Chapter 8 - Dedication
In late 2018, I spent one hundred hours editing, arranging, typesetting pages, and designing a cover for Foreign Voices. I worked in my bedroom on a battered laptop so small I had to bring it right in front of my face to see the changes. All of the stories I included had appeared in magazines and anthologies, so I bundled them together and prepared to self-publish.
Christmas was coming.
Surely, all my friends, colleagues, and digital stalkers would want to buy my first book as a present. I'd be signing copies left and right.
It’s a lot to learn, self-publishing — compiling front and back matter, understanding Amazon’s ranking systems, keywords, eBook deals, reviews, royalties. You begin to realize why most publishing houses dedicate entire teams to book launches. But my team was just me, so, for about three weeks, I blasted through it all. Late nights, endless how-tos and instructional videos, and lots of trial and error.
Christmas didn’t really matter.
The more pressing deadline was that my father was dying of cancer the next room over.
I’d flown back to be there at the end.
To help.
The days went, and we lost all sense of time. The only way to track it was by how thin he got.
He never did talk much, my dad. Nearly 30 years in the navy.
He never even acknowledged that he was dying. Each day was just a mission with a new difficulty.
We watched quiz shows together, reminisced about our climbing trips, and looked through a coffee table book of military weaponry. Mostly, I buried myself in my own book project.
Two weeks before he passed, a proof copy arrived in the mail.
I went straight to my father’s bed and showed him, directing him to page 7.
I guess, like him, I wasn’t used to talking. There was no pre-prepared speech thanking him for being my dad. For the maths tutoring. For standing on the touchline. For leading the way up countless mountains.
When he turned to the page and saw the words, he froze. I watched him try and swallow a fist-sized lump in his throat.
When we locked eyes, we both said nothing.
We just sat there and listened to the echo of those three words.
“For my father”
Christopher Roy Charter
1950—2018
(Pictured in Scotland, 2007).
#unphiltered
In late 2018, I spent one hundred hours editing, arranging, typesetting pages, and designing a cover for Foreign Voices. I worked in my bedroom on a battered laptop so small I had to bring it right in front of my face to see the changes. All of the stories I included had appeared in magazines and anthologies, so I bundled them together and prepared to self-publish.
Christmas was coming.
Surely, all my friends, colleagues, and digital stalkers would want to buy my first book as a present. I'd be signing copies left and right.
It’s a lot to learn, self-publishing — compiling front and back matter, understanding Amazon’s ranking systems, keywords, eBook deals, reviews, royalties. You begin to realize why most publishing houses dedicate entire teams to book launches. But my team was just me, so, for about three weeks, I blasted through it all. Late nights, endless how-tos and instructional videos, and lots of trial and error.
Christmas didn’t really matter.
The more pressing deadline was that my father was dying of cancer the next room over.
I’d flown back to be there at the end.
To help.
The days went, and we lost all sense of time. The only way to track it was by how thin he got.
He never did talk much, my dad. Nearly 30 years in the navy.
He never even acknowledged that he was dying. Each day was just a mission with a new difficulty.
We watched quiz shows together, reminisced about our climbing trips, and looked through a coffee table book of military weaponry. Mostly, I buried myself in my own book project.
Two weeks before he passed, a proof copy arrived in the mail.
I went straight to my father’s bed and showed him, directing him to page 7.
I guess, like him, I wasn’t used to talking. There was no pre-prepared speech thanking him for being my dad. For the maths tutoring. For standing on the touchline. For leading the way up countless mountains.
When he turned to the page and saw the words, he froze. I watched him try and swallow a fist-sized lump in his throat.
When we locked eyes, we both said nothing.
We just sat there and listened to the echo of those three words.
“For my father”
Christopher Roy Charter
1950—2018
(Pictured in Scotland, 2007).
#unphiltered
This became my mantra. Story after story.
I never kept a writing schedule, but I’d say I put in 10-20 hours a week most weeks.
I would write on the go, in a coffee shop, libraries, at my tiny desk, at work, in bed.
Over the course of two years, I wrote probably 50 stories and published 20. Each story HAD to be different in theme, main character, genre, form, style. It was as if I needed to prove I could write with variety. And it wasn’t that my prose was looking for its natural home. Sure, I’m better at some genres than others, but all that matters is that I cover more ground.
I discovered how Litmags work:
They are generally run at a loss by passionate writers. Eventually, all of them fold, and you find few readers. Still, they do fantastic work giving writers a platform and helping share challenging stories.
In my experience, it’s all about fit and timing. If you want to get your story published, submit it to a magazine that perfectly matches the genre, ethos and style of your work. Most will pay a token amount (if anything). It’s also good to find magazines with editors who care about making your work better, and to find them before other authors mail in 50,000 submissions! Use platforms like Chill Subs or The Submissions Grinder to find outlets.
The other route to payment and publication as a short story writer is competitions.
These are ‘pay to enter’ opportunities which are judged by industry professionals, Litmag editors and often other writers.
It’s crucial to adhere to the rules, read previous winners’ work, understand the judging criteria and who the judges are. My tip is to save stories until the PERFECT competition arrives. I’ve won a couple of competitions and been runner up or shortlisted in a dozen or so. I learnt to search for emerging competitions and not to get lured in by the big prize money opportunities.
My biggest payment was 250 pounds for a competition on the theme of ‘dark-wild sea’. I already had the story written, and the judge agreed it fitted perfectly in the anthology.
Through all of my successes (and my many failures), I learned that established writers can easily judge the authority of other writers. They read your stories. They know the editors of certain magazines. They hang out in the same forums and attend the same workshops.
But newer writers and non-writers have no frame of reference other than a book. If you introduce yourself as a fiction writer but you don’t have a book, that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
And so, as my work moved towards helping English learners with their writing, I decided it was time to get some writing authority. At the end of 2018, I published my first book.
#unphiltered
