Halfway Mark

So I came up for air, and realized I have made it to the halfway mark in my back-to-front edit/galley assembly, and it’s gone by so fast I didn’t have any real time to contemplate a post.

So today, until I get this post done, I’m not working on They Came in Peace, Author’s Edition, only on this post. Which is annoying because honestly I hate the WordPress UI; it’s been a few years since I had this page active, and, frankly, the way it’s all set up now just annoys the SHIT out of me.

Like having to hit [shift]+[enter] to start a new paragraph instead of just [enter] like a normal User Interface.

Okay, enough stream-of-consciousness raving; I try to save that for social media. Well, a social medium.

So, at the halfway mark of building my galley, we start with the first lesson from my So You’re Self-Destructive Enough to Want to be a Writer* quasi university class.

Okay; you wanna be a writer when you grow up. Cool. So did I, so do a lot of people. When we’re young, when we’re kids, everybody dreams of Making It Big. The most ordinary thing in the world is to want to be extraordinary. I stole that line from some movie, honestly can’t remember which – that line was literally the best part.

Here’s the thing: If you’ve ever so much as STARTED a poem, a story, a fucking BOOK REPORT, you’re already WRITING. The only question is, are you ready to go HARD?

Because writing is a VERY solitary practice, and it WILL eat into your social life, and even sneak around your professional life, too. You have to let it become your obsession, your compulsion. I won’t try to teach you How To Write Good, because you either CAN or you CAN’T, and all the learned technical skills, books-to-read-to-sound-literate, books-to-read-to-be-literate, creative writing skills, parts of a god-damn sentence (this one is a run-on,) is all shit you have to learn ON YOUR OWN, from the guidance of teachers you trust, both in high school and college. Your friends and family can’t critique you, and you need to find someone who will legitimately tell you your writing sucks shit, and then tell you both how and why.

The crisis you will be in immediately after is a state known as “Ego Death,” and believe me, it is very necessary. Everything you wrote in high school and grade school may be based on great ideas, fantastic concepts, but I promise you unless you are Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart-level exceptional, which you might be, I don’t know, your creative execution will most probably be utter shit.

I’m not here to teach you a fucking creative writing class; those are available everywhere, and, frankly, other than technical skills, are completely fucking useless to waste money on outside of college/university. Even IN college or uni it’s questionable.

Because the truth is, you don’t just want to be a writer and know how to write good, do you? No, the hours, days, months and years of accumulated solitude, self-doubt, lost sleep, ecstatic bursts of creative inspiration and long hours powered by imaginative disassociation alone, alienation, crippling self-doubt, the intellectually constipative misery of writer’s block, and ultimately fucking Making a Thing, you want to be READ, too, don’t you?

Now, this is probably not an original thought, but I have believed since I was a kid just starting to write that there are only two kinds of writers: Those who want to see their work published and read, and fucking liars.

So, what I’m trying to show you, in this lesson, is how to get published. And believe me, it’s a LOT more fucking complicated than you might think.

Peruse the bestsellers and you’ll see that talent and literary creativity are not requirements to be at the front of the bookstore. The whole fucking thing really is nepotism; it’s about WHO YOU KNOW, and more importantly, WHO THEY KNOW.

You have to network with other writers, socially both online and in skinspace; you have to make some kind of casual friendship with one or two of them; you should go to school with someone who has a parent in the trade and chum up to them. It is ALWAYS about Who You Know.

You want to know how I got They Came in Peace published? Because of people I met on what is now recreational duck-rapist Mark Zuckerberg’s** Fascist Hellsite formerly known as Facebook.

Back in the day before the Yeehadi Vanilla ISIS MAGA mungos shit all over the site like pigeons with irritable bowel syndrome, you could actually join groups of people interested in the same things as you without constantly being bombarded with lunatic intrusions from the politically insane who dare call other people deranged.

Among the people I connected with were a few old greybeards I knew from the Revolutionsf.com website, and friends of theirs, and friends of THEIRS, including author Gary Mitchell (No relation to the fictional man-into-god Gary Mitchell of Star Trek fame,) and my future publisher, Sean Demory.

I’d already at the time published the first two volumes of That Space Opera I Won’t Talk About (But whose copyright is available for licensing) and had a surprisingly existent fanbase of my own. And, as it turns out, among them were editors and graphic artists, and mainly people who stumbled over my work, and for some reason enjoyed it. (I’m sorry, I really am embarrassed by that pretentious bullshit I was writing. I needed to get the fuck over myself and just go for simple high-concept sci-fi and classic adventures like from seasons one and two, whatever the fuck that means…)

So I had a built-in Beta Reader Rogue’s Gallery of volunteers, but I thought I’d ask Sean and Gary and a few other folks from the RevSF community if they’d like to dip their eyeballs in the ink.

