How to survive the submissions process (whether that's comics, novels, shorts, or screenplays) by rejection-proofing your soul

In Chapter One of My Future Shock Hell! I revealed how the legendary British sci-fi anthology 2000 AD became my first port of call when I decided that I wanted to ‘break in’ to comics.

READ: My Future Shock Hell! (Chapter 1 of 4) How I broke into comics and why there's no such thing

Almost twenty years on and still making cold submissions or pitches to various other outlets in various other media, I’ve realised that my experience of submitting those first Future Shocks has taught me how to cope with submitting just about anything.

The truth is, cold submissions never get easier; you just get better at coping with them.

​Whether you’re submitting poetry or a short story to a literary magazine, a novel or screenplay to a prospective agent, or planning on writing a pitch for a Future Shock ready to throw at the next 2000 AD Talent Search, it’s always a good idea to do a little recon...

Multimedia ghost story creator Thom Burgess explains the techniques behind his latest horror project 'Mister Howl', as well as lessons learned piloting a host of successful indie projects

Hey, Thom! I’ve been following your multimedia ghost stories for several years now and had to reach out for an interview. You’ve received plaudits from several members of horror royalty, including Andy Nyman, Reece Shearsmith and horror director Corin Hardy. But, for me, it was Junji Ito who summed up the distinct creepiness of your work when he said that you understand very well, “that the most frightening tales are those told in whispers.”

I’ve just read your latest book, Mister Howl, and it’s an absorbing, innovative, and above all creepy-as-hell urban horror story. It’s like Rear Window as told by M.R. James (with a dash of Fright Night) and does brilliant work evoking a sense of horror gradually oozing from its hiding place over the course of the story. It’s another example of the brilliant work you’ve been doing within the grassroots horror scene.

For those horror fans yet to discover your work, can tell us who you are and the kind of projects you’ve created so far?
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Thanks, Alec. That’s very kind of you to say. I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, but doing so professionally since around 2013. Horror is my real passion, in particular ghost stories and strange folklore. I started off writing in comics, but I’m really interested in using different mediums to tell stories. From online to film, video games, to augmented reality. It feels like we’re existing at an exciting point in history where all these mediums, which once might have seemed fantastical, are becoming a lot more accessible. I think that’s hugely exciting, and if it means being able to tell a story in a new and unique way then that’s something that should be embraced.

You wrote your first graphic novella Malevolents in 2015 (with artist Joe Becci). You followed that with The Eyrie (with artist Barney Bodoano), which won Rue Morgue’s ‘Graphic Novel of 2017’. Last year your Early Haunts became one of the most successful horror anthologies ever launched on Kickstarter.

You’ve built an amazing back catalogue of graphic novel ghost stories, in which you’re combining traditions from across the spectrum of supernatural fiction: literary ghost stories with oral folklore, bygone hauntology with very modern, very urban found-footage mysteries.
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When you first decided to write comics, why did you decide to self-publish? Why not save yourself some work and go pitch a story to 2000 AD instead? Or go to comic conventions in the States and chase editors at Dark Horse or Image...?

How I broke into comics and why there's no such thing

This four-part essay is an updated and extended version of a piece first published on my blog back in 2014, itself prompted by a popular talk I gave at Bristol Comic Expo the same year.

I submitted my first script to 2000 AD knocking on twenty years ago. Back then the legendary British sci-fi anthology was your most viable option if you were unfortunate enough to be living in Britain and deluded enough to want to work in newsstand comics. The venerable war title Commando took open submissions, but everyone else - Titan, Panini and The Beano - were a brick wall.

To get in with these publishers you needed to have gotten in somewhere else first. Similarly, the notion of writing for Marvel or DC was something akin to the whimsy of a crack-addled Leprechaun.Today, if you’re British and want to ‘break in’ to comics, there are several other doors to publication that await your crowbar.

​Crowdfunding is now an option if you’ve got the time, the know-how and the followers. And if you’re funding a project with nothing but passion, potential collaborators can be easily reached via social media. You can host projects online on the platform of your choice, forming the basis of a big shiny portfolio over which potential editors can then feign interest.

Taking these routes to assembling a complete comics project can take months, maybe years, in between day jobs and other commitments. On the other hand, writing a single four-page script can take only a week or two of solid focus. Almost two decades on from my first sale to 2000 AD, I can safely say that if I were starting out now then I’d still be making cold submissions wherever I could...

