I’ve always created a soundtrack or playlist for each story I write. It can be just a few songs, or hours worth, played in a continuous loop the whole time I’m working. Inevitably the songs melt their way into my consciousness as I’m working, and ends up guiding or directing the story in various ways.

Lately, I’ve found instances where completely changing the soundtrack to a story’s composition has helped me to see it differently, has shifted the mood to make the story work.

The last story kicked off with a bunch of aggressive Killing Joke songs from the albums Night Time and Fire Dances. That feel worked for some of the more energetic scenes, but I was only able to get the right mood in the weirder, dreamier scenes when I switched the soundtrack to some long instrumentals by The Necks. Initially I only started play The Necks because they happened to be mentioned in the story from the beginning, but I found they really worked as a soundtrack for writing.

Right now I’m finishing up a story that seemed to call for classical listening. I started off writing to a mix of 20th century opera, but the story didn’t quite open up for me at first. I was able to write the plot, but the feel was lacking. Then I scrapped that playlist and instead looped a Joy Division mix. The right mood for the scene came into focus. The elegiac, almost gothic quality of the music helped sharpen the story’s emotional undercurrent, even though a reader of the story would probably never guess the writer had been listening to something like “Atmosphere” or “Dead Souls” or “Isolation.”

My first goals as a writer had to do with finishing stories, and submitting them. After clearing that bar, my next goal was far more difficult: getting that first story acceptance.

Reaching that milestone took longer than I hoped, though certainly not as long as what many writers have to endure. It really felt wonderful to break through, to finally be able to consider myself a published writer.

It took a while after that before I escalated my goals to anything significantly different. “Get published again… then again…” was my focus for a while. And of course I had the more distant goal of publishing a book some day.

I’ve often read interviews with writers further-along than myself saying they were so busy, they had transcended the slush pile. They had so many people asking them for stories, they no longer wrote anything “on spec,” and only worked to the requests of editors. This seemed to me like a really wonderful situation to have. Imagine, no longer having to live with the brutal cycle of diving into the slush pile, waiting months and months, only to almost inevitably be rejected.

This became my new goal: to become the kind of writer who was sought after at least enough to remain busy writing to invitations.

Somehow, without realizing the progress I was making, I’ve reached this goal. Lately, I’ve received enough invitations that I no longer have time available to write much else. In the past 5 months, I’ve received 4 invites, and another 3 in the 5 months before that. 7 invites in a 10 month period doesn’t quite max me out (I can complete roughly one story per month), but I consider this being “booked up” because I want to start working on longer material. If I want to dedicate at least 1/3 of my time to a couple novellas and a novel series, and I’m already this busy, with new invites coming faster all the time, I think the time has come to swear off the slush pile.

Invitations tend to be “hush hush” for at least a while, so I haven’t been able to crow about most of the possibilities that have recently come my way. I hope to have some more specific good news to report soon.