometimes I think that, but then I gag on on the New Ageyness of it. Still, though, that’s probably what I’ll end up believing, someday.

Because when you say you’re not that great, people will believe you. And even if you think you’re not that great (and I am far from thinking that), it doesn’t help you for other people to think so too.

The worth of self-deprecation is mostly social. We don’t like it when other people are arrogant and have a high opinion of themselves. We want people to like us, so we take pains to avoid being seen as arrogant. And that’s the right thing to do in social situations, when it’s more important to avoid annoying people than it is to impress them (like when you’re talking to your family).

But most of the occasions on which we talk about our work (whatever that work might be) are not social occasions. Insofar as you’re my readers, you’re not my friends. My responsibilities towards you are different than if we were all sitting around the house together. My responsibility is to provide you with some pleasure, and to gain your regard in return. In that kind of relationship, I think that the risks of being annoyed by possible arrogance on my part are lower (though not entirely gone), and that the costs of self-deprecation are higher (because you have fewer friendly feelings towards me to inflate your opinion of my work).

In this regard, I think its part of the performance for me to at least pretend that I think my words are worth your time. Because if it’s not, then what the hell am I doing?

I think that we should all strive to be one of those people who skates by on confidence and braggadocio (even if, in my case, that confidence is backed up by some solid talent).

You know the people I’m talking about, right? They’re the ones who exude a great deal of confidence in themselves, and, in doing so, achieve a reputation that is disproportionate to their accomplishments. That’s because people don’t spend very much time or effort trying to make accurate judgments about other people. Most of the time, they’re just willing to take your word for how much your worth (although that level of worth is, of course, giving a floor and a ceiling by your overall place within society).

There are two counterarguments here. The first is that even promotional arrogance can sometimes annoy people when it starts to call their own judgments into question. If I said, “My novel is better than the Windup Girl and you guys were fools not to give it every prize”, then people who disagreed with me might feel like I was being a huge fool.

But I don’t think that’s a big deal. There are writers with massive, outsized egos out there: writers like V.S. Naipaul and Harlan Ellison. For their fans, that’s part of their appeal. And that massive ego often causes otherwise uninterested people to give them a shot (I would not never have read a word by V.S. Naipaul if he was even slightly less bombastic). Basically, any publicity is better than no publicity. Even people who disagree with a writer’s brag usually have to read their work in order to do so. It’s better to be read and hated than not to be read at all.

I think the more salient counterargument is that sometimes self-deprecation is merely the outward expression of a person’s unwillingness to be satisfied with the things in their work that are not up to their personal standard.

That unwillingness is very important, and it’s a skill that writers have to greater or lesser degrees. There are a large number of writers who are not very self-reflective about their work (i.e. they think their own work is awesome even though few others would agree), and because of that, they never improve.

Being able to make accurate assessments of one’s own work is something every writer should probably develop, but I don’t see any reason to pollute your potential audience with that self-awareness. What you want is for them to be totally clueless and to think you’re the greatest thing since the invention of ice cubes.

I’ve been entering this contest for like six years, and have never gotten much love from them (in addition to finalists, they also have semifinalists and I’ve never even been one of those). And with my latest publication in Nature, I became ineligible for the contest, which was kind of a relief, because they take a long time to get back, and I was sort of feeling like I was never going to sell to them (they have a reputation for preferring very adventure-oriented stories, I guess). But the story I sent in right before my Nature publication is now one of 8 finalist for this quarter (out of whom the 3 winners will be chosen by a panel of judges). In fact, my first words to Joni Labaqui, the contest administrator, after she called me (I was at a Labor Day barbecue in a vacant lot in Oakland) were that there was a problem because I was no longer eligible for the contest and I had been going to withdraw my submission but I couldn’t figure out how and anyway I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to win. We sorted it out and she said that this entry, at least, was still eligible since I had sent it prior to my publication, So this is pretty nice. I’m glad to know that I’ve somehow, over the years, managed to become a creditable beginning writer.

But there is something very compelling about the statement. It’s not very clear how one is supposed to become good at writing stories. And everything is even more muddled because each new writer is not just supposed to write good stories. He or she is also supposed to do something new and distinctive that will make their stories worth reading.

