A friend recently tipped me off to a limited open invite for a shared world anthology paying pro-rates. The trick was that they wanted a writing sample of your best work, and, as much as my Writers of the Future winning piece still ranks among my best, the anthology is Sword & Sorcery, and “After the Final Sunset, Again” is magic realism.
So I went to the Trunk, meaning stories that I’d written before I decided to switch to writing screenplays and graphic novels. These weren’t “real” trunk stories that had made the rounds already and been rejected everywhere. Rather they were good stories that I decided not to waste time on submitting, because I had moved on from short story writing. I wrote six stories at Clarion West and never even looked at them again. Several stories I’d written since CW had only gone to one or two markets.
The closest thing to S&S that I felt showcased my best work was an Asian-themed Magic & Mechanica piece that was my fourth story at Clarion. I’d always liked the piece, and David Hartwell of Tor (that week’s instructor) said that if I expanded it to novel length, it would probably sell. Thing is, I’m a much better writer now than I was at CW and the story needed work. However, I found out from Steve that the call for submissions had an overwhelming response and that the submission window was probably open for no more than a day, so I stayed up all night and wrote a new draft, and darn it, it turned out pretty well (and won me a spot in the antho. Yay!)
That got me thinking about my other CW pieces. I was pretty down on myself after the workshop ended and hadn’t bothered to look at them again. I even went so far as to throw out the crtis I’d gotten. But I feel like I’m a good enough writer now to see what’s wrong with them and fix them. As much as I’m still committed to writing long, I’m probably going to polish these up and get them into circulation.
Looks like I’m going to be a short story writer, novelist, screenwriter, and graphic novel writer by the end of the year. I’ll be a slog, but with my fingers in so many pies, something’s gotta hit!