Oh! Hello there. Yes, this is very overdue, isn’t it?

The past month has just been wild. The book tour. Thanksgiving. Three or four vet visits. Two or three doctor visits for me (minor stuff, in the big scheme, don’t worry). Assorted holiday activities.

Oh, and this book I’ve been editing. And another book I’ve been poking at.

It’s still really weird to me sometimes to think I’ve had over a dozen books published. Me! That’s not even counting all the short stories and collections. It’s just… weird.

Which leads me to this (very overdue) ranty blog post. I’d planned to do it waaaay back at the start of November but… y’know, maybe it’s better now, as we’re all starting to think about top ten lists and how much we got done and all that sort of thing. Those can be fun, but I think they can also be kind of demoralizing. It can be rough when you’re trying to find time to write while someone else is pounding out three or four books a year. Heck, even once you’re kind of established, it’s easy to watch people talk about all those end of year accomplishments and feel like… wow, I didn’t do much at all, did I?

One thing it took me a while to figure out was that a lot of us have very skewed ideas of the time frames involved when we talk about “how long things take” when it comes to art and artistic careers. F’r example, when I first started out, people thought I was ridiculously prolific because I had four really solid books (and a bunch of short stories) published in less than two and a half years. But it actually took five years to write all of that. Likewise, right now it looks like it took me three years to write God’s Junk Drawer, since that’s how long it’s been since The Broken Room came out. But I actually wrote three books in that time. You just haven’t seen them all yet. And when those start coming out, I’ll bet you anything someone pulls out the prolific label again.

Like, okay, how often do we (as a society) dwell on how long it was since someone started writing until they sold their first book? Once they decided to do this, how long did it take them to get published? It sounds straightforward, but all of these are kind of tricksy points in time. Like, okay, my first published novel (Ex-Heroes) was written in 2008 but it came out in early 2010. And there were a few novels before that one, but they didn’t sell. For good reasons.

And the starting point? When did I actually start writing? Well, if we use when I started telling stories as an eight year old (using my Death Star playset as a slowly-evolving diorama of Star Wars figures), then from that to first published novel was about thirty-two years. But if we go off when I first actually writing things out on my mom’s typewriter and my first attempt at a “novel” (the often-mentioned Lizard Men From the Center of the Earth), then we’re looking at about thirty years.

Then again, we could go off when I first tried submitting stuff (some just-as-awful comic book “scripts” to Marvel when I was eleven) and then it’s twenty-nine years from starting to write to first published novel. But those were comic book submissions, not novels soooooooooo… I don’t know. Do we count that? Yes? No?

If we want to start at when I actually learned how to submit (whoa, publishers and editors and agents have guidelines? who knew?), then I guess we’re looking at about twenty-two years from “starting to write” to “published novel.

We could also consider the college novel as my starting point, so now it was nineteen years. Or if we use the after college/ moved to California novel it was maybe seventeen.

Also, to be honest, for about seven years in there (while I was working in the film industry) I put books aside and just worked on screenplays. Had some mild success, too, relatively speaking. But like with the comic book scripts… should we count that time? Skip over it? Half-count it as general storytelling?

It was in 2001 that I decided I’m going to go back and finish the after-college novel. Polish it up, actually turn it into something I could submit. I remember the moment I decided it. So if we go from there, it only took nine years to get from “starting to write” to “published novel.”

And, of course, in late 2006 I left the film industry to focus on writing. Fiction and non-fiction. If we want to use *that* as the starting point… well, it only took me two years to sell a novel once I put my mind to it.

See what I mean? Those points are pretty damned flexible. Depending on how we want to look at it—and the story we want to tell—it can look like my career took forever to take off or I did it without much effort at all.

This is true of most books. There are early inspirations and ideas, first thoughts, outlines, drafts. Once we mix in behind the scenes stuff—like the very random amount of time between writing and publication—it’s not hard for people to look very slow or very prolific. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally.

Y’see Timmy, we shouldn’t beat ourselves up over those end-of-year lists. I got a lot of stuff done. I bet you did, too. That’s what matters. Not how much someone else got done.

Next time…

Hell, next time is Christmas. And the Thursday after that is, well, next year. But I’ll still try to squeeze in one more post about… something? I’m taking requests, if there’s something you’d like to hear me blather on about.

Oh, and if you’re looking for a last minute gift– hey, maybe a copy of God’s Junk Drawer? No, no, Grandma will love it. Really.

Until then, go write.