And it’s made more frustrating because writers tend to be people who read a lot, and people who have high expectations for stories. But those same expectations prove to be our downfall when we try to write our own stories, which inevitably (for a long time) fail to be as good as even the worst piece of dreck we’d ever deign to read if it was being put out commercially.

It’s very confusing to have such a clear idea of what is good and what is bad, and to have no idea how to put that paradigm into action. It’s like having a kind of aphasia: the words come out all askew and we know they are askew but can’t do anything about it.

That’s why for many writers (include myself), those one million words of crap are such a talisman. On the face of it, the number is ridiculous. For some people, the first thing they write is perfect and sells a bajillion copies. Other people write for decades and far exceed a million words and never produce anything worthwhile. Writing a million words does not make you a good writer, per se. It is the things that often happen during the course of writing a million words–the epiphanies, the adjustments, the compromises, the aesthetic judgments, and all the other little bits of learning and soul-searching–that make you a good writer. Some people can do those things before they type their first words. Some people can never do them.

We all know that something needs to change. We know that if everything was right, then we’d be writing better stories. And we know that if we stay the same, then we will never write those stories. But we cannot simply will ourselves to change.

Most of us just don’t know the things we need to do in order to become good. We don’t even have a clue what type of things they are. We don’t know whether we need to change our attitude, or our lifestyle, or our viewpoint, or our surroundings, or what….we don’t know whether we need to move to a different state or whether we need to become Buddhist or whether we need to stop revising so much or whether we need to eat less junk food or whether we need to stop drinking or whether we need to cut loose from everything or whether we need to forgive our 2^nd grade teacher for saying that we were stupid. And even after we do the thing we needed to, we will likely have no idea that the thing we did was so necessary.

Writing a million words is a much easier concept to grasp. It’s a sort of shorthand. We know, intuitively, that writing a million words will be very hard and will take a long time and will likely ram us again and again up against the things that make our writing so terrible, and will force us, through sheer frustration, to unconsciously destroy those obstacles.

I think that this goal meant more to me than it does to most writers, because I believed in it very strongly but I also felt that I would never reach it. During my first year of writing, I wrote about 70,000 words. Each subsequent year, I wrote fewer words. After five years of this, early in 2009, I calculated that at the rate I was going (about 55k words a year), it would take me another 13 years to reach one million. I’d get there right around my 36^th birthday (at the time I had just turned 23, and right now I am a few months from 26)

This drove me to despair. I had already made my first pro sale by then, and I hoped against hope that the million words was just a rough guideline and that I was ahead of the curve. I’d been hoping for years that I was ahead of the curve, and that great professional success was going to come me earlier, and with less work, than it did for other people.

But I was never satisfied with that hope, because I knew that there was no reason I should be ahead of the curve. I knew that I wasn’t doing the things I needed to. At that point, I only had a glimmering of what those things were, but I knew I wasn’t doing them.

Well, that was two and a half years ago. I’ve made changes in my life that were unimaginable to me back then, and I’ve hit my goddamned millionth word.

Of course, I know that there’s still much more work left to do, and I still have no idea what that work is.

Anyways, I spent today starting and completing my 140^th short story. It is 500 words long, and I wrote it just so I could end squarely on a million. I spent the rest of my allotted writing time making these pie charts. The first breaks down my million words by type. As, you can see, the largest category is completed short stories, as measured by their wordcount. But the second largest category is revision. This is basically just the difference between all the measured word count in my spread sheet (the totals of my novels, stories, fragments, etc.) and my total daily word count (in which I give myself somewhat arbitrary word counts for revision).

The second pie chart is a breakdown of my word count by year. As you can (sortof) see, if I had continued on the same writing pace as I had set during my first five years, today I would be somewhere around my 428,000^th word.

P.S. I didn’t actually write my millionth word today. I wrote it on Friday. I just delayed this blog posts because no one reads blog posts on Friday evening (no one except NERDS)

But then I wrote a novel in 8 days (and, including revisions and other short story writing, that means I wrote 100,000 words in July alone). So, as of today, I have written more words this year than I did last year, and could very well break 400k for this year.