She’s the psychic cop who has patrolled the dystopian streets of Mega-City One for over four decades, and she’s nobody’s sidekick

I first met her in 1991 within the pages of the Judge Dredd/Batman crossover Judgement on Gotham. It was love at first sight. Her first scene had her answer the phone before it rang. What a perfect introduction to Mega-City One’s premier psychic. It was the promise of a bust-up between Dredd and the Dark Knight that got me to buy the book, but it was the supporting character of Judge Cassandra Anderson that got me hooked.

Written by her co-creator John Wagner and her long-time chronicler Alan Grant, she brought a goofball energy to every scene in which she appeared. Superstar artist Simon Bisley was perfectly tuned into Anderson's eccentric frequency and drew her more like a musclebound Tori Amos than the chic Debbie Harry lookalike she had been under Brian Bolland - who drew her first appearance 11 years before in issue #149 of legendary British sci-fi anthology 2000 AD.

​Smitten, I started tracking down the books and annuals that collected her previous adventures while discovering her more recent and harder-edged psychotropic epics, which were then running in the monthly Judge Dredd Megazine. Reading all these alongside Dredd’s regular adventures in 2000 AD, it was clear that Judge Anderson was a vital component of the Dredd saga. More open to introspection and enquiry, Anderson could open windows into the dystopian world of Mega-City One that remain forever closed to her stone-hearted colleague...

The writer of SUICIDE SQUAD, JUDGE DREDD and DOCTOR WHO talks story-building and script-mechanics, as well as managing PETROL HEAD, his new creator-owned sci-fi project landing in November from Image

Mr Williams! You’re a veteran comic-book writer and you’re Welsh. What else do we need to know?
‘Veteran’ makes me sound decrepit and Welsh makes me sound… well, Welsh. I can’t deny the second one at least. I’m a writer, mainly of comics but also of TV and film screenplays these days. I’ve worked for 2000AD, DC Comics, Marvel, Hellboy, Kingsman, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Indiana Jones. I’ve been about a bit, comics-wise, I can’t deny.

Your writing on Petrol Head is as tight, witty, and fast-paced as anything I’ve ever read from you, while the artwork by Pye Parr is just this maelstrom of incredible design. I honestly feel like this book is going to take a lot of readers by surprise.

You’ll do a much better job than me of pitching the actual story. So, what’s it all about?

It’s the story of a very smart girl, Lupa, in a future domed city called ‘The O-Zone.’ Lupa’s dad thinks he has a cure to the environmental disaster that had destroyed the breathable planet, and so he and Lupa go on the run from the City’s terrifying administrator, ‘The O’, who doesn’t want that cure getting out into the world.
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And Lupa and her dad then run into a giant, defunct, gas-guzzling drag-racing robot called Petrol Head who has his own beef with ‘The O’. Together they go on the run, and from that point on it’s a pedal-to-the-robo-metal chase thriller with colours and art that’ll take your head off.

So why write Petrol Head and why now? Why not chase another high-profile gig in superhero comics instead?

Deliver a sting in your tale

This essay is an updated and extended version of a piece first published on this blog back in 2014. And, boy, was it popular!

A twist is a moment of revelation within a story that throws into question all that’s gone before it. A twist is essentially a specific type of action or ‘beat’. Aristotle called it the ‘peripeteia’ (variously translated as ‘reversal’ or ‘sudden change’), referring both to the sudden downturn in the protagonist’s fortunes that occurs in tragedy (such as Oedipus’ realisation that he’s married his mum) and the sudden change for the good that occurs in comedy (such as the lovesick Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night realising that his favourite page-boy is actually a girl).

​Whether for good or ill, the peripeteia means an abrupt reversal in the protagonist's circumstances. Aristotle pointed out that the reversal occurs in conjunction with ‘anagnorisis’ (variously translated as ‘discovery’ or ‘recognition’), the moment at which the protagonist uncovers a hitherto unknown piece of information. In other words, it’s that bit in the movie when the main character realises they’ve just murdered their dad, married their mum, or were a ghost the whole time. This is also the point at which the character might fall to their knees yelling, ‘Nooooooooo!’ And it’ll probably be raining...

The mutant vampire bounty hunter known as Durham Red is one of the most popular characters in British comics. An unsung figure in vampire fiction and one whose appeal remains truly troublesome

“Of all the strange and terrible beings who wore the badge of the Search / Destroy Agency, there were few more feared – or more desired – than the woman they called Durham Red.”

A suitably pulpy teaser for one of the most enduring - and problematic - characters to ever appear in still-going-strong British sci-fi anthology comic 2000 AD.

