This December marks the ten year anniversary of my first short story sale, “Cthulhu Fhtagn, Baby!” to Weird Tales.
Since then, I’ve sold some thirty other stories to all sorts of great places, and thankfully I’ve gotten better at it. “Remembrance is Something Like a House” from the forthcoming Interfictions 2 anthology has as much in common with “Cthulhu Fhtagn, Baby!” as a trilobite has with Angelina Jolie.
I’ve worked largely under the assumption that if I write well enough, people will find and enjoy my work. My career gold standard will be when people say, “Ooh! A Will Ludwigsen story!” and that is actually a SELLING point.
In the meantime, though, my twitchy social skills aren’t luring in the readers, contacts, or mentors, either. I’ve been managing my career with all the nuance and focus of a blinded buffalo; nobody knows just what it is that I do that is interesting or unique or special, least of all me.
I’ve wondered where to find advice to correct this, and as luck would have it, Jeff VanderMeer somehow heard my call. (Can’t be too hard; he lives just a few hours away in Tallahassee.)
His latest project is an excellent book on managing a writing career called Booklife: Strategies & Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer. I’ve only started reading it yesterday and I’m only a third of the way through, but even if Jeff suffered a stroke and just wrote random characters for the rest, it is still an invaluable resource, right up there with my other must-reads for writers.
It’s full of excellent advice about career logistics, yes, but it never forgets (as so many other books do) that all the networking and huckstering in the world won’t redeem a book written poorly or cynically. You still have to pony up the art, however you choose to do that; Booklife helps you figure out the rest.
I’m sure this book will change my career, but I don’t yet know how. Keep watching here to find out.