Your First Time...

With a thread title like that, how could I not look? You're so cruel.

That aside, and the fact that I don't do novels, I agree that inspirational stories of first publication help keep us afloat.

A friend suggested I start freelance writing after I'd been working in another profession for several years. I have no degrees related to writing or journalism or the English language.

I studied the industry of freelance writing for nine months before I submitted even my first "letter to an editor" (which was published, but I don't count that now - though I did then! It was a meaty letter). But still, nearly a year after deciding to be a freelance writer, I hadn't submitted anything for paid publication. I was, however, working on two non-fiction book ideas.

Finally, in May 2002, I submitted an op-ed and it was accepted and published and paid for. My next published piece came that same month with the same paper. And then, I didn't submit anything except for two contest entries for seven months. In the eighth month, now Jan. 2003, I submitted to an essay contest and placed in the top 10, went to a writer's conference (connected to the contest, sponsored by The Writer mag) and got fired up. Four weeks later, I sent my first query (based on one of my nonfiction books) and got an assignment for four articles from one regional parenting publication. That was June 2003.

Fast forward, and I'm now a contributing editor and regular columnist for that magazine (I'm even comfortable enough to have said no to that editor for the first time ever, yesterday). And I've got a lot of other clips, credits, awards etc. AND REJECTIONS.

You just have to keep plowing through. There's a pattern here - it's called work hard, don't give up, get published. It can and will happen, but you have to make it happen.

I'm still working on that first novel being published (it'd be nice to finish it!), but I vividly remember that first short story in a national market. The genre I write in, suspense, had, at the time, only three markets for short stories (now only two), and the one I thought the best fit had rejected my story, which was a first-person account of a straight guy going to a gay bar in order to meet guys, go home with them, then rob them. Unfortunately, he chose a fellow named Dahmer...

I didn't hold out much hope for the other one to buy it, but dutifully submitted it. Six weeks went by, then I saw my SASE, looking a bit worse for the wear. It wasn't thick--I was expecting my manuscript's first page rubber stamped "Not for us" (which I'd received from this magazine before).

When I opened it, of course, there was an actual personalized letter making an offer to buy it at slightly above the going rate and asking for a short bio (which they didn't use, once they learned I'd taken a class from someone whose work appeared there fairly often).

And such a rush! It's hard to liken it to anything I've felt as an adult, before or since. The closest I can come is that junior-high feeling. You remember, the one you get the moment you realize for certain that s/he likes you and you feel almost high (in a way you don't yet recognize, in your youthful naivete). You smile for hours at nobody, and when you purposefully wipe the smile off your face, it returns unbidden. The only bad thing is you're too old to skip.

I've made a few other sales since then, but never felt quite the same upon hearing the news.

Maryn, whose writing career got way sidetracked

Um.. let's see. I worked on my book for about three years, off and on, not really knowing if I wanted to publish it or not. Not really knowing if it was publishable. I started doing research on what I needed to do; write queries, blah, blah... Once the book was done, I joined Critters and had some great critiques, cleaned it up and started sending it out.

Once the agent quest went bust, I rewrote the query (thank you Maestro) and sent it to a few small publishers. All of which I researched thoroughly beforehand. Three out of three wanted to read it, and one beat the others out to make me an offer.

Since then, I've written a short story and had it put into an anthology. But I was invited to sub for that. LOL. I came up with something suitable in about... three hours.
Now I'm cleaning up another book to sub, with the sequal on deck .

And I've sold a couple of freelance articles to places like Associated Content.

Wrote my first novel when I was 17. Sent it around to various publishers (these were the days when you could easily get in over the transom). Got some nice comments, but no takers.

A couple of years later it landed on the desk of an editor who was about to start her own literary agency. She offered to represent it. I, knowing zip about agents but sick of packaging the thing up and sending it out, said "Sure." She has since become extremely successful--a major stroke of luck for me, as I suppose it could as easily have turned out the other way.

She sent it out--nice comments again, but no buyers. After another couple of years she'd exhausted all the markets, and put submission on hold. I, meanwhile, fatalistic and lazy person that I am, had decided I was crazy to imagine I could be a writer, and resigned myself to a life of horrid day jobs. I basically made myself forget I had an agent and stuck my ambitions so far back on a shelf that they ceased even to appear in my dreams.