This first-page glamour shot by the legendary Spanish artist Carlos Ezquerra makes the ‘desired’ bit pretty obvious. This was back in 1987 when 2000 AD was still targeted pretty much exclusively at British teenage boys who had to make do with hedge-porn and the underwear section of the Kay’s catalogue. But this mutant vampire bounty hunter – with her sour cherry pout and a hairdo like a Norfolk cottage - doesn’t look any more fearful than all the other ‘strange and terrible’ scuzzbags who populate the mutant-ridden universe of Strontium Dog, the intergalactic Spaghetti Western strip in which Durham Red first appeared.
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You had to read on to realise what it was about Red that made her so frightening. The character’s darkly seductive appeal plunges much deeper than that formidable cleavage, a scariness that runs vein-deep and assures the character a solid yet unsung place in the wider canon of vampire fiction.

The Agent of Weird welcomes reader questions! If you want to ask what works for me when writing stuff about vampires, aliens and wizards, then head over to my Substack and drop a query in the comments...

“I'd be interested in reading your thoughts on emotional arcs versus plot-driven stories. Horror seems like a good place to go heavier on the plot and lighter on the emotionality, e.g. John Carpenter's The Thing.” 
Sweet Nightmares Media
It took me a while to really understand that plot and character are essentially the same thing. I’m pretty sure it was when I was watching the first season of Game of Thronesthat the penny finally dropped. I saw how an action taken by a certain character – like Jamie shoving Bran out of a window at the end of episode one – triggers the next beat of the story. In this case, the next beat is that Bran didn’t die as Jamie planned. This causes the next beat of the story in which everyone else must now decide how to react. Their actions will cause another character to react, setting up the next beat, and the next, and so on, cause and effect. And if the characters are drawn well enough, they’ll often come up with those beats for you...

A milestone in fantasy cinema that illustrates exactly why writing about magic requires a true sorcerer’s touch (contains very mild spoilers)

There’s a scene in Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves that says the movie knows exactly what it’s doing. Our party of roguish adventurers are drowning their sorrows in the local tavern, bickering over the best way to break into the bad guy’s vault. The barbarian (Michelle Rodriguez) grunts over her ale. “Can’t you just magic us inside?” The party’s timid sorcerer (Justice Smith) bristles at this. “Everyone thinks you can solve everything with magic, but you can’t! There’s rules!”
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Director-screenwriters Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, along with co-writer Michael Gilio (as well as the writer of this previous essay Too Much Magic: The Pitfalls of Writing Fantasy), understand that nothing breaks the spell of drama more completely than characters waving a magic wand at a story problem. It’s one of several reasons why Honour Among Thieves works so well. It has a geek’s understanding of the rules of the game, but a dramatist’s flair for storytelling. In other words, the movie plays like it’s being run by a really good DM.

The movie is another milestone in the wave of big-budget on-screen fantasy that’s been rolling for the last twenty years, ever since Peter Jackson’s still-magnificent Lord of the Rings trilogy and Warner Brothers’ charming-but-very-much-less-than-magnificent Harry Potter series. These blockbuster successes, along with advances in digital special effects and the rise of the internet, helped carry the fantasy genre out of the ghettos of fandom and into mainstream culture.

Created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss from the bestselling-but-not-terribly-well-known-at-the-time fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin, the first series of Game of Thrones arrived in 2011 and had clearly learned much from Jackson’s trilogy...

The award-winning author, scriptwriter and games designer talks craft, getting published and staying focused, as well as revealing his new creator-owned fantasy project 'Letters from an Unknown Land'

Hey, John! Thanks so much for agreeing to do this Q&A. Who am I kidding? I’m bloody delighted to have you do all the heavy lifting for this article! First off, can you please tell our readers who you are, what you write and what you’ve written?

I’m a writer, script-writer and sometime games designer. Basically, I write novels and short stories, scripts for TV, video games, and audio dramas, and just occasionally something involving the rolling of die and playing of cards. A lot of my work has been for Warhammer, including novels for the Horus Heresy series, but I’ve also done work for the Call of Cthulhu RPG, and novels for Arkham Horror, Sherlock Holmes, and sundry other writerly things.

So, what do you say at parties when people ask what you do? Do you do what I do and look at your shoes like a schoolboy caught smoking behind the bike-sheds and mumble ‘I write stuff…’?

I grin and say, ‘I’m a writer’. No sheepishness involved. That I get to do this is quite a surprise to me, and a huge privilege. Saying it aloud always gives me a spark of pleasure. As does the ‘What? Really?’ reply that follows.

And do you write part-time or full-time? Are you freelance?

I’m full-time, but have been part-time too.

How long have you been writing professionally?

[counts slowly on fingers…] About seventeen years.

And how difficult was it for you starting out?

​It was both tricky and not, to be honest. A lot of my experience of becoming a writer is that I did one thing and then another and another. It didn’t all happen in one go...