Week 42 - A Glimmer of Hope

 

Can a book like this be published today? I sure hope so...

Update – Not so good, but getting better. After a week-long descent into video game addiction, I finally got my shit together and started writing again. Not much, but I’m building momentum. I actually took the laptop to one of the county libraries and wrote a couple paragraphs in public. It’s a little exercise I came up with to spur creativity and, frankly, get out of the house. If I get stuck, I can pick a book off the shelf and read for a while. Wins all over the place.

November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, so I’m going to attempt what I was going to attempt last month, and write the first draft of a book over the course of the next thirty days. I haven’t fully decided which book, so I picked a contender at random from my list of possibles. If it doesn’t pan out, I’ll try another and maybe another until something sticks. Pity there’s no Start a Book in a Month program. I’d be a whiz at that.

Whichever book I end up on, it’s going to written longhand. This will keep me away from the internet and all its enticing distractions. That’s how I wrote the detective book, and that turned out okay. Anyway, I can’t type with my fingers crossed but I can still hold a pen. I’ll let you know how it worked out next week.

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Meanwhile, back at the writer’s block…

Recap: I wrote a book I had hopes for, until I looked at the markets. At the moment, my target market (SFF) is caught up in the throes of diversity. Straight, white characters, especially men, are anathema right now. So are male authors, and not just in genre. I recently made the mistake of watching a YouTube post about how women have taken over publishing in general and are making the decisions on who and what gets accepted and published, to the point that straight white male authors like Brandon Sanderson, in spite of an impressive sales record, have moved on to self-publishing. The upside for him is, he doesn’t have to share his sales profits with a publisher any more. Other, less popular authors, regardless of skin tone or gender leaning, probably won’t be as fortunate.

I, of course, insisted on writing a book about a straight white male in a straight white male profession, with the added red flag of choosing a male Anglo-Saxon pen name to keep impressionable kids from hunting up the erotic romance books I stupidly signed my real name to. I did manage to work in a Black character, but these days simply being Black isn’t enough, any more than my being simply female will help me get my foot through a publisher’s door. I should have published the sexy romance with the bisexual Hawaiian/Pacific Islander vampire slayer heroine. That was over-the-top when I wrote it; today she’d just be another face in the crowd.

Then, as a finishing touch, I had the only contender for Token Lesbian come out as straight with a vengeance, when she hooked up with a literal caveman. Let’s just pound those nails into the book’s coffin with a sledgehammer, shall we?

With all this going against me, added to my many insecurities, is it any wonder why I went on a writer’s block? (It’s no excuse for the video gaming, though. That’s on me.)

But there is hope. The SFF genre may be out of reach at the moment, but trends do change. Tastes change. The pendulum swings one way, and then it swings the other. In a market glutted with diversity books, some small publisher might be willing to take a chance on something new/old with a twist. It doesn’t have to be SFF anyway; my book can still be classified as mystery, although with a touch of the fantastic. If necessary, I’ll try querying mainstream publishers. As far as I know, they still publish anything and everything. With women running the industry, I may have a shot in spite of the male lead and byline, because at the ultimate heart of the book is a love story. (And how writers of all stripes get shafted by publishers. I'm hoping nobody notices that.) The Bridges of Madison County was written by a man, after all. Is Nicholas Sparks still publishing? I’ll have to check that out.

And if all else fails…I think for Christmas I’ll treat myself to the latest edition of Self-Publishing for Dummies. Maybe ask Brandon Sanderson for marketing tips. You only fail when you stop trying. In the meantime, it’s back to writing smut romance and hope I can garner enough income to offset the drop in my paid job. Failing that, it’s back to my scheme to blackmail the Pope. That one’s a long shot, but whatever happens I can always write about it. See y’all next week.

 

Week 19 - Frozen

 

Update – Not much went on last week. I had a boring assignment—simple typos and punctuation errors on almost every other line made it drag on and on—to the point I finally just quit working and went back to computer games. Yes, I had a relapse. I got the assignment done before deadline, but my own writing, not to mention the yard work, suffered as a result. It doesn’t help that my area has been stuck in a bad weather pattern of primarily clouds and drizzle with only glimpses of sun. I think the sun is getting back at us for being eclipsed last month. It’s just warm enough and wet enough