Publishing This Year

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I’ve made the decision to publish a book this year.

That, in and of itself, sounds preposterous. You can’t really ever decide to do something; you simply do it or you don’t. Hell, New Year’s Resolutions are basically that in a nutshell. Anyone can resolve to lose weight, stop drinking, or publish a book (or all three – nothing wrong with ambition, right?). But until you actually do it, it’s just a formless idea. I’ve entered many years with the notion of, “This is the year I get published!” only for it to not come to pass.

So, why should this declaration of publishing intent really be any different?

Well, for starters, I plan to self-publish, likely on Amazon but hopefully elsewhere. That, in and of itself, changes the calculus on how likely publishing will occur. In all previous endeavors, I’ve attempted the traditional routes: querying agents, submitting short stories, etc., and nothing’s panned out. Maybe it’s because my writing’s not good enough – I’d be crazy not to admit there’s a constant bullhorn of self-doubt blaring in my head – or maybe it’s just not been the right moment. Maybe it’s bad luck, bad timing, or a myriad of other reasons that could explain the lack of forward movement in this aspect of my journey.

Regardless of the reasons why, the simple fact is that it hasn’t happened, and there’s no escaping that. One could be bitter about that reality – I won’t lie and say there haven’t been moments where I’ve felt bitter – but bitterness won’t solve anything. It won’t make me a better writer to use it as a motivating factor; if anything, it’ll supplant the real reason I should be writing – the joy of creation – and leave me feeling hollow. I think this type of thing happens often, not just in writing but in society: people don’t get what they want or feel they deserve and grow angry and resentful as a result. But I don’t want to be angry and resentful. I don’t feel that’s productive, nor do I think it’s warranted. I like to believe I’m a pretty damn good writer, but I have to acknowledge that I come to that question from a very biased perspective; perception and truth can very easily be diametrically opposed forces.

But it doesn’t matter if you’re a good or bad writer when it comes to self-publishing. Sure, it matters in the sense that it can affect whether you can become a successful self-publisher, at least in terms of monetary and popularity gain. But in terms of actually putting your stuff out there for someone somewhere to find, the only gatekeeper is yourself. And, as far as I’m concerned, I’m through with being my own gatekeeper. I’m almost thirty-eight now, and it’s high time I shit or get off the pot.

I’m currently working with friends on both a cover and a final pass-through edit for grammatical/spelling errors, as well as a final read on whether there are any glaring problems with the plot and characters. Once that’s done, it’s on to copyright, ISBNs, Kindle formatting, and whatever else I need/want to do before getting it out there. But the only thing stopping me from doing any of that now is myself, and that’s a fairly empowering position to be in.

So, here’s to publishing a book (or two) in 2024. I’m going to do my damnedest to get out of my own way.

100 Rejections A Year, the Redux

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I’m re-upping something I wrote about several years ago (2016 I think?). Now that I’m actively writing and submitting short stories again, I feel like this is a good article to bring back to the forefront of my focus and set as a benchmark for my writing goals for the year.

So far I’ve notched *checks notes* 1 rejection this year; 5 if you include agents who have passed on my novel, though I think the spirit of this article is more geared towards short stories, so I’ll concentrate my tally more on those.

So, you know, it’s a slow start, but it will (hopefully) pick up as I finish more pieces and start submitting those around.

Why You Should Aim for 100 Rejections a Year

Short Stories and the Art of Ego-Checking

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Recently I submitted a short story to a magazine, and am currently awaiting judgment. The reason this is noteworthy, at least for me, is because it’s the first time I’ve submitted a short story anywhere since 2017. I didn’t realize it had been that long until I went to log the submission on the different submission trackers I use and saw my scant history of recent submissions. Frankly, it floored me, yet as I sit here now and think about it, it correlates pretty well with the last time I was truly active on this website: look at my posting history and you’ll see that before my sudden burst of activity, my last post was in 2018. And that post then was about how I had been neglecting to write on here for some time.

Why has it taken me so long to get back to all this?

