Kris Ashton

This morning I received an acceptance email for a story of mine, ‘Blood and Light’. When it appears in an anthology later this year, it will represent my first paid publication in nearly two years. (I had a short piece appear in the venerable AntipodeanSF, but that’s a non-paying market.)

The period prior to this publication drought, ironically, was easily my most successful since I sold my first story back in 2005. During 2017-2018, I cracked Aurealis for the first time after a decade of trying (and that story, ‘Howling Mad’, was selected for Tangent Online’s Recommended Reading List), I appeared in Andromeda Spaceways for the second time with ‘The Larval Stage’, The Fiction Desk awarded me third prize in its annual ghost story competition for ‘Highway Memorials’, and I even found a new publisher for my novel, Invasion at Bald Eagle.

Then, almost overnight, the wheels seemed to fall off. Between mid-2018 (when Digital Fiction Corp agreed to reprint Invasion at Bald Eagle) and early 2020, I managed a handful of shortlist rejections on stories and a couple of full manuscript requests on a novel I had finished in 2017. I didn’t understand how I could go from nailing three hard-to-crack markets in comparatively short order to becoming unpublishable almost overnight.

The truth was, I had become complacent and… I was going to write lazy, but that’s not quite accurate. My second child was born in 2016 and between that, my wife’s chronic health problems and a number of other family issues, my head wasn’t in the game anymore. Although I didn’t realise it, I was coasting – expecting to achieve the same level of success without putting in the hours. And if there is an immutable law of writing fiction, it’s that you get out what you put in.

With my son a little older and some of life’s pressures easing, I knuckled down in early 2019 and began to write harder. This often required anti-social behaviour, another unfortunate reality of the authorial existence. Back in the day I used to do a lot of writing and editing on my train commute, but with those uninterrupted periods no longer available to me, I simply had to find time elsewhere. While ostensibly on holiday with friends in Queensland, for example, I wrote a long sci-fi story, ‘Bigger’. Just before the coronavirus lockdown I began a novel and, thanks to a hermit-like existence, completed it in just three and a half months – record time for me.

Little by little, I started to see the fruits of these labours. In 2019-2020, stories were shortlisted at a couple of pro-paying markets and I had a number of very positive rejections of the “this is a great story, it just doesn’t suit our editorial requirements right now” type. Sportsmen talk about ‘having the yips’, where something easy suddenly becomes difficult. For nearly two years I was the basketballer who couldn’t nail a free throw or the cricketer who kept edging the ball to the slips. I can’t tell you how happy I was to finally hit one right on the button.

‘Blood and Light’ has a zany and complicated origin story, which I’ll share once it is published. In the meantime, though, it’s just nice to be back on the field.