But my agent was more optimistic than I (thank goodness) and never gave up. Every time a new imprint opened or a new editor moved to an imprint where she'd already submitted, she sent my manuscript out again. One day, eight years after I'd written the novel and six years after my agent took me on, I got a call: an editor at Frederick Warne (publisher of the Peter Rabbit books, then an independent publisher, now an imprint of Penguin) loved it and wanted to publish it. It was one of the most surreal moments of my life, because I had completely, and I mean completely, abandoned hope. I really thought someone was playing a joke on me.

I wonder sometimes if I'd be writing today if that call had never come. I hope I would be, but given my temperament and the fact that I don't greatly enjoy a lot of the writing process, I think it's just as likely that I wouldn't be. I also think about the years I wasted pretending to myself that I'd never REALLY wanted to be a writer (because of course I was lying to myself--it's all I've ever wanted), when I could have been building my skills and writing other novels that my agent maybe could have sold more quickly. If I could change one thing about the past, that would be it. I truly regret that lost time.

So the moral of my story isn't that your moment may come, even if you've given up all hope. It's this: If writing is what you want, you should never, EVER stop.

- Victoria

I had been freelancing for about 6 months and had already published about half a dozen stories in regional magazines and newspapers when I sent a query to Parade Magazine (for those non-US readers, it is a national magazine insert to Sunday newspapers with a huge circulation). About two weeks later, the editor called me while we were eating dinner. I was so excited, I almost forgot my own name. I probably sounded like a blitherind idiot and I swear my feet did not touch the ground for days. That was when I really thought I could make it as a freelancer.

Thanks.

Great stories. Keep them coming. All you seem to hear about is how few wannabe authors actually get published. But some do, and why not us??

First time

My first time was with a girl named. . .oh, wait, wrong subject.

Writing. Yeah, that's it. Anyway, I don't think there's much that's inspiration about it.

First short story sale. I was a high school drop out with a rotten job and no prospects. Then I read an article wherein Robert Heinlein said he wrote his first short story becuase he had a bill he couldn't pay. I think it was his electric bill. I'd neve rthought about being a writer, but I also had bills I couldn't pay, so I thought, "Why not?'

That same week, I found an old copy of Writer's Digest, a magazine I didn't even know existed. I read it, went to the librray and found they had back issues. Checked them out, and got myself a grammar book because I didn't know a comma from a coma. I spent three weeks reading the WDs and the grammar book, then sat down and spent two days typing out a short story of, geeze, about 8,000 words. I mailed the first draft (Didn't know you were supposed to write more than one draft!) to a magazine called Far West, and they bought it. And paid almost as much as my day job paid in a month. I quit my day job. I sold two more short stories to different magazines over the next month or so.

First novel came about two months later. I wrote the first quick couple of chapters and mailed it to an agent. I knew nothing about agents, and I picked that one because I liked her name. (Though I did make sure she handled the kind of novel I wanted to write.) Thinking I'd have months and months to finish the thing, I neglected to mention that the novel wasn't finished. Imagine my surprise when the agent called me about five minutes after I mailed that chapter and said she wanted the novel, and knew an editor who needed one just like it to fill a slot.

I told the agent I really needed to write one more draft before it would be ready. Well, I did. I needed to write the first draft. She said fine, but she needed the finished manuscript no later than the first of the next month. I said sure, no problem.

Somehow, even though I had no idea where the novel was going, I managed to write the thing in three weeks, and I mailed it to the agent, she sent it to the editor, and the editor bought it about three weeks later.

I can't see much that's inspirational about it. That first short story came about not because I wanted to be a writer, but only because I was confident to believe that what one man could do, I could duplicate. . .and ignorant enough not to realize Robert Heinlein's case was somewhat out of the ordinary.

There was certainly luck involved with the agent. I decided to write the kind of novel I read most often, happened to send it to an agent who happened to know an editor who happened to need a novel like mine to fill a slot.

My first publication is one that I always forget to count as a publication.

Back in 2000, I taught special ed in a VERY small school with a VERY small budget. I needed phonics-based stories for my students, but couldn't afford to purchase any of the ones I found in catalogues. So I wrote my own, following the sequence of a phonics program developed by my college advisor. After seeing the reading skills gains in my students over the first six months of using my stories, I got in touch with my old advisor and told her about them. She was interested, since she'd been looking for reading materials to go with her program, and the company that she and her partner created to publish her program ended up publishing my 75 phonics-based short stories in two readers.

