Write 1 Sub 1
My writing career has been fairly spotty. I’ve been writing - and trying to sell my writing - since I was a literal child. When I was about 9 years old I wrote a “novel” (I think it was probably around 12,000 words long - impressive for a 9 year old, but not a novel) that I’ve long since lost, which my mum helped me submit to Penguin. Obviously Penguin don’t take unagented submissions, and certainly not from children, but neither of us knew that in the 1990s. We packed a short manuscript into an envelope, wrote a cover letter, and sent it off.
I wish I still had the letter we received from them a few weeks later, which was a very nice note explaining that you can’t just send a manuscript to a publisher but also expressing not a small amount of joy at seeing a child write a book and try to get it published, and encouraging me to continue. I have no idea what happened to it in the intervening 30 years, and you don’t think about retaining things like that when you’re a kid.
These days “writer” is my job, though I work in tabletop roleplaying games rather than in fiction. I’ve said this many times over the years but fiction has always been my first love, and it’s always where I saw myself forging a career. I love my job and I’m very grateful that I get to do it, I love roleplaying games and everything that goes into making them, but I still feel the siren song of story.
The first time I decided to take writing fiction really properly seriously was around 2009 or 2010. I’d found my way onto the Absolute Write forums, I’d joined a local writing group, and I was suddenly surrounded by other people who loved fiction, were working on fiction, were talking about the craft and art of writing fiction. Writing is often an incredibly solitary task - I won’t say “lonely”, because I don’t ever really feel lonely; I like my own company quite a lot - and it was a real game changer to suddenly find this community.
At the end of 2010 somebody on the Absolute Write forums floated a year-long project called “Write 1 Sub 1”. (A quick Google tells me this was the brainchild of Stephen V Ramey, Simon Kewin, and Milo James Fowler). The idea was to emulate Ray Bradbury, who wrote, edited, and submitted a short story every week for a very, very long time. They wanted to imitate Bradbury, and invited everyone else to join them.
I gleefully leapt into the project, and it was honestly incredible. Some of the stories I wrote during the few months I managed to keep it up - I still didn’t know about ADHD then, or why I have this habit of jumping with both feet into something only to let it die shortly afterwards once it isn’t new anymore - I wrote some stories that I’m still very proud of, and that I still consider to be among my best work. (Part of that is because shortly after starting this project I simply stopped writing fiction for a very long time, so I wasn’t producing new work that could be better). I came very close to making some really good sales, and in hindsight I know that if I’d stuck with it my career would likely have taken me in a different direction.
I’ve had brief periods of coming back to fiction over the years, and the last time I decided to start taking my writing really seriously was in 2016 when I got my MA in Creative Writing. That also happens to be the year that I started playing tabletop RPGs again and began writing a blog called Loot The Room, which eventually morphed into my day job. It wasn’t that I dropped off writing again, as I have over the years, but that game writing became my focus and eventually my career.
And that’s been great, but I still feel the fiction itch. Working towards Loot The Room over the past almost-decade has helped me to create a really healthy writing routine, and it’s also shown me that if I do actually stick with something I can be successful at it.
This isn’t the first time this year that I’ve blogged about wanting to get back to fiction, of course. Back in February I started writing a novel and was blogging about it, but I had to put it aside because I couldn’t devote the time I needed to it. I had too much day job writing to do, and the way I work - in compressed bursts, starting and finishing a project in a day or two before moving on - doesn’t lend itself to producing a long piece of continuous prose like a novel. That’s a shame, because being a novelist is very much The Goal, but I also am very aware of my own limitations and of how frequently I take on too much and walk the tightrope of burnout. Novels will happen at some point, but this isn’t the time for it.
But I’ve been writing fiction again, and really enjoying it, in the form of shorts. In the past few months I’ve released a couple of new shorts (The Knight of Rot, a bloody grimdark thing set in the world of Mörk Borg; and The Interview, a reverse murder mystery ‘dark academia’ story) and I think they’re pretty good. I’ve also recently revised a novelette I wrote for the release of The Moss Mother’s Maze back in 2023, What It Is To Burn. It’s much easier for me to carve out the time for these shorter pieces, and so it feels like if I want to get back to taking fiction seriously this is the way to go.
Recently I’ve also been hanging out in the New Edge Sword & Sorcery Discord, which has a really great community of writers in it, and I’ve remembered how nice it is to talk about craft - and how much it makes me excited to sit down and work on fiction.
Which brings me back to Write 1 Sub 1. I can’t commit to a story a week as I did in 2010, but I can at least commit to writing - and submitting, which is the important part - a story a month. I’ll do some blogging about it as I go along, too, about what I’m working on, anything I discover about my process, all that fun stuff. And maybe I’ll post some fiction, too, though my goal is going to be trying to sell things to magazines. But I can look at some of my old, unsold work, and see if there’s anything to learn from that.
And with that all said I’m now going to stop blogging, and go and work on a story.