Breaking In

My September 2021 Locus Magazine column

When I was a baby writer, I obsessively collected career advice from established writers, reading books and essays and attending panels on “How I broke in” featuring established pros. It’s a testament to the irrational, burning desire to publish that I continued to do this long after it became apparent that there was nothing of contemporary applicability in these discussions.

I mean, it was entertaining to hear a writer describe how they’d sold their first story by typing it up, separating the carbons, putting the manuscript in an envelope and riding the C train all the way to the office of John W Campbell’s Astounding on 42nd Street, hurling the manuscript over the open transom over his door so it would be the first thing he saw when he arrived the next morning.

But John W Campbell died a week before I was born (and he wouldn’t have published me anyway because he was a cryptofascist). What’s more, transoms had been rendered obsolete by the widespread deployment of central air-conditioning. Also, I lived in Toronto, and I couldn’t catch the C train without first clearing US immigration and then flying to New York City.

I broke in anyway, nearly a quarter century ago, when Gardner Dozois’s Asimov’s became my first professional publication. By then, I was encyclopedic on the subject…