Is publishing desired?
There was a recent Pearls Before Swine comic (11/28/2007) that touched on blogging in general and how it related to writing. To paraphrase it, Rat thought Goat blogged because he was frustrated that he was not a good enough of a writer to get published.
I’ve struggled with trying to get published, which doesn’t mean I have a stack of rejection letters, just that I haven’t tried to get stuff published.
But, the kicker is that I have plenty of non-fiction publications from my academic career. And peer-review is brutal.
The other problem about research publications is that they invariably lead to trying to put 10 lbs of rice in a 6 lbs sack. I’m pretty sure I learned more about editing and page layout than I did about writing.
My natural writing style could be called rambling. After publishing enough research papers, my writing style is terse. I also tend to let the reader do some mental jumps to get points.
So as I write science fiction stories, I struggle with length. But I’ve come to realize that some of my stories are just right. For example, in Abduction, abduction, whaat’s your function?, I tried to write more, but I realized that for once I was happy with the dialog and adding anything else was fluff.
And I can clearly tell that both Batter Up and The Nanovampire have more to come.
Back to the title of this post, am I trying to get published or am I trying to write things which please me? I enjoy writing as a hobby. I also enjoy coding - most of the activity on Serialized Science Fiction has been writing perl scripts and CCS style sheets to present the stories.
But just as I don’t want to get paid for doing the web programming, I don’t want to get paid for the writing. And I don’t want to subject myself to whether or not some independent body thinks I am an author or not. (Which doesn’t absolve me from editing the stories…)
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