One thing the lack of submissions over the last few years showed me was that the biggest obstacle standing in my way has been…well, myself. Now, it hasn’t been a completely barren desert of submissions these last few years: I’ve been sending out Phlox Fall to agents in hopes of representation during all this time, though certainly not as often as I could be. But when it comes specifically to short stories, I’m recognizing a very clear pattern of behavior:

  1. I finish a story.
  2. Believing this will be the masterpiece that gets me published and prove my undeniable talent to the world, I submit to between 10 and 20 markets.
  3. The story is rejected by all comers.
  4. Sulk and stop submitting, bitter they do not understand my brilliance.

First and foremost, we have to address the clear egotistical assholery present in points 2 and 4. The fact is, I have an ego about myself. I very often find myself falling into a pit of belief that I am somehow special and unique in this world. But we have to be completely clear about what that is: It’s a character flaw, and one I’ve become more in tune with over the last few years and am actively working to combat. This is not to say I’ve been trying to destroy my self-esteem, as I think a healthy self-esteem is a good thing. Rather, I’m working to not get an over-inflated sense of significance and to realize and remind myself constantly that there are millions and millions of more talented writers than me out there, and that the only thing standing between myself and publishing is my own skill and ability.

It’s easy to say you’re not great at something when you don’t care about being great at it; it’s a much harder thing to admit you’re not great at something you want to be great at. I know I have some skill with writing: I’ve gotten enough personal rejections along the lines of, “it’s well written but I just didn’t connect with the plot/characters/etc.” to know there’s something there and I’m not just flailing at a hopeless cause. But I think where I get tripped up is thinking that what I’ve written should be good enough to be published, without realizing that if it was good enough to be published…then it would be published. It’s that ever-present human problem of wanting to blame some outside source for faults and lack of success, and while I like to think I’m above such problems, the truth is I just as easily fall prey to them. Hell, the very fact that I like to think I’m above them is probably further evidence of how not-above them I am.

So, where does that leave this? Where does it leave me?

As of right now, I have 1 story out in the ether, hoping to be published. But if not, I’ll remember to check my ego and submit it elsewhere. I also have 3 different stories in the hopper, in varying draft states. The goal now is to get these done and also start sending them out, all while continuing to craft new stories, so that I might eventually have a revolving door of writing and submissions. I’ve never been in that situation before, so if I can get to that point it would be a very welcomed change.

The other aspect of all this will be to keep reminding myself to keep writing and keep submitting, even when things aren’t going my way. If I keep striving for improvement and not let the rejections get the better of me, then eventually I will write something good enough to get published. I just might not know I’ve written such a thing until the acceptance comes rolling in.

You know what, though? I can live with that. Better going forward with that mindset than thinking I’ve reached that point and being sorely disappointed to be shown otherwise.

Dreams As Stories

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A few nights ago, something occurred which has not happened in a long time: I had a dream that inspired me to formulate a story.

The last time something like this happened, which was probably when Obama was still in his first term, it turned into a YA story called Stitcher. Now, I give it the simplified status of “story” because I believed I would turn it into a novel or series of novels, but to date that hasn’t happened: I have really only written a small, 40k-ish word bit of what might one day become the first book. I have written other pieces in the Stitcher world, some of which are conceptual ways in which the story could continue beyond that initial 40k, but none of it has felt quite right. As such, Stitcher remains an unfinished, 40k word start to a story, some 9 or so years after I first wrote it.

But that’s not what this is about. This is about the concept of dreaming up a story. The reason I bring up Stitcher is to illustrate how a few small samplings of imagery or scenario can bloom into an entire world. In the case of Stitcher, my dream consisted of essentially two scenes: one of some strange vehicles racing through wide sewer pipes, the other of a boy at a podium chastising an auditorium full of people who conspired to kill his father.

Now, considering you have never read Stitcher–and maybe never will, depending on if I ever return to it–I recognize that my description of these two scenes means nothing to you. That’s fine; it’s not really the point. Rather, the point is that despite my being able to describe the two visions from my dream in…hang on, let me count…30 words, I was able to extrapolate a story, or at least part of one, for 40k words. I find that to be pretty bonkers considering there have been times where I’ve spent weeks fleshing out a story and then never written more than a few thousand actual words of it. Perhaps that says more about my work ethic and commitment than I’d like to admit, but it is what it is.