First time

Oh, and to echo Victoria, had that first short story not sold, or maybe the second, the sales were very close together, I'm pretty certain I wouldn't be a writer today. I never had the dream of being a writer, and while I found I love the process of writing, I have no doubt I would have moved on to other ways of making money had I not started selling immediately.

I'm neither fatalistic nor pessimistic, but I am the kind to move on without regret when something fails. There's always another idea, another interest, another way of making money and finding satisfaction.

I’ve submitted a few short stories and poems—a handful at most—and received nothing but rejections. In the meantime, I had a few novel-length stories I wrote for my friends, and they really liked them. So I chose the strongest one, New Frontier, and started the long process of revision. I had three drafts total, I believe, and roped people into acting as betas. It is erotica, so I started researching publishers. It seemed that e-publishers seemed to be the ones most likely to publish my erotica novel, so I sent it to the most successful one, Ellora’s Cave. After six months, (and reading the full MS), they said it wasn’t smutty enough and I should submit it to their new “mainstream” imprint. I figure it’s a half-rejection. So I submitted it to their new imprint and started checking out other epublishers. And waited and waited and waited. Finally, after six months, I figure, “It’s the same editors. If they wanted it, they would have said something.” I withdrew the MS from consideration, and submitted it to Liquid Silver Books in Sep, I believe. By November they requested the full MS.



I was in Italy when I got the news that they wanted to buy New Frontier. That was about six weeks after they requested the full MS. The first thing I did as a published author was visit the Spanish Steps and the Keats-Shelley Museum.

I first got published in the late 1980s writing freelance hardware and software reviews and feature articles for Computer Shopper magazine. It started with a phone call to the editor at the time, Stan Veit, who I found to be a gruff talking guy. I pitched my article idea and he said, “Sounds good. Send it in.” So I wrote my article up and mailed in the manuscript. I didn’t hear back for a long time. One day I went down to the mailbox and got a letter that looked like a piece of junk mail. Yep, the check for the article--$75. I was thrilled! It was that feeling of…this is possible. It is possible to get published!

Thanks maestrowork for this thread. It's just the kind of thing to get me motivated. Keep the stories coming!

My first publication was in Jan of 2002, I think...I guess the date doesn't matter much. I have been writing, literally, since I was about 7 or 8 years old. In grade 8 I had a horrible experience with an English teacher. She accused me of plagiarism. We had to write a poem and then read it to the class. She accused me and then made me go to an empty room by myself and write a new poem. She came in to check on me ten minutes later and I gave her the new poem. She read it, crumpled the piece of paper and chucked it in the garbage...then she continued to belittle me all the way back to the class. Needless to say I felt a little burned. And when you're that age everybody is impressionable. I never showed anybody my writing again until years later...and then it was only my future wife. After sharing only with her for about 16-17 years she convinced me to join the local writing circle. They have breakfast meetings once a month where they have editors/writers/agents etc come and talk and we mingle, etc. The first breakfast I went to featured the editor of one of the most popular columns in Canada...The Globe & Mail's Facts & Arguments. After the breakfast I went directly home and emailed the editor a piece I had written just a couple weeks earlier.

Sorry for the preamble...I was just filling you in on why it took me so long to get published.

The editor accepted my piece a week later and THAT was my first publication...Canada wide circulation. I could not believe it. I still don't believe it. And Mrs. LaFrance did not hunt me down to accuse me of plagiarism again! You have no idea the negative effect she had on me. Thank God for persistant spouses!

There is another piece to this first publication story. My wife, wanting to mark the occasion and totally embarrass me, took the piece to get it framed. She was telling the framer the whole story...thank God I wasn't there (You should have seen her...I was feeling just stunned but she was walking around like she had finally been validated...I think she would have had a parade if possible.). After she told the story she took out the page of the newspaper and handed it over to the framer. The framer called someone out from the back room and the two tell my wife how much the piece moved them...they read it the day before and one of them even cried. They were talking about it just a couple of hours before my wife came into the shop. <<<That was the best part of the experience...to know that not only did people read it, but they liked it and carried it with them?!

Anyway...too late to make a long story short...the framer did the job for free and I have my first publication sitting above my computer.

