I’m interviewing Charlie Stross for the WELL’s inkwell.vue conference for the next two weeks or so — it’s free to read, and you can ask questions by emailing me and I’ll post ’em.
I suppose you could say my second writing career dates to about 1998.
I took stock of myself and found (a) one unfinished novel (I was 12
months in to it), (b) one finished, unsold novel with structural
problems (bits of it have since re-surfaced in the form of “The
Atrocity Archives”), (c) one short story sale in 1998 — and that was a
reprint of something I wrote in 1991. I was in my early thirties and I
realised that either I should give up, or I should get serious about
writing. I started by setting myself a goal of writing *and selling*
four stories a year, and a second goal of getting into the magazines
that get name recognition — Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF. Somewhere in the
preceeding decade I’d cross-fertilized a chunk of ideas between the
biological and computer science, and I’d also learned a little bit more
about human nature — enough to handle characterisation better than
during my late teens or early twenties. (Parenthetically: this is one
of the reasons why we often see new authors erupt on the scene aged
thirty-something — they’ve finally learned enough about human nature
to have something interesting to say about it.) So in 1998 and early
1999 I finished and sold “Antibodies” and “A Colder War” (which got me
into the Year’s Best SF anthologies), wrote “Lobsters” (which got me
into Asimov’s and onto the Hugo and Nebula ballots), completed the
novel now know as “Singularity Sky”, and got serious.