Blog Post No. 507
Back when Adventure Worlds was just a blog for some want-to-be writers to post stories as we practiced our writing, the original group was about on the same footing. Christian probably written the most up to that point on a separate blog, but none of us had anything published, self pub or otherwise. That was back in 2013, nearly a decade ago.
I was pretty content with just getting stories written and posted on the site back then. I knew that long term I wanted to get published (shorts and/or novels) but it was all future stuff that I didn’t worry about too much. Christian was the one who was eager to move forward. He announced early on that he was going to write a novel. I felt like I had to write one too, but it was way too early for me. I got maybe five chapters in (written by hand in a note book) before calling it a failure.
Eventually Christian collected some of his stories and released them as The Space Between Houses (a title I still love). I felt left out again and the next year, he and I collaborated on the anthology, No Light Tomorrow. It was at about that point that our paths started to diverge. We still did a lot of work on Adventure Worlds, writing, editing, and posting stories, but Christian started work on anther novel and I decided to do my first novella.
I had tried to write other novels since the first attempt, finishing one that still hasn’t seen the light of day (I’m thinking of you Pilot). But, after the success of No Light and the feedback that people liked the short length, I felt like I could adapt on of my shorts into a novella and I released The Thinking Machine. Since Christian and I were going to a lot of events and some of them annually, I felt like I needed a new book to sell each year. Thus, the Synthetic Albatross Novella Series was born.
I spent the next five years working on the series and dipping my toes in the waters of the Invasion Novel. In that time, Christian kept on writing shorts and working on novels of his own. Eventually, Christian started to get his short stories published in anthologies and he found a publisher for his first novel and novella.
It wasn’t until I decided to wrap up the novella series (for now) that I really jumped feet first into the Invasion Novel again. I had plenty of books to sell at conventions, what I needed was to move forward as an author. Since starting the Novella Series, I struggled to write shorts. My older blog posts are littered with comments that I was getting back into writing short stories, but it wasn’t until recently that I finally finished a few.
I mentioned to Christian that I felt like I was playing catch up with him and he said that we both just took different paths and that I wouldn’t have been able to write the Invasion Novel if I hadn’t done the novellas. It was a nice thing to say, and it was right. I have a lot of regrets when it comes to writing, but the biggest one is that it took me so long to actually sit down and write. When I get caught up in those thoughts, I have to remind myself that I can’t change the past, but I can do something about it now.
Christian just finished his review of the Invasion Novel and I’ll have some work to do going over his notes. (I’ll probably write a whole post about it next week). For now, I’ve got a short story to finish for an anthology submission. I doubt the story will be selected. The book is horror and I’m not a horror writer. The point is that I’m moving forward again and hope to start submitting to open calls as regularly as I can while finishing the edits on the Invasion Novel and after finishing the first draft of the next novel (which I think I started calling the Salvage Novel). If I keep plugging away, eventually something will get through.
Ben Van Dongen 