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Clarke stood on the dunes, watching the party coalesce on the beach. Over the horizon, and the grey swell of the ocean, lay Africa. Beyond their borders. Outside. Lands of suffering. A knot formed in his stomach just at the thought. He shifted his focus, tried to relax, and scanned the crowd for the familiar gait of his brother, longing to catch a glimpse of his face, but from a distance he couldn't quite resolve the features of the crowd. The wind blew hard off the sea, flicking his hair around his eyes and making the task more difficult. The exhibits, consumer products whose trails constituted art, stood on pedestals on the beach, the crowds floating between them.

My story Searching, Hiding, Leaving has been published in Eschatology, which calls itself “an online journal of Lovecraftian and apocalyptic flash fiction”. I’ll leave it up to you to decide how to classify my story….

"The city was half dead when I arrived, and a quarter undead. The undead didn’t seem to know that they were not alive. The dead were stacked inside banks in the hope that somehow they would vanish."

This is a post about confidence, but first of all I need to talk about Cricket, stay with me it's all relevant...

The England Cricket team have just beaten Australia in The Ashes Test Series, in Australia. This is a big deal because England haven't done that for 24 years. In fact it's fair to say that Australia have been a much better team than England for a long time. Yet this time something has changed: the English cricket team were really very good.

Even if you're not into cricket it's interesting talking about the psychology of this. How does a team change from being losers, to being winners?

Don't stop until the job is finished. Each Test match can last up to five days. The attitude of the English players at the end of each days play was fascinating, no matter how good a position they were in, the usual quote was "we've got a lot of hard work to do yet". Even when a match was won they never seemed satisfied, "we've not won The Ashes yet". (The series is five matches, if the series is drawn the holders retain The Ashes, so England only had to draw the series because they won it in England in 2009.) Even when they retained The Ashes, it was "We haven't won the series yet." They wanted to win. Everything.

It was about the team. Another feature of the player interviews was the continuous refusal to talk about themselves and instead talk about the team. Talk about how someone else did a great job, talk about how the team did a great job, talk about us.

Deep Rooted Confidence. England didn't win every match in the series they lost the third match quite badly (after drawing the first and winning the second comprehensively). However the last two matches were won by England extremely comprehensively. When talking about recovering from the defeat, England Captain Andrew Strauss said that they always believed they could win because they had deep rooted confidence. In other words England had such belief in their ability that they knew they were going to win, that the loss was a blip, that they could play better cricket than Australia.

So my question is this (yes, I've got to the point) do writers ever get Deep Rooted Confidence?

Personally, I constantly doubt my ability. I read my stories and think they're rubbish. I um and ahh about whether my story is good enough for the pro magazines. I worry that I'm not getting any better. I definitely do not have Deep Rooted Confidence.

Does anyone else? Is it even possible for writers? If so, how do you achieve it?

It’s the start of a new year, so I’ve decided to look back on 2010 from the point of view of my writing.

I’ve had a couple of successes, and hit some major milestones, but overall this year had felt a bit weak.

Success

On the success side my story The Rules Of Utopia was published in DayBreak Magazine, which was my first pro sale. Also, my story Together was published in A Fly In Amber. And I won the James White Award with my story Flock, Shoal, Herd. All three of these stories I really like so it was great for them to find a home or recognition.

Also an achievement, although it doesn’t feel like a success, was tackling my large backlog of handwritten stories. I started in September, and haven’t finished yet, typing up thirty stories so far.

Failure

The number of stories I submitted this year was the lowest ever, only twenty, a very poor effort. One of the things within my control is the amount of stories I submit, I should raise my level.

My production of new stories this year has also been very low, and those that were finished felt like a tortuous process. Writing does not appear to be getting easier.

The amount of time I spent writing has been lower than usual, for a variety of reasons. This is something almost within my control, or rather within my control to a certain extent, and so I should spend more hours writing.

I failed to sell anything to Print. This includes anthologies or print magazines. Maybe this milestone is becoming less important but I’d still like to see my work in print in paper.

Aims For 2010

• To work harder and get better. The harder bit sounds easy: write more hours? Perhaps. But it needs to be effective effort and I’m not quite sure how to achieve that yet. Which is frustrating because I thin getting better derives from working harder and effectively. I need to be productive not just churn away.
• Submit more stories. I’m going to try submitting one story a day and see how far I get. I’ll probably run out of markets or stories.
• Write some quality short stories.
• Sell stories to more pro markets. (Hopefully a consequence of the previous two points.)
• Start thinking about my novels again.

