A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.
I’m not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.
That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me.
My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.
When I’m not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I’m not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I’m reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.
Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.
If you write, one of the questions you’re always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer.
It took me about 12 years to reach my million-word mark. The challenge now is to continue to challenge myself.
When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.
Once you’ve invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story’s grown to around a half-million words and can’t be written as anything less than a trilogy.
One of my great passions is the collection of historical trivia.
There is nothing that compares to an unexpected round of applause.
I’ve read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.
Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.
The money can be decent, but I really don’t recommend the work-for-hire route as an entry into publishing. Too many things can go wrong.
I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I’m dodging bullets and gasping for breath.
Editors of open anthologies actively seek submissions from all comers, established and unknown. They are willing to read whatever the tide washes up at their feet.
I’m dense when it comes to discouragement.
For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.
I write sets of books, but I’ve also written a lot of orphans.
I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I’ve never been able to sell. I’m known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre.