About Martin L. Shoemaker

Martin L. Shoemaker is a programmer who writes on the side… or maybe it’s the other way around. Programming pays the bills, but a second-place story in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest earned him lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that! His work has appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Galaxy’s Edge, Digital Science Fiction, Forever Magazine, Writers of the Future, and numerous anthologies including Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF 4, Man-Kzin Wars XV, The Jim Baen Memorial Award: The First Decade, Little Green Men—Attack!, More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity, Avatar Dreams, Weird World War III, Weird World War III: China, Weird World War IV, ROBOSOLDIERS: Thank You for Your Servos, Gunfight on Europa Station, Surviving Tomorrow, Humanity 2.0, Murderbirds, Vampire Survival Guide: An Anthology for Cautious Immortals, and Tales of the United States Space Force. His Clarkesworld story “Today I Am Paul” appeared in four different year’s best anthologies and eight international editions. His follow-on novel, Today I Am Carey, was published by Baen Books in March 2019. His novel The Last Dance was published by 47North in November 2019, and was the number one science fiction eBook on Amazon during October’s prerelease. The sequel, The Last Campaign was published in October 2020.

(Ain’t it weird when authors talk about themselves in third person?)

Beginnings…

I’ve been telling stories all my life. My mom told of me making up adventures for my imaginary friends. When my older brother got a typewriter for college, I was fascinated. You could make real books with that! I was too short to reach it on the table, so I learned to type with it in my lap. I still type that way.

In my teens, I submitted my first story. It got rejected, and I gave up.

In college, I submitted my second story. It got rejected, and I gave up.

Early in my programming career, I submitted another story. It got rejected, and I gave up.

And so on. And so on. I wanted to write, but I lacked persistence.

Finally, when I was 47, I got a rejection… and I didn’t give up. I sent to the next market, and the next. I studied. I wrote and submitted more stories. This time I kept at it for six whole months!

But I was getting nowhere. My stories weren’t selling. So I gave up… but this time with a plan. On January 1, I would put away my writing tools and start writing computer games. I could pretend to be a writer until then. And as a writer, I had a rule that every Saturday I had to submit every story that wasn’t submitted yet.

I had written a story I really liked, and sent it off to Asimov’s Science Fiction. It came back rejected… on December 31… which was a Saturday. My rules said it had to be submitted. So I searched for a market, and I found Writers of the Future. I didn’t know much about it, but I knew it was some sort of contest. I knew that some of the writers I followed were judges, including two of my favorites, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. And the contest has a quarterly deadline. December 31 was the deadline. And I like serendipity. So I sent the story in.

And the next day, I put away my writing tools. I was done. I would write Windows Phone games. I’m an excellent programmer. I would stick to what I knew. And by March, I had made $50 from my games. That was where I belonged.

And then I got a call from Writers of the Future. I had literally forgotten I had sent them a story, so imagine my surprise when contest coordinator Joni Labaqui told me my story was a Finalist. That meant it was in the top 8 among thousands of entries. The top 3 would be published in the annual anthology, and the writers would attend a workshop in Hollywood taught by the bestselling judges.

Suddenly I was back in the writing business, learning more about Writers of the Future. The more I learned, the more I wanted to win.

But I didn’t. A month later I got another call from Joni. My story hadn’t won; but contest judge Jerry Pournelle thought it should have. He loved that story.

Jerry Pournelle… whom I’d been reading for 30 years.

Jerry Pournelle loved my story.

And that’s when I realized that maybe my biggest mistake was giving up. That’s when I gave up giving up. And sales followed.

So my message to new writers, young writers especially, is: Be smarter than me. Keep trying!