Anyway, the crux of this diatribe is that the same thing has happened again, and it led to me furiously typing on my phone at 2 AM for fear that I would forget details of my dream, all the while formulating a narrative that could, in theory, connect the dots. It’s a very weird moment when that happens, not least of which because sleep chemicals are no doubt still pulsing around the brain and making things a little more vivid, surreal, and intense then they ought to be. Indeed, by the morning, the severity of my feelings towards the dream had waned, but not my memory of it, and this, I think, is down to the fact that I wrote what I remembered before it could all get lost in whatever mental ether forgotten dreams go to.

What ends up becoming of this dream story is anyone’s guess. My hope is that I can formulate something interesting and meaningful that can be turned into a new piece of art to be unleashed on the world…or, at the very least, unleashed on my wife, who is kind enough to read everything I write regardless of how good or bad it is. It’s a rare thing when a dream can do that, at least in my experience, and is always a welcomed addition to the tool kit of my creative process.

Audiobooking It, With Dragons!

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Earlier this month I wrote about my 2021 reading goals and reflected on the goals I hit and missed over the last few years. Within that recollection were a couple years where I set my goal at 26 books (effectively a book every 2 weeks), with one of those two years being successful and the other–2020–a failure. Now, I would be slightly remiss if I neglected to admit that a large reason I was able to succeed despite my glacial reading pace is because I was typically “reading” two books at a time: one via the traditional means, and another via audiobook. Yet with the loss of my commute due to, you know, the pandemic and work-from-home orders, my audiobook intake decreased substantially in 2020, and it’s a big reason why I did not hit my reading goal last year.

But now it’s 2021, and in fact nearly two whole months into it, so it seems as good a time as any to jump back in. Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of the short stories supplied by the podcasts of speculative fiction magazines (Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, to name but a few) and have found I’m more than capable of following the narratives while plugging away at my day job. So I figure, why not indulge in something longer?

To scratch this itch, I picked up the audiobook version of Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon. I chose this novel for a two reasons:

  1. Naomi Novik has popped up in my suggested reading recommendations a few times, most notably her critically-acclaimed novel Uprooted (which I do intend to read at some point), so I thought now would be a good time to dive into her body of work. In addition to His Majesty’s Dragon, I’ve got a library hold on her newest novel, A Deadly Education. Unfortunately the hold list is pretty long right now, so I’ll probably be waiting on that one for a while.
  2. Less important but still relevant to my preferences, His Majesty’s Dragon clocks in at about 10 hours in the audio format, which for me is a great length. Fun as it is to indulge in a titanic 30-40 hour epic, I find I enjoy my audiobooks more when the narrative is tighter and easily digestible over a handful of listening sessions.

A daunting part about picking His Majesty’s Dragon is that it’s the first book in a looooong series, with nine core books in total. If I enjoy His Majesty’s Dragon, I’ll likely read another one or two before jumping to something else for a bit, as is pretty customary for me and long book series. But who knows? Maybe I’ll love it so much that I won’t want to jump ship and will instead plow right on through. It’s happened before: I arrived late to the Harry Potter party and ended up reading all 7 books in roughly a month and a half. Other straight-through reads that spring to mind are Alastair Reynold’s Poseidon’s Children trilogy and Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy; conversely, I’ve only read the first two books in the Song of Ice & Fire series and, frankly, I doubt if I’ll ever get back to it. It is what it is, I suppose.

I’ll report my thoughts on His Majesty’s Dragon–and the other books in my “currently reading” pile–once I’m finished. Until then, it’s off to joyous listening (and, regrettably, mindlessly number crunching)!

In Progress: The Stand by Stephen King

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Despite being a massive Stephen King fan, I’ve never actually read The Stand all the way through. This surprises no one more than myself, since it’s one of his most well known and beloved works, and the copy I’m currently reading (the Complete & Uncut edition, which clocks in at nearly 1200 pages) has been on my bookshelf for nearly half my life. Why it’s taken me so long to really dig in and commit is a question I don’t rightly have an answer for. I wish I could say I was intimidate by the length–I’m a pretty slow reader and have only managed to get halfway through despite starting around Christmas–but I’ve already read IT, which is roughly the same length, so it’s not like a book’s exorbitant page count has stopped me before.

