Starting Out

Hello dear visitors, readers and anyone who might wander here. You've stumbled upon the website of a speculative fiction writer. My name is Petr Janecka and I welcome you here. I hope you will like this little cosy place and will keep returning, enjoying what you read, commenting and sharing words.

I hope we're off to a good start. There are stories underway, both freebies to read and links for sold stuff. Currently, I have tons on my plate, my stories buffer is overflowing with unresolved cases. There is quite a number of novellas I'm not sure what to do with, so if they don't end up sold, I'll probably be posting them here.

However, everything takes time. I'm a fast writer, especially when it comes to writing tales I love, but that, along with revisions, editing and correcting, is about 10% of what a writer really does. I won't try to even estimate, but I believe most of the 90% is actually...

a very loooooong wait.

Yep. You send a story out and wait for a response. Many of you are probably familiar with how it goes, but for those who don't... With the invention of the series of tubes called the Internet, reaching out to editors and attempting to sell them a story became way easier. Especially for me it is a boon, considering I'm from the Czech Republic (how many of you know where it lies on the map?), where evil things dwell.

However, there are pros and there are cons. The aforementioned obviously means there are lots of people flooding the email gates. So the poor creature calling themselves the editor is... well, swimming in electronic manuscripts.

And then? What happens after the overworked person finally manages to rake through the imaginary paper and grasp your work?

Rejected, most of the time.

It's perfectly expectable though. Taking statistics into account, only a small number of stories gets published. So if there are hundreds of submissions... you get the drift.

Another problem is, I don't like short stories. I don't enjoy writing them. However, short stories are obviously (because they take shorter time to read) a better choice for editors and publishers. I like longer fiction. It's hard to squeeze a decent plot with decent characters decently evolving into just five pages. To me, the longer the better.

So usually, I end up with stories which can hardly be sold. Why? Well, I often wade into the novella territory. These ARE much harder to sell, because they're basically short novels. Now, trying to sell a novel, that's another story...

To be continued?

In other news, I'll put up a story soon so that you know what kind of stuff I write  :)