Still working on getting my first novel published. I feel like that is never going to happen. My fiction is not as strong as my poetry and non-fiction and I curse myself every day for that!

Sorry to ramble...you may continue!

Thanks guys, it's so good to hear such good news.

Please keep the ball rolling. This thread is an inspiration for me too...
:Cheers:

The long and winding road . . .

My first paid writing assignment was in 1975 when I submitted my first sports article for the local paper. The editor liked my work (with a little rewrite and some one-on-one mentoring) and I wound up getting the full-time sports writing gig. I was a sophomore in High School then. By the time I was a senior, I was the Sports Editor with two other writers working for me.

After college, I joined the Army where I became an Analyst/Reporter. Completely different style of writing, but still getting paid to write. Papers I wrote were read by Senior Officers and Senior members of the Government at various times in my career, (1984-1999).

In 1992, I started writing comics, self-publishing in 1994-95. Self-publishing in comics has much less of a stigma than it does in book-publishing and I got some fairly good reviews. Unfortunately, we just missed the second B&W explosion and got caught in the market implosion that shortly followed.

However, an editor had seen my book and offered me a chance to write a short story for an "Incredible Hulk" Anthology that Marvel was doing. Steve Roman and I did Assault on Avenger's Mansion in 1998, which was my first "professional" short story sale.

Now that I'm out of the Army, I work as a Tech Writer (which some days feels like I'm writing fiction. ). Not the type of writing I thought I'd be doing at this point in my life, but hey, it pays the mortgage and lets me go to SF/F conventions.

I was talking to my old editor one evening when he asked if I was interested in doing a fantasy story, since I had a degree in Medieval History. That's how I got offered the chance to pitch for "Gauntlet: Dark Legacy". Midway Entertainment liked my story, so that's how Paths of Evil came out last July (my first novel) and now the sequel Paths of Fear will be out this fall. The Gauntlet story directly led to my opportunity to pitch for the "Star Trek: Starfleet Corps of Engineers" novella that will be coming out next spring and so the story goes.

I'm still working on my first "independent" novel, which I hope to start pitching next year, but I'm finding out with media tie-ins, once you get the first work, the others slowly start to follow, especially once the editors find you can hit deadlines with minimal corrections.

About 12 years ago, I had a really bad date. The kind of date that's funny afterwards -- long afterwards -- but at the time is actually kind of scary.

I felt compelled to document this bizarre moment in my life, so I sat down and wrote a first-person piece of about 1200 words. It made several of my friends laugh, so I went to the bookstore, looked up the name of an editor and Fed-exed the complete article to him. (I had no idea what I was doing.)

The fates were on my side. I got a call from the editor the very next day, saying he wanted to publish my story in the next issue. He also offered me an assignment for the issue after that.

Eventually, he hired me as an editor on the publication and I've been happily avoiding the real world ever since

I still have a Xerox of that first check for $100.

I got my first freelance publication too easily really. It made me think freelancing would be easy = ) Getting gigs since then has proved a lot harder!

But there is this girl I used to be friends with. But she's always embarassing herself in public and it drives me crazy. Well, she was writing for a pretty well respected website. And I was like -- if she can do it, I can clearly do it. So I looked around for a website to write for. I was working in a comic book shop at the time and one of our regulars was a writer on moviepoopshoot.com (kevin smith's pop culture website). So I looked there. I saw what columns they had and then tried to find something to pitch to them. I noticed they didn't have anyone covering foreign films. So I wrote a crazy query and the editor was all for it. I've been writing there for over a year now.

So that was easy, but it made me think I could freelance. Later, when I got really sick and couldn't go to work anymore, I tried to become a freelancer so I could work at home (I certainly had mounting medical bills). Fortunately, I had months worth of clips from my regular column and that helped a lot. All because I thought I was better than a 'friend' of mine -- and if she could do it...

Now I'm having a blast doing entertainment journalism. I get to interview cool people and see movies for free (yea for press screenings!). But I have gone back to my regular job now that my illness is a bit better.

But freelancing, being sick and my actual job take up all my time so I've had trouble completing my fiction and getting it out there! Hopefully the next time someone puts up a topic like this I can talk about my first fiction sale.

