I’ve been writing books since the 1990s. How I began writing them in English is a fun little anecdote:
I was once a Swedish wannabe cartoonist. My lack of success in comics plus a sense of a shrinking market in an already tiny country was frustrating me, and I figured I should try writing prose.
I showed my first novel - a conspiracy thriller written on an electric typewriter - to an editor I knew, at his seaside home in Sweden. He had previously published a science fiction magazine, a rare thing in my country where sci-fi wasn’t seen as “proper” literature by the cultural establishment… but that only made me respect him more.
The friendly editor read the pages and said something that began with: “Du skriver så amerikanskt…”, roughly meaning “Your writing is so ‘American’…”
…and he politely explained to me that he couldn’t get it published.
I remember feeling a bit slighted after the meeting. Not simply because of the rejection, but because - whether he had meant it or not - I thought his argument against my manuscript was unfair. What was wrong with writing in an “American” style, anyway? Wasn’t that “proper”? Was there some “Swedish cultural protocol” I was expected to follow in order to be “acceptable”?
(Perhaps the editor just meant that I wrote Swedish as if it were translated from English, and not in a good way. I never had the nerve to ask him. And in hindsight, that novel did have some glaring weaknesses. I’m embarrassed by it now.)
So because of that meeting I decided (as if to say “That’ll show’em”) to start writing in English. Apparently, Sweden was the wrong market for the kinds of stories I wanted to tell. And I thought I might have a better chance with my manuscripts if I tried abroad…
To make a long story short: I wrote several books in English, and no foreign publisher accepted them. (I had better luck with short fiction; it has been published in a few countries.) Then I translated manuscripts from English to Swedish, tried again, and eventually did get some of them published in my home country. I had finally gotten a foot in, but it took much longer than I had expected.
The moral of the story, I guess, is that writers are crazy. They must be. No sane person would keep going despite all the rejection letters I got.
While I struggled with all that, I had a day job and posted unsold stories and novels on my own website. One of them was the space-opera novel titled The Argus Project, which began as a Web serial. It ran to a length of about 100,000 words.
Later I self-published that novel, and it’s still available on Amazon.
(UPDATED) During the weekend of October 8-9, 2021 (Pacific Daylight Time, that’s until late Sunday morning in many timezones), you can download The Argus Project for free from Amazon.
Download link:
https://www.amazon.com/ARGUS-PROJECT-R-Yngve-ebook/dp/B01N2OVKIS/
If you miss the deadline, you can either wait for another “free ebook” offer from me - it will come, I promise - or just buy the book, it’s cheap.
THE ARGUS PROJECT depicts violent conflict in a Solar System nearly 200 years into the future, colonized by humans who are genetically and bionically modified for life on other planets. The science parts seem dated now - could we really get that far into space in such a historically brief time span? - but the story is rousing and fast-paced.