I've been lucky...

[sleigh]

For record-keeping purposes, I was looking back through some of the ancient magazine publication for some of my earliest stories. In looking at the Tables of Content from back in the mid-to-late 70s, I was struck that, hey, I've been lucky in being able to sustain a writing career for so long, even if as a midlist author rather than one of the 'stars'. There are so many names of 'up-and-coming' authors who were starting out with me, or who were further along in their career at the time. Maybe they'd sold a novel or two already. I'd see them at conventions or appearing in the magazines or even in award nominations and mentions, and I'd think "Man, I hope one day I'll be where they are..."

But they've vanished somewhere along the line. I wonder about them: did they lose the urge to write? Did they find that they couldn't sell their stories? What happened?

Yeah, a bit of judicious googling and I might be able to find out. But just looking at all the names I once knew and who appear to have disappeared into a fog of long silence makes me feel lucky to still be doing this...

Comments

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

Someone I knew in college, long ago, was a one-shot wonder--he'd written an SF story when he was an undergraduate, sold it to Analog, and then never followed up writing any other fiction, afraid that he had had only that one story in him....

A couple of writers whose novels I liked, I asked someone in editorial at the publishers they'd had, "what happened to?" and the reply was that their days jobs and other parts of life left the writers without time/energy to get any more novels written.

And then there are the people who lose the urge, for whatever reason, and those whose work for whatever reasons--lousy distribution, bad covers, buried by the publisher, wrong format/packaging, bad copyediting, changing audience tastes, lack of market appeal otherwise--fails to sell at the levels demanded by publisher/booksellers.