Dreaming in Colors

The more I’ve been reading and weighing information, I’ve come to a staggering realization about my future as a writer.

I may choose to take the self-publishing route.

I’ve been published by a small press. Granted, small press comes with all sorts of disadvantage from the get-go, and most of you already know my disastrous stories with them.

Most of my life I’ve wanted to be a published writer. Then when I got published, I didn’t feel any different about my writing. In fact, with the editing I was given and the absolute lack of marketing help, and the non-existent promotional assistance and my meager 5% royalty on a book I did a tremendous amount of out-of-pocket  expenses for, with NO advance – I did not feel wonderful for having finally gotten a book with my name on it – I felt stupid.  Like I should somehow have known better.  To date, I’ve earned roughly 380$ on Ghosts of Seattle, total. Even though I’ve sold thousands of copies, been pushed through Costco and promoted on Amazon. And then I purchased a box of my own books through the company to do my own promoting. So of the 380$, I spent half on my own promotional copies for interviews and networking.

When I turned down three more contracts with the same publisher, my editor asked me why I wouldn’t write for them and I said it was an issue of payment, “It’s just not worth the money to do all that work.”

She replied somewhat indignantly, “Writer’s don’t write to get rich. They write because they must, because they love it.”

I answered, “Yes, but you can’t write if you can’t eat.”

She suggested I was in the wrong profession. And in a moment of tortured self-loathing and fear, I signed a second contract, only realizing in hindsight, I signed out of fear. Fear that I would never be a paid writer, living (if even meagerly) off my own creative force.  My dream might never happen if I don’t take bad contracts to build my resume.  (at least that’s how I thought about it at the time)

So of course, I told myself A) you weren’t published for what you love and are good at, you just tripped and fell into this contract and didn’t know any different. B) it was a small press and not a “Major House” with a “Major Contract”.

You can call yourself a writer when you get published for fantasy at one of the “Big 6” houses.

So I spent the next five years re-writing, building and working toward the chance to be – discovered.

I wasn’t asking for a lot.

Just enough to live on.

I didn’t care if I scored a million dollar deal, so long as I could reach a readership and supply creative works that people found entertaining, educational and escapist.

That’s it. Sounds pretty simple, right? You’d think, anyway.

But the submission process and the agent hunt has been incredibly demoralizing. Sure, everyone goes through this stage. It’s part of the gauntlet to weed out the uncommitted, just like the long, lonely hours, the brutalizing critiques, the disheartening failures and the colossal bills piling up, only met in part by a few hundred bucks. If you can’t sustain all these along with constant rejection – you’re in the wrong field, right?

Do you have the conviction?

Will you write when you’re tired, uninspired, sick, just worked a double shift? Will you make time for your writing, by cutting out a social life and squeezing in your edits while you’re at the gym on the treadmill drinking coffee from a sports bottle and wishing you didn’t have a 50 hour week ahead at the office?

Will you write inside when it’s sunny out? Will you wonder when the last time you had a chance to eat, or drink or shower was, because you were sitting in front of your computer for 12 hours? Will you shop, do laundry, cook and clean while taking notes for characters, hooks, backstory, arcs and world building?

Would you spend your last 100 bucks before payday next week to get a back-up hard drive for your manuscripts?

Will you stay up working on that character arc till 2am when you have to be get up for work in five hours? Will you spend days on end in crippling self-doubt?

Will you pay out of pocket for classes on craft, conferences, networking, promotion and education? Will you do your own photography and marketing and research, Ohmigod, the RESEARCH. Never. Ending. RESEARCH. Will you?

Will you stand shoulders straight and listen to people tell you, “You’re awful” “You suck” “You missed this mark and this arc and this giant plot hole” and “You should probably not quit your day job”.  THEN after hearing all that, go home, stay up late and start over? Will you take the mistakes and learn and keep going? Will you try to be better, stronger – clearer? Will you work to keep your ego in check? Keep your desire for validation planted firmly out of the story frame?  Will you tell yourself, every day, sometimes a dozen times, “you can do this.”?

Will you send query after query to agents too busy to tell you that they aren’t interested, to publishers with a 6 month waiting list and a 99 percent rejection rate? Will you pay out of pocket for each print copy and shipping when you’ve become unintentionally unemployed?

Will you check your email a thousand times a day, hoping for ONE-Fucking-Break?

Do you have the conviction to give up sex, because a relationship would cut in to your writing time? Would you be celibate for years in an effort to push for the dream?

Will you do all that for writing?

Because – I did.

And I can guaran-fucking-tee  that I didn’t do it all for a whopping three hundred and eighty dollars.

It’s one thing to question my quality or craft, dear small press editor, but it’s entirely another to question my conviction.

Quality can be learned, craft conditioned.

But you either have conviction or you don’t.

I didn’t do all that because “I’m a writer and I must because I love it.”

True, I love it. It makes me stupid happy to write.

I did it so that I can support myself with my writing. I nurtured it when it was hard, difficult, seemingly impossible. I kept getting up when it seemed like I should just lie down.

It still feels like I should just stretch out, snuggle down and forget the whole thing.

But how would that make an interesting story?

So, to make a long story longer, I gave myself a number of rejections I’d be willing to put myself through before I took the self-publishing path. It seemed ridiculously high at the time, but I’m now only about 9 rejections away from that mark.

I didn’t give myself a limit because I can’t take the rejection, I gave myself a limit so I wouldn’t waste a huge chunk of time sitting around not making progress.  

So the solution is to handle my career myself. Raise funds for a story editor, a copyeditor and a graphic artist, to name a few – then fly into the new digital age.  

It wasn’t the dream.

The dream was to land a huge, juicy contract with a “Big 6” house thereby giving me all the personal and professional validation I’ve craved to assuage all the self-doubt and sense of unworthiness.

Also known as vanity.

The dream WAS vanity.

But the foundation of the dream has always been – hands down – to be read. To offer up stories to anyone and everyone AND thereby pay my rent and buy groceries with my own hard work and creativity.

At the end of months of queries, the final gift is realizing in retrospect – I don’t need the validation anymore from a huge publishing company to tell me I’m good enough so I can finally believe it and get my 5-17% royalty.

I’m not sayin’ I’d turn down a fatty, unreal contract. Not sayin’ that at all. A girl can still hope for the mother lode, right?

Just sayin’ that come January, I embark on the journey of going my own way to reach the goal of getting my stories on the market.

Time to put it on the table and let my work be judged by the readers. Time to let my work support me on the merits of my own quality, marketing and effort – and when I can pay rent and buy coffee, then I’ll really know whether or not I’ve made it as a writer.