I can't remember which piece was actually published first, but I vividly remember my first acceptace letter. It was from a lit mag for a short story. When I pulled the envelope out of the mailbox and saw the return address, I nearly fainted. Then I opened it and read the letter--and started screaming and jumping up and down right there in the road. It's a wonder the neighbors didn't call the police!

Anyway, that story went on to be multi-published (and brought in multi $$). The thrill of that first acceptance...there's just nothing like it. Except maybe for the first-time thrill of seeing your words in print, in a magazine or book you can hold in your hands, and reading your name under the title!

Although I've published a few non fiction articles, I'm a fiction newbie. When I was inspired to write a fiction piece last summer, I posted it on zoetrope.com. Needless to say, people totally tore it apart. However, I took their advice to heart, and began to work on my fiction writing skills. My characters began to sound less like topics of a research article and more like real people.
Recently, my first fiction piece was accepted as a serial novel on keepitcoming.net. {see link in sig. file} Although this is not a high status accomplishment, the fact that I have to keep it as a serial until my 6-month contract runs out, has helped me develop the plot.

My first was an unbelievably long time ago. I had been writing stuff since childhood and had been published (without pay) in a newspaper or two and a statewide magazine. Then, just days out of college, I wrote a 3000 word short story over a period of four days and mailed it out to a regional magazine. Some weeks later, I left to go into the Army (where I would spend the next three decades.) After I'd been in the Army a couple of months, I got a letter from the magazine saying my story was being held for additional consideration. After another spell, I got a check and galley proofs. Unfortunately, all this led me to believe writing fiction successfully was going to be easy. I took the inevitable rejections even harder than I might otherwise have, and tried to give up writing. It kept nagging at me. I wrote occasional stuff over the years, again without pay, for military publications, journals, newsletters, etc. Back in civilian life and working for a bank, I wrote or edited a good bit of commercial things for my employer, just as part of my job. Once I was forced to retire to take care of my invalid wife, I wrote a piece and submitted it to a national magazine; it was rejected. I sent it to the editor of the local weekly. He ran it as an op-ed piece and asked for more. I have continued, at a rate of two or three columns a month, for the past five-plus years, this time for pay. I have written columns for a couple of military journals and am currently under contract to provide one chapter of a large military history volume. I have written one "trunk" novel, am slowly working on another, and am in the final, I hope, stages of rewrite of a non-fiction work about my wife's battle with concurrent cancer and paralysis. None of this was ever as easy as the sale of that first short story tricked me into believing it would be.

Sorry to be so long-winded. I've enjoyed all the posts on this thread.

I've been writing all my life, but only seriously the last 20 years. My first time was in 1992 with one of those stupid poetry contests that everyone enters. It didn't matter that a million people was in that book. The fact that I could open the book and see a work by me made it all worth while, and drove me harder for real publication, which in my book means a novel published by a U.S. Publisher that requires an agent for submissions. When that happens, I'll let you know. I'm on the edge right now.

Great thread, Maestro! You have to post your story too, y'know.

I used to work at a movie theatre as part time projectionist. I became friends with the theatre manager, a wonderful lady named Sandy. A few years after leaving that job, the local newspaper called me at my day job. Apparently, they had been talking to Sandy about finding someone to write a weekly movie review column and for some unknown reason, Sandy had suggested me.

Well, I had dabbled with creative writing off and on most of my life, but had never been serious about it. Mostly daydreams of being interviewed after winning the Pulitzer, stuff like that. Now I was faced with actually penning a coherent 500 word critique of a movie. I submitted three examples as requested, and lo and behold, they gave me the job.

It may be a small town newspaper with a readership of less than 20,000, but I am truly proud to say that this weekend, I'll be filing my 199th consecutive column.

Though I have yet to make a fiction sale, since getting the newspaper gig I have written two novels and am nearly ready to start submitting #2 and start writing #3.

To this day I have no idea why Sandy suggested me to the editor of the paper. If I mentioned an interest in writing to her at any time while working for her, I do not remember. Because of her, my interest in writing was reawakened, and so every success I may have as a writer, now and in the future, I owe to her.

My first (and thus far, my only) publication was non-fiction -- a tech book published in 1999. Although not fiction, it was a thrill to "be published."

I'd been a technical writer for seven years before going into software engineering. As a programmer, I had some experience using a particular piece of software, about which the publisher wanted to put out a book. The editor found my resume online and sent me an email, asking if I'd like to write part or all of it. Imagine that!