Skip to main content

The Hoops Writers Jump Through





"Lie-zee Sandai Arrffta-noon, Oi Got Nah Toym-tah Warree...!"

Well it's all right for some, snoozing the day away.  Unlike the rest of this household, I've been wielding the red pen on what was a 5,000-word story; so far I've cut out 500 words.  That's a lot of editing by my usual standards, but this may be because I don't write much sci-fi and School is (more or less) a sci-fi story.  It's a sci-fi/fantasy hybrid, really, destined for inclusion in Dark Tides. 

I was reading the submission guidelines for an anthology yesterday.  The requested subject matter sounded like my kind of thing.  The editors did not accept email submissions, and planned to pay $0.01 USD a word if they used a story, (which is not unusual, unfortunately).  So for a 1,000-word story they'd pay $10 USD.  At today's exchange rate, that works out at £6.33.  Deduct a third for UK tax, and that leaves £4.22.  Postage for a light MS from England to America would cost around £2, leaving me with £2.22 out of which I'd also have to pay for paper, an envelope, printing ink  - and at the end of the financial year, my accountant.  All this assumes my story would be selected by the editor.  If it wasn't, then I would have worked at a loss. 

All writers collect rejections like a church yard collects confetti.  I know a traditionally published (in magazines and books) sci-fi writer  - who I won't name! - who says his writing account is £2,000 in the red.  His earnings from being published haven't covered postage, stationary, travel etc.; costs accrued in the pursuit of his writing activities.

Now, creating a fully edited 1,000 word story usually takes me around six or seven hours - longer if it's slow going.  I'll be generous and call it six hours work.  The legal minimum wage for adults is currently £5.93 her hour, so the that amount of work should earn me a minimum of  £35.58.  Instead, being a writer to quite naturally loves to write, I'm supposed to happily and willingly chase after a few pence just for the hope of getting my name in print.

Bah humbug!

Share   Subscribe

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Cure for Aging?

"All that we profess to do is but this, - to find out the secrets of the human frame; to know why the parts ossify and the blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventatives to the effort of time.  This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood.  In our order we hold most noble -, first, that knowledge which elevates the intellect; secondly, that which preserves the body.  But the mere art (extracted from the juices and simples) which recruits the animal vigour and arrests the progress of decay, or that more noble secret which I will only hint to thee at present, by which heat or calorific, as ye call it, being, as Heraclitus wisely taught, the primordial principle of life, can be made its perpectual renovator...." Zanoni, book IV, chapter II, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first published in 1842. Oroboros keyring - Spooky Cute Designs The idea of being able to achieve an immortal life is probably as old as human life itself.  Folklore and myt...
15 comments
Read more

Remembering Richie Tattoo Artist's Studio

Richard in the street entrance to his tattoo studio in Liverpool. The vertical sign next to Richard is now in the Liverpool Tattoo Museum. Yesterday, my sister Evelyn, Richard and myself stood outside Richard's old tattoo studio and looked up at the few remaining signs, whose paint has now mostly flacked away to reveal bare wood. On the studio's window are stick-on letters which read, "Art", where once it boldly announced his presence as the city's only "Tattoo Artist".  I can remember him buying that simple plastic lettering from an old-fashioned printer's shop. This was in 1993, not long after he'd opened the studio and before he could afford better signs. After he'd patiently stuck them onto the glass we realised that from the outside the sign read "Artist Tattoo", so we had to carefully peel the letters off the window and have another go, laughing over having made such an obvious error yet worried in case we spoiled the letteri...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dear Diary...

Do you keep a diary? Why did you start it, and, if you started one then stopped, why was that? What sort of things do (or did) you write about? I ask as, as a long-time diarist myself, there is an interesting piece in The Guardian today which talks about one woman's diary habit, which she began at the age of fourteen. I started a diary around that age too, but destroyed it after my mother accused me of using cocaine.  A stern scene followed, with both parents perched ram-rod straight in their armchairs, while I was subjected to a heated inquisition. Where had I bought it, and who from? Didn't I know such things led to death and doom? I struggled to decipher their bewildering accusations, until Mum blurted out, "I read it in your diary!" To find my diary, Mum would first have had to rummage through my dressing table, obviously when I wasn't around to protest. Her intrusion on my privacy was assumed by both parents to be acceptable, and now, with this handwritten c...
Post a Comment
Read more