# The Road to Publication by J. Ashley-Smith



## TKent (Jul 26, 2021)

We invited author J. Ashley-Smith to share a little about his road to publication.​




J. Ashley Smith is a British–Australian writer of dark fiction and other materials. His short stories have twice won national competitions and been shortlisted seven times for Aurealis Awards, winning both Best Horror (_Old Growth_, 2017) and Best Fantasy (_The Further Shore_, 2018). His novella, _The Attic Tragedy_, was released by Meerkat Press in 2020 and has since been shortlisted for an Aurealis Award, an Australian Shadows Award, and a Shirley Jackson Award. J. lives with his wife and two sons in the suburbs of North Canberra, gathering moth dust, tormented by the desolation of telegraph wires.

*You can connect with J. at spooktapes.net, or on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.*

*Ariadne, I Love You** is available now from Meerkat Press.*​The Road to Publication​J. Ashley-Smith​
The most important lesson I have learned, on what turned out to be a thirty-year journey to becoming a published author, is best summed up by Chuck Wendig’s crude aphorism: _finish your shit_. It doesn’t matter how good that story is in your head, or for how many weeks, months or years you polish those first few chapters – if you don’t finish the damn thing it doesn’t exist and that’s the end of it.

I first started writing when I was about ten or eleven, gruesome little horror skits that I’d scratch out in a hardback Manila notepad. There’d be one, maybe two characters, little to no plot: just terrible things happening to people, sometimes a ghost; the end. When I was about seventeen, I started taking writing more seriously, penned longer pieces – scripts mostly – that had a beginning, a middle and… well, that was the thing. I could finish an outline of a longer piece, but when it came to actually sitting down to write it, I could never get to the end.

I studied film at university (hence the scripts) and minored in creative writing. It was there that I first learned to ‘finish my shit,’ but only because I had to. It wasn’t so much that I learned a valuable life lesson and from that moment forth was some kind of prolific author – finishing things was more a necessity. If you wanted a grade, you had to hand in your work. In the years after uni, I started five, six, seven novels, maybe more. I’d get excited about the idea, write the outline in a flurry of creative energy, write one, maybe two or three chapters, and then… I’d grow bored or restless, or some other idea would knock on the door. I was like a man that longed for marriage but couldn’t commit, that fell from one abridged and unsatisfactory relationship into another.

I did finish a novel towards the end of that period. Well, the first draft of one anyway. I had big plans for the redraft, but then moved to Australia. I imagined myself as F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing _The Great Gatsby_ on the French Riviera (the novel was set back in Cambridge, where I grew up, and was, I was then convinced, a masterpiece). But I couldn’t finish it. I got two, three chapters into the rewrite and began to struggle. Turned out that finishing a novel – even a masterpiece – was _hard_. After a couple of months going over and over the same few pages, I quit. I didn’t write a word of fiction for ten years.

In all that time, though, I knew I wanted to be a writer, knew that I had unfinished business. But that novel sat there like a lump of concrete in my imagination. Nothing could get past it, and I couldn’t bring myself to go back to it – convinced, as I was by then, that it actually _wasn’t_ a masterpiece. Of course, it actually wasn’t _anything. _Because I hadn’t finished it. In end I had to literally burn that book to let it go, to move on and write other things.

Turns out that even _burning_ books is hard. In the end I had to feed it into the flames a page at a time, burning my fingers in the process. That was a turning point for me though, the first action relating to a book that I ever followed through on and completed.

When I did start writing again, I was chastened. _Maybe_, I told myself, _let go of the whole masterpiece idea. Maybe just finish something._ I wrote a story just for fun, a crime horror short about a lyrebird that hears and mimics the sound of someone being horribly murdered – the detective hears the murder through the bird, but doesn’t recognise it, so falls into the same trap. It was short. I enjoyed writing it. I _finished_ it. And sent it out. (That’s the other thing you have to do, by the way. Send your babies out into the cruel, hard world.) Then I wrote something else. Another horror short about a sensitive new age guy who lets himself be sucked dry by leeches. It was fun to write. I finished it, polished it. Sent it out. Just a few days later it was picked up for an anthology of Australian horror – my first acceptance.

In the years since that first story was published, I’ve worked hard to hone my craft. I feel deep in my bones that complaint of Chaucer’s: _The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne._ I have so much that I want to write, so many stories I want to finish and put out into the world before… and, please, forgive the melodrama… before I die. But I’m a married man now, committed to completion. It doesn’t matter how many ideas may be knocking at the door, I’m wed to my WIP till ‘The End’ do us part.


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## noisebloom (Aug 11, 2021)

I'm surprised no one has replied to this thread (or perhaps I'm a weird committing some sort of interview thread "faux pas")...

It's insane how much I relate to this advice. For most of my life, I never finished anything related to writing. I tend to give up when my work is not ideal, but eventually I actually got to thinking what "ideal" really means, and that clued me into how foolish I've been all along. I'm determined to actually finished things now!


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## Chris Miller (Aug 12, 2021)

Very much enjoyed this essay's honesty and humor. Humble without being self deprecating. I once enjoyed a long hiatus from creative writing, and, having just finished my own "masterpiece" was considering another. But this post might just have inspired me to reconsider.


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## Kyle R (Aug 15, 2021)

Great article! And so true. Finishing a work is often harder than it seems. But it's so instructive to do so.

And for those who haven't read any of J. Ashley-Smith's work, he writes beautifully.


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## TKent (Aug 16, 2021)

As a follow-up note, J. Ashley-Smith won the Shirley Jackson Award last night for his novelette: THE ATTIC TRAGEDY. So glad he stuck it out and started finishing those stories.


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## Moose.H (Sep 15, 2021)

I love the expression - finish your shit. It is easy to start but to go the whole distance is what matters. Knowing when it is finished is also difficult.


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## cozwry (Sep 23, 2021)

I love the idea of finishing your shit, imaginative. (Sorry for the cuss, will it be edited out, or asterisked in post?)


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