Hi, I’m Graham Storrs and I’m a writer who lives and works in Australia.
Graham Storrs in the dark
This is my writing blog and it documents my attempts to become a published author (and my occasional successes.) There are many writers like me. We have worked hard to learn our craft and to understand the arcane and archaic world of publishing. We are writing short stories and novels but having very little success at publishing any of them – especially for money. There is, in fact, little hope that we will ever succeed – the odds against it are fearsome. Yet we continue to work at it.
If you are one of this army of unknown, unpublished writers, I hope you will find things of interest here. For most of my life, I have written alone and in ignorance of the often-unspoken ‘rules’ of this game. Even today, when the Web is full to overflowing with advice and guidance on how to break through as a writer, there is so much that is inconsistent, self-contradictory, and just plain wrong, that the battle against ignorance and error is almost as hard as it was before.
But not quite.
The Web has brought one magnificent benefit that the pre-Web world could not easily provide. Now we can all talk directly to successful writers – perhaps the only half-way reliable source of information on what works and what doesn’t. It is only since I realised this and began to make use of it, that I have had any success at all in publishing fiction.
Yet most of the sites you will come across on the Web are by ‘insiders’ – people who are deeply networked into the writing and publishing world. It is daunting to read these sites and to see what a close community the writing world is. It makes you feel excluded and alone. I am not an ‘insider’. I’m struggling to get good information and make good connections on all kinds of fronts. What I want to do here is pass on some of the lessons I’m learning, as I learn them. Perhaps they will give you hope, perhaps you will hear things you didn’t know before, perhaps they will just give you the comfort of knowing there are others like you in the world.