…except I thought Gary and Sean were Just Fellow Nerds/Geeks; unlike most creepoids, I don’t deep-dive internet search every name of every person that I interact with online. So, when I started turning the horrible alcohol-fueled nightmares that I’d been having into the narrative thread behind They Came in Peace, I thought to myself, “Well, who better to ask to beta-read my work, than my online nerd buddies?”

A Beta-Read later, and I’ve got Sean telling me the story has legs, and he gives me his notes; as did everyone else I’d asked to beta-read, and with everybody’s notes/suggestions/comments/questions in hand, I wrote another draft of They Came in Peace, and sent it to the second-round volunteers for reading (Most of the same first-rounders, but fewer – TCiP gets a little heavy and hard-to-read in some places: It was literally the stuff of nightmares, so…yeah.)

Sean comes back and tells me he’d like to be my agent, and try and sell They Came in Peace. But first, I needed to work with an editor. Then, I had to take out 20 000 words. Then work with the editor, again.

And he pushed that book everywhere he could; see, he knew people; I didn’t know people, I knew a person; Sean. The problem was, despite “having legs” as Sean put it, nobody wanted to take a risk on a first-time author who isn’t writing the same safe formulaic crap they’re already churning out. I have the rejection slips to prove it. (At least I did until I moved and lost the hard copies to a coffee-in-a-drawer.) I still have the rejections-by-email I got from a LOT of small, medium and big publishers too cheap to reject you on stationary, like it should properly be done.

Anyway, after two rounds of being put through the wringer of rejection like the shit I’d gone through when I was trying to date in high school and college, I’d had enough and was ready to just leave They Came in Peace in permanent storage.

Sean insisted he’d publish it; he said he wanted it to see the light of day, and that it had the legs to sell. So, I promoted him from my agent to my publisher.

The process was glacial – scheduling it for publication, trade galley reviews (more editing), the Cover Art Follies, but by September 2017 it was ready to roll, just had to wait for the opening on the roster.

Waiting for your slot on the roster, if you’re fortunate enough to get published, will be the longest, most tedious experience of your writing career. Yes, worse than those six months you spent blocked and questioning if you were better off just geting some Joe Job.

Spots on rosters are decided years in advance; my spot? April 2020.

…anybody remember what happened in 2019?

…anybody else notice that since 2020, it’s still been 2020?

Three things happened to me in April 2020: 1) My firstborn son turned 10. 2) My mother died. 3) My book was published just as the economy collapsed.

My mother did not pass from COVID, thankfully, but none of us got to be by her side when she died; that is going to live with me forever. Along with a lot of other unfair shit my mom had to deal with because of all the bastards in our family.

I’d like to add that not one of my surviving uncles, nor any of my aunts (Not even her own sister,) cousins, or nieces offered my sister and I any condolences after our mother, who had spent her life giving to others in the family, even those far more well off than her, died. Not. A. Single. One.

They couldn’t even be bothered to pull their heads out of their asses long enough to extend their regrets. The Forlinis, Gamboas, Williams, Gluteneys and Townsend families are all fucking garbage shitbirds, as far as I’m concerned. You bastards took advantage of my mom.

Anyway…I can’t let that shit go, but I want to focus.

Long story short, while the world went to shit the first time around in the ’20s, my the first edition of They Came in Peace died on the vine, after 14 sales.

It got overlooked and withered. Once my contract with Sean was up, I asked him to take it down. He told me to get it back out there, and do good things with it.

I’ve spent the last 5 years trying to write other stories; I have at least two per year that are in various stages of being abandoned during construction.

Because, my mind kept turning to They Came in Peace; the work wasn’t done, and it might just be the one actual good novel I ever write. It’s become an albatross around my neck, constantly reminding me of the frustration of failure that about nine out of ten writers have to face, perpetually.

Finally, I decided if it was the Last Good Thing I’d written, then I’d whittle away at it, carve it, polish it, and get it back out to market.

While I’m halfway done working the trade galley ready to self-publish (In the age of print-on-demand and ebooks, the true democratization of literature) once I’m happy with it.

After the trade galley is reassembled, I’m going to take another shot at removing 10 000 words from it; finish streamlining it.

Now, self-publishing is going to be a WHOLE OTHER LESSON, so, stay tuned.

But long story short, cultivate relationships with other people in “our field.”

No matter how fucking good you are, if you don’t know the right people you won’t get published. Herman Mellville wouldn’t have gotten Moby Dick past the screener readers if he were publishing today. He’d have had to schmooze with the right people long before he wrote it.

Honestly, of all the American literary giants of the 20th century and earlier, the only one I think would have an honest hope in hell of getting published today would be Samuel “Mark Twain” Clemens, and even then he’d likely be a Blogger.

Okay; I don’t know what else to tell you in this lesson, so fuck off and get back to your writing. Or something else that needs doing; I don’t care. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.

I’ll be updating the blog again, soon. Adjacent.

*Course title still has not been written in stone.
**There is no evidence to suggest which specific kind of waterfowl Mark Zuckerberg is sexually abusing.