Write. Submit. Repeat.

I used to write a lot when i was a kid. At school, it was the only thing I was any good at or had any interest in. I even won 5 old Irish pounds in a school writing competition when i was nine or ten. (There were a lot of Chomps, Tangy Bars, and Cadet Cola bought that day. If you're unfamiliar with Cadet Cola, and would like to replicate the taste experience, leave an open bottle of Coca Cola sitting out for a week, pop it in the fridge for half an hour, and enjoy!) After this early, heady success, my fledgling writing career stalled somewhat. I say 'Stalled', what I actually mean is it malfunctioned irreparably, got towed away to the scrap yard to be crushed into a small cube, and was left to rust and rot under a pile of broken washing machines and fridge freezers.I still had a love of reading, but the drive to write had deserted me. I left school early, got a job, left home, moved house several times, moved country, moved back.Occasionally, the idea of writing a novel would return to me. A couple of times I started, got a few pages in, was overwhelmed, and quit.My childhood copy books and teenage/early twenties A4 pads were unceremoniously dumped in the bin. I hadn't the confidence or drive to pursue it further. I hadn't the time either; had to work the nine to five to fund the weekend drinking. Priorities!It wasn't until a few years ago that i decided to have another go, and a massive factor in that was the encouragement of my other, better half, Cara. She had the confidence in me that I could never muster myself and pushed me to at least try. I put pen to paper and, to my surprise, had a lot of fun.Those first couple of nights produced eight hand written pages, and when I decided I was going to properly go for it, I procured a second hand laptop loaded with Word. Two years, at the age of thirty, I had my novel, 'Semianimus'. The next step was submitting it, another task that i would have shied away from were it not for Cara's encouragement and enthusiasm. Semianimus is a zombie novel. I hadn't written it in an attempt to jump on the undead bandwagon that was rolling around at the time. I hadn't intended for it to be read by anybody but me and my partner.But submit I did, and i soon found out that zombies were not selling that year! I received mostly generic, stock rejections. Every personalised rejection i got stated that it was because zombie fiction had been done to death, but a lot of them did say that they liked my writing and invited me to send them something else in the future.One Editor, Jonathan Raab from Muzzleland press, invited me to submit a story for a collection they were putting together called 'High Strange Horror'. I wrote a new story...and it got rejected. I was dejected, to say the least. Then he got back to me to encourage me to have another go. I took a few days off work, locked myself away, and in a haze of coffee and cigarettes, i wrote 'Púca', a story based on the creatures from Irish legend. It was accepted, and became my first published work. I was blown away. How the hell could something i wrote be fit for publishing? I had a hard time seeing it at the time, but it gave me the confidence to carry on.I self published Semianimus on Amazon, and while it hasn't exactly set the world alight, it's there, and it's mine.This week i found out that a short story i wrote will appear in the Halloween edition of online horror magazine Yellow Mama, which I am over the moon about. It was the same thing this time around too; I submitted a story, they liked it but it wasn't a good fit, they asked me if I'd like to try again. I did and they liked it, but didn't like the ending. After stewing for a day in my stubborn way, I looked at the e-mail again, looked at the story again, and saw exactly where they were coming from.I changed the ending, doubled the size of the story, fleshing it out and giving it the fighting chance I had denied it in my haste to finish. And it got accepted.I have a few more short stories I'm waiting to hear back on, and my second novel is coming along nicely. I have learned not to rush things. Be patient and send your work out in it's best form. And if at first you fail, try, try again. And again, if needed. Oh, by the way, if anyone cares or remembers my last post, I am still off the smokes. 19 days, and still going strong. Thanks for reading, Chris

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