Welcome, one and all, to the official inaugural post of the Bitter Quill.

I started this blog because I love writing. That’s a little simplistic, maybe, but when you boil it down, I love to write. I love the initial heady rush of creativity as an idea takes shape in my mind. I love taking the raw material that my imagination provides, wrestling it down and smithing unrefined creativity into words and phrases in order to, like some English guy once wrote, giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. I love it when someone takes what I’ve written and reads it, and smiles. Good writing makes me happy, and I like to think that I can bring that to others. I love the whole process, from start to finish.

I also love a paycheck. I find that without one, my quality of life tends to plummet rather quickly. As long as I can remember, I’ve always dreamed of being able to combine these two great loves: Writing and getting paid. So far, I haven’t had much luck. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve had a couple of minor roleplaying game credits and some nice blogging opportunities, but those are my career highlights thus far — and they haven’t earned me a penny. Right now I have a job where I can write reviews of books and movies and get paid for it. But I get paid per review, and it’s not a lot. I certainly couldn’t make a living at it.

A while ago, I decided that I was going to make a serious go at establishing myself as a real-life, honest-to-Elvis professional writer. My chosen field: Genre fiction, though I’m also pursuing other opportunities, specifically food-and-drink writing and general reviewing. Now, I could do this by myself, clattering away at a keyboard in a dark basement, cloaked in obscurity, but instead I thought it might not be a bad idea to gather unto me a group of like-minded aspirants and write about what we’re going through. Hopefully some of you out there in blogland will be interested in reading about our experiences and ideas on “making it” in the wilderness of the writing scene.

Today, January 15th, 2006, I’m putting a story of mine, “Claude’s Diner”, in a big manila envelope and sending it off to Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is one of the six-hundred pound gorillas of the short-form genre fiction world. Now “Claude’s Diner” is good — in fact, in my extremely biased opinion it’s damn good. I only hope that it’s good enough to be picked up out of the slush pile at the F&SF editorial offices and given a real chance.

Today is the first day of the rest of my career. I’ll be letting you know how it goes.