Lessons Learned 101

There a lot of material showing up about getting past being a Neopro. I think I've given shouts out to Tobias Buckell and his series, "Getting Past Being Joeblow Neopro." It was how I found Tobias and he is not only a great source of info, a rockin' good writer, but a really nice person as well.

Merrie Haskell (did I get the name right this time, Mer? :) also links to another article "Common neo-pro mistakes: Wiscon panel 70". It's mostly notes, but some good points are in there.

I've been mulling around about "Lessons Learned," i.e. what I've learned so far trying to get published, and if I'm taking the correct lesson away from experiences. This really isn't formed fully in my head, so I'm going to flail around it for a bit, possibly over several posts.

One fear I have is that WotF will make a nod toward my "Robert's Thunder" or Weird Tales will accept "My Favorite War Stories." Why fear? Well, because I'm not really liking that trend toward military fiction. I'll need to explain why I don't like it later. So, should I take the lesson from that as "I can write good mil fic and should pour more effort into it" (which is where the fear is coming in) or should I look at other parts of the story. That is, with "RT" I try the "you're not going to see this comming until I'm into the action" trick. In other words, I try to intentionally get you to root for a suicidal-car-bomber. Well, it's a light tank bomb actually. With "MFWS" I work with not telecasting what comes next (okay, you know the POV makes it out alive, but you don't know so much about the secondary characters). My self-editing has also gotten better and I throw my characters to the wolves with more glee. Can I do those with other stories (fairytales, adventure SF, etc)? Or is my genius really military stories?

Anyway, like I said, it's just a rough idea of a concern. Maybe it's only goblin talk.