Is that enough? Are they too vague? Not sure, I’ll let them change as the year goes on, but that’s what I’m starting with.

NaNoWriMo, if you don't know, stands for National Novel Writing Month. It's not entirely clear which Nation this moniker stands for these days, it's probably The Nation Of The Internet or something.

I feel conflicted about NaNoWriMo.

On the positive side it gets people writing. It's hard to start writing: there's worries and procrastination and concerns. Most people need a push to get started, an acceptance that they can just write, then come back and make it better. I know I definitely needed that. My big breakthrough moment was when author Deborah Bosley told me of a friend of hers who wrote scenes, lots of scenes, then organised them into a novel after. There is much to debate about that practice, however I felt it gave me permission to write, any scene, out of order scenes, ideas. Get it out of my head and onto the page. And NaNoWriMo certainly does that, thousands of people write, start writing, continue writing, come back to writing, spurred on by the camaraderie of a collective effort.

However... Have there been many great novels that are 50,000 words long and took a month to write? I'm sure there are some, but I would suggest that it is a bit unrealistic to expect to write a novel in a month and for it to be any good. If that isn't the aim, then fine, but I'd hate for would-be writers to be suffering delusions that in one crazy month that was it. Perhaps most people are fully aware that the novel will take a lot of editing, a lot of work, after the initial frenzy? Perhaps there will be a few novels of genius in there. Perhaps I'm feeling bitter because I know too well that I could never write a novel in  a month? (It's taken me a year per novel for each of the three novels I have "finished".)

On top of my worries I have an aversion to following the crowd. It's organised, I want to be free to do my own thing. Revolution! etc. As an alternative, one year I wrote a piece of flash fiction every day instead of a novel (I know, what a rebel).

This year however, my writing activities in November are entirely consumed with an on-going task of typing up a large backlog of stories that I have written long-hand.

Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, I write stories long-hand in a notebook with whatever pen I can lay my hands on. I blame Neal Stephenson and Nail Gaiman. Whilst I was writing my third novel I got stuck. Which was a shame, and a surprise, as the first twenty thousand words came out in a NaNoWriMo style rush. In order to work around my brick wall block I started writing long-hand. After all, if Neal Stephenson can write the entirety of The Baroque Cycle long-hand it must be a good thing, right? And on top of that stories from Neil Gaiman of writing whilst queueing at the Post Office etc.  and the romanticism overwhelmed me. Perhaps not so surprisingly for someone who spends all day in front of a computer, I rather enjoyed it. I still do. I like the feel of writing the words, the pen on the paper. It gives me time to think. It's easy on my eyes. It's relaxing. And fun.

The downside of writing long-hand is that I then have to type them up in order to edit and submit them. The sensible solution I hear you say, is to do that once I have finished writing the story in my notebook, it's just the next step of the process. Well, yes. I don't do that. I blame Jay Lake.

A few years ago I decided to write a short story every week, for the entire year. Jay Lake said it was a good idea! And it was. A few weeks here and there I wrote a flash story to catch up, but mainly I wrote stories of a few thousand words. Proper short stories. Lots of stories. And when I finished one story I started another, I kept going. For an entire year. My rationalisation of this was that it would be like Prince recording lots of demos and then locking them in a vault for a year; when I went back to them I would be fresh and objective. And that's true, the problem being that I'm only just getting around to typing them up. The backlog has got so bad, that to track it I've started using an Agile Development tool that we use at work. Not so romantic now.

So that's what I'm doing now, and through November. Hopefully I'll have typed everything up by Christmas. Then I have to edit the stories, decide which to Trunk, decide which are worth working on. Already some of them feel very dated, but until I've caught up and assessed them all, I'll have the nagging feeling that there is a good story locked away in a notebook somewhere. I need a clean slate, and then I can start writing some new stories.

So will I give up writing long-hand? No. First thing in the morning, bleary eyed, writing in a notebook is a great, instant way to get some words down in the short time that I have (zero boot time!). And after a day in front of a computer, writing in a notebook is the only way I'll ever write anything in the evening. So, no. However it doesn't mean that I won't ever write on a computer, I'll just have to feel like it.

Good luck with your NaNoWriMo.