Closets and Windows

John O’Neill at Black Gate wrote me just after Christmas to tell me he was buying the most recent Morlock novella (a sequel to “Payment Deferred”), and I have been invited to submit stories to two different places. So naturally I have been blocked. This is a relative rarity for me: normally when I have time to write I can write.

Nothing is more tedious than a self-involved writer writing about writing, except for a self-involved writer writing about not writing, so I’ll try to keep this brief. But one of the things I discovered about myself (as I was trying to find out what the trouble was) was sort of amusing.

I wrote for twenty years in the closet, tapping out stories for an sf/f market that was becoming increasingly remote from the kind of stories I was tapping out. This was not bright, but it was not unintentional. I decided that, since I was obviously not going to make a living at this business, that I might as well write the kind of fiction I liked reading (call it adventure fantasy, sword and sorcery, or …) and consider publication (should it ever happen) as gravy.

Dim as it was, this method had some benefits. The relevant one: as I accumulated a mountainous pile of rejection slips, I was increasingly willing to drop the big one and see what happened since there seemed to be no likelihood anyone else would ever lay eyes on the results, no matter how disastrous the experiment.

And now that some of those same stories have been published and read, I no longer have the sublime confidence of failure. There is at least a chance, a tiny chance, that the stories I write will be read by somebody. Instead of writing in a closet, I feel like I’m writing in a window.

The nice thing about an inhibition like this is that, as soon as you notice it, it vanishes like The O.C.‘s ratings. I… I ain’t a-scared o’ no windows (said the Mac user nervily).