how Ken Liu rebooted his career
from an old interview, emphasis mine:
Luc Reid: Back around 2002-2003, you won the Phobos contest (may it rest in peace) and were a published finalist in the venerable Writers of the Future contest. Then things were pretty quiet until 2011, at which point your fiction, in the words of Aliette de Bodard, "was basically everywhere." What happened in the years between, and what so powerfully motivated you to pour new effort into your writing career?
Ken Liu: Briefly: I went to law school, started a new job, and kind of gave up on writing for a while due to a supreme act of stupidity. I wrote this one story that I really loved, but no one would buy it. Instead of writing more stories and subbing them, as those wiser than I was would have told me, I obsessively revised it and sent it back out, over and over, until I eventually gave up, concluding that I was never going to be published again.
And then, in 2009, Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson bought that story, "Single-Bit Error," for their anthology, Thoughtcrime Experiments (http://thoughtcrime.crummy.com/2009/). The premise of the anthology was, in the editors' words, "to find mind-breakingly good science fiction/fantasy stories that other editors had rejected, and release them into the commons for readers to enjoy."
I can't tell you how much that sale meant to me. The fact that someone liked that story after years of rejections made me realize that I just had to find the one editor, the one reader who got my story, and it was enough. Instead of trying to divine what some mythical ur-editor or "the market" wanted, I felt free, after that experience, to just try to tell stories that I wanted to see told and not worry so much about selling or not selling. I got back into writing-and amazingly, my stories began to sell.
(h/t sumana's blog. "There is no ur-editor. It's us.")
Luc Reid: Back around 2002-2003, you won the Phobos contest (may it rest in peace) and were a published finalist in the venerable Writers of the Future contest. Then things were pretty quiet until 2011, at which point your fiction, in the words of Aliette de Bodard, "was basically everywhere." What happened in the years between, and what so powerfully motivated you to pour new effort into your writing career?
Ken Liu: Briefly: I went to law school, started a new job, and kind of gave up on writing for a while due to a supreme act of stupidity. I wrote this one story that I really loved, but no one would buy it. Instead of writing more stories and subbing them, as those wiser than I was would have told me, I obsessively revised it and sent it back out, over and over, until I eventually gave up, concluding that I was never going to be published again.
And then, in 2009, Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson bought that story, "Single-Bit Error," for their anthology, Thoughtcrime Experiments (http://thoughtcrime.crummy.com/2009/). The premise of the anthology was, in the editors' words, "to find mind-breakingly good science fiction/fantasy stories that other editors had rejected, and release them into the commons for readers to enjoy."
I can't tell you how much that sale meant to me. The fact that someone liked that story after years of rejections made me realize that I just had to find the one editor, the one reader who got my story, and it was enough. Instead of trying to divine what some mythical ur-editor or "the market" wanted, I felt free, after that experience, to just try to tell stories that I wanted to see told and not worry so much about selling or not selling. I got back into writing-and amazingly, my stories began to sell.
(h/t sumana's blog. "There is no ur-editor. It's us.")