I got a couple of stories published, but the kind of money you were making for publishing a short story, I could see I wasn't going to make a living at it.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.
On the other hand, now that I'm not dependent on fiction for my income, I've been writing more short stories despite the fact that there's no real paying market for short horror other than Cemetery Dance.
I wrote a novel in my early twenties; I won a high school prize - my short story got published, and I got 50 dollars, which was a huge deal.
It's taken me 15 years to feel I might be able to write and publish short stories, and for the assiduous checks of the industry to allow some through.
I started off as a journalist when I was young and I did not get paid unless I wrote three stories a day.
Writing wasn't about making money. I wanted to find fulfillment in writing and telling stories, and that's what's driven me.
As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.
At 18, my first short story was published - I was paid a penny a word by a science fiction magazine. I continued to write, and five years later I published my first novel, 'Sweetwater.'
Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.
I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.