There’s a part of me that really laments having not read it before now, given we’re all living through an actual global pandemic. COVID-19 lacks the murderous rampaging of King’s imagined Captain Trips, but there’s plenty that’s analogous to how things have played out in the real world. There’s the rapidness with which it spread, the public reaction vacillating between dismissive skepticism and blind panic, and King’s fictional President even states his intention to, “spank the American people for overreacting.” Gee, where have I heard that kind of rhetoric before?

It would have been a fascinating juxtaposition to have read the book before, when the thought of a pandemic uprooting society seemed preposterous, and to read it again now, when the preposterous has become reality. If anything, it today seems preposterous that we will ever return to something resembling the normalcy of pre-COVID life. I know it’ll eventually happen—it’s inevitable; COVID will not be forever—but I also recognize we will never return to something exactly like pre-COVID life: that ship has long sailed. Whatever comes after will be different, by the shared value of the traumatic experience we’ve all lived through. Hopefully it’s different for the better, but honestly who would dare try to make a prediction about the future at this point?

Anyway, I continue to read The Stand with great interest and enjoyment. I’ll need to take a forced break soon; my mom has asked all her kids and in-laws to read a book she selected so we can have a book club on her birthday. After that though, it’ll be back to post-apocalyptic America and the fight between the our intrepid band of lucky survivors and Randall Flagg, the ever-looming Dark Man who hovers over the narrative like a specter.

I’ll share my full thoughts on the book whenever I finish it (probably in April lol).

Reading List 2021?

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I’ve participated in the Goodreads Yearly Reading Challenges for four years now, reaching my goal in three of those years (15 read of a goal of 10 in 2017, 26 of 26 in 2018, 13 of 12 in 2019). In 2020 I tried to be as ambitious as I had been in 2018, setting my goal to 26 books. Alas, I was only able to complete 14 in 2020, and the majority of those were in the first half of the year, before the complete derailment of all things stable and rational.

This year, though, I’ve set my goal at 13. My reasoning here is that there are 52 weeks in a year, so that gives me an even 4 weeks to read each book (subject to change depending on how long or short said book is). Also, I’m a massive dork who loves a good prime number. No, seriously, I use prime numbers for everything: when watching TV, acceptable volume variables are 11, 13, 17, 19, and 23 (anything above or below tends to be either too loud or quiet, varying by TV). Every custom playlist on my podcast app has a prime number’s worth of shows feeding into each. When creating music in Garageband, I set my BPM to a prime number–usually 127 or 131, since I’m typically making techno.

Like I said: massive dork.

But that’s besides the point of this. Rather, I’m trying to plot out what books I’m going to read this year. I’m already about halfway through Stephen King’s The Stand (post on this forthcoming), and will be reading The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone for a family book club. Beyond this, it’s all about combing through my Want To Read list on Goodreads–currently at 215 books, which I lament is not a prime number–and what is readily available to me from the Library.

These are the books at the top of my list:

  • Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh
  • Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman
  • A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
  • The Grand Dark by Richard Kadrey
  • The Hidden City by Michelle West
  • Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
  • The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

I’ll stop there for now, since 7 is a prime number 🙂

My aim, if in fact I really have one, will be to try to include all of these in the pile that make up my 13 books. Subject to change of course: could always have one or two or ten jump up the line and take the place of the others. We shall see!

2021 – Let’s do this!

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As I sit here with a cup of steaming coffee at my desk in my basement–where I’ve worked my corporate office job for the last nine months–I’m left with a lot to reflect on.

2020 was a hell of a year. That’s probably the understatement of the century and a sentiment shared by the vast majority of people. I think it’s generally fair to say that a lot of us had plans derailed by 2020, and my writing plans were no exception. I finished the first draft of a children’s/middle grade fantasy novel in January, and while it wasn’t anything particularly special, I was excited to have a new long-form work completed and was eager to see what I could make of it in the editing process.

Then the pandemic hit, but I thought, “Okay, this will be pretty bad, but we’ll get through it.”

Then the economy collapsed, but I thought, “Okay, another blip. It’ll be tough but we’ve gotten through tough things before.”

Then George Floyd was murdered.

To my mind, that horrible and needless tragedy, when the forces of racism and injustice reared their ugly heads in full public view, was the true defining moment of 2020, even more so than the pandemic. There’s one specific moment, in fact, that to me marks the dividing line in the year. It’s that moment when a large crowd of protestors were walking down a bridge in downtown Minneapolis, and out of nowhere a massive tanker truck came barreling down the highway like a runaway freight train, launching itself through the crowds. I watched it happen live, and at the time, I thought I was witnessing a mass domestic terrorist attack play out in real time. And when the crowd proceeded to rip the truck driver out of the cab, I thought for sure I was about to watch someone get tossed off a bridge to their death on live TV.

I remember sitting in front of the screen, watching it all unfold, and thinking, “Oh…shit…are we actually going to make it through this? Or is this the point where it all falls apart?”

Despite the fact that no one died in that incident–not the driver, nor any of the protestors–I still felt a great feeling of helplessness descend upon me. I think it was primarily a helplessness directed at the fact that some of the most ugly parts of this country had been brought to the surface–systemic racism, social injustice, class and cultural warfare–and I felt powerless, as a single non-descript individual person, to stop it or even stem its tide. Everything, it seemed, was unravelling, and there was nothing I could do about it.

After this, my creative well–already running low as it was–completely dried up. For months I did near nothing creatively, and my mental health fell into the shit house. Part of that was due to a general sense of doom and gloom over the state of the world and, more specifically, the United States. But another factor contributing to my lack of creativity was, in fact, my lack of creativity and my disappointment in myself for not being able to fix it. Real twisted cycle there: couldn’t create, which made me depressed, which prevented me from creating, which made me more depressed, and so on and so forth.

(Note that when I say “depressed” here, I’m not talking about clinical depression. That’s a whole different animal and I cannot speak to the challenges and experiences of people fighting it. Frankly, it would be inappropriate of me to even try.)

It was my wife who pulled me out of that toxic spiral, not by giving me some perspective on the world or encouraging me on any particular creative project. Rather, she took the opposite tact and implored me to accept that I was in a creative slump and realize that…hey, that was okay! It wouldn’t be forever. Forgive yourself, show yourself some grace, and give yourself a break.

And honestly? It worked.

I decided to give myself the break she suggested. For a few months, I let go of the fact that I wasn’t producing anything and couldn’t change the broader societal problems with the snap of a finger. Instead, I just did my best to live with what was in directly front of me, to work on being a good dad to my two kids, a good spouse and partner to my wife, to work at keeping our house in order and take everything one day at a time. And as I sit here and think about it now, being able to forgive myself for my deficiencies went a long way to improving my general outlook on things. Now, it’s not as simple as snapping a finger and saying, “I forgive myself!” It certainly required a bit more work than that. But that attitude formed the bedrock with which I was able to eventually pull myself out of my funk.

OH, also–and there’s really no point beating around the bush here–Biden winning in November was a big boon to improving my general outlook as well. And if the Georgia runoffs continue as it’s looking like they will on this, the morning of January 6th, 2021, that’ll only improve things more.

So where to go from here? Well, I’ve started writing again, and writing with actual enthusiasm, which is probably the bigger victory. Just working on a couple short stories for now–want to get back into the groove before I commit to anything long term (also, want to figure out what that long term thing would even be). I’ve also taken to recording my stories in audiobook format. I got a nice desktop microphone as a Christmas gift, and it’s proving to be a very reliable tool for narrating my stories. What I do with those recordings, if anything, is completely up in the air, but we’ll see.

My hope is that the new year brings a new basket of optimism and good fortune, both for myself and for you as well. If there’s anything I can give–any half-baked wisdom I can offer–it would be to remind you to show yourself some grace, forgive yourself for your deficiencies, and give yourself a break when you need it. As I said, it won’t magically solve things, but it might form a decent bedrock off of which you can spring forth.

UPDATE: This is kind of a surreal post looking back on it, especially since it was written mere hours before the Capitol got charged by a bunch of lunatics, which then proceeded to cause another few days of pure, unadulterated distraction from writing, work, and basically everything else. Going to keep it for posterity’s sake, but just know it was written BEFORE the events that have since made 1/6/21 famous in the American conscience.

Thoughts

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Huh. Seeing as it’s been a year since I wrote anything, I figured I might as well re-stamp my mark on here.

Since no one really reads this anyway, I’ve decided to stop writing as if people are reading it and just start writing the thoughts in my head. I want to be a little more real, and take down the facade that has been a part of my previous posts. That’s not to say my previous posts have been false or lies or anything like that, but I very much put on a persona when typing them, distilling myself down to the best possible version of myself. I’m going to stop doing that. Especially since my brain often works in overdrive and I have nights–like last night–where I end up awake for 4 hours.

I’ve been thinking a lot about death recently. Or maybe a better way to put it is nonexistence, and what that would look and feel like. This also kinda works in tandem with my current interest in learning about ancient civilizations, especially Ancient Egypt, about which I am currently reading a book. Basically I often think about the people who lived back in those times, the friends and families they kept, the dinners they shared, the philosophy they debated, etc. etc. etc. And it makes me think about my own life, and the experiences I have. For the time they occur to me, they are the most important events in the world, and add color to my life. And yet, in time, they too will become ancient history, for which little evidence exists.

So does that make them any less real, or meaningful? I suppose not, since they are how I experience life. The only life I can really experience is my own (until they invent fully interactive VR, I suppose). And frankly, a huge part of the life experience that I struggle with is that it will be forgotten and erased from history. Which is kind of a silly thing to worry about, I know, since on a long enough timeline, every life lived will be forgotten and erased from history. It simply can’t last forever, that’s almost certainly impossible. But what’s daunting is that my history will last but a fraction of it, and that a hundred years from now I will live only in the memory of my children and grandchildren, should they still be alive. And in two hundred? Barring gene therapy or other medical advances that more-or-less mimic immortality, there will be no one left alive who will be able to say they knew me.

It’s both a terrifying and comforting dilemma, an ultimate yin and yang. Even if I become somehow famous enough for my name to live on beyond my life, it will soon turn into nothing but a name, the way Charles Dickens or George Washington has. Or, going back even further, to Caesar or Alexander the Great. But the people who actually know me, who remember me, who heard me speak and sing and laugh, will be gone.

Maybe those are the people I should live for, rather than the theoretical people I will never meet and have never been born.

A Draft Completed, Another Project to Begin

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I finished it! I finished the second draft of Phlox Fall!

This pronouncement comes quite delayed, as it was actually completed a month ago, but for reasons ranging from the craziness of life to my laziness on weekends (and a looooooooong love affair with Horizon: Zero Dawn), I haven’t really been back to write about it until now. It took quite a bit longer than I intended due to a plot alteration I made in the second half of the book that required many scenes to be rewritten from scratch. And even those that didn’t need to be complete rewritten required edits–sometimes substantial edits–to make them cohesive with the rest of the book.

Now it’s on to the first readers. Phlox is the current selection for the Graham family book club (members including my parents, siblings, and their spouses), and we’ll be holding our discussion on it in September. I’m excited to hear what they say, as they’ll be coming at it having not read the first draft; only my wife holds that honor. Some of them will be starting without even a basic detail of the plot, so it’ll be especially exciting to hear their takes having no fore-knowledge of what they were getting into.

So, what does that mean for me?

One, it means it’s time for me to move on to something else. I’ve already started putting together character profiles and doing preliminary research for the next writing project, though how long before I start putting pen to paper (or finger to keyboard, rather) is up in the air.

Two, it means I need to start really considering what I want for the future of Phlox. The practical thing would be to send it through a couple more revisions and start trying to sell it, but the question remains how that would be best done. There’s the traditional route, which I have explored previously when trying to sell my novel Sunshine INC, but I’m also becoming much more interested in self-publishing. Whether I feel ready to dedicate myself to the hard work that would be necessary for that avenue is something I’m still exploring, but I think as time goes on, I will be more open to it. There are still a couple mental hurdles I have to clear, though. One, I need to become comfortable with the notion of spending a decent chunk of change on editors, covers, and the like. Two, I need to be ready to put myself out there and do my own marketing. This will probably be the part I struggle with the most, since in a lot of ways it’ll require as much work, if not more, than the actual writing of my stories, and will in some ways be like a second job. But then, writing should already be treated like a second job, and in many ways I’ve been neglecting that very pertinent aspect of this whole endeavor.

So that’s where I stand now, and where my thoughts and concerns lie for the next few months of my writing adventure. I’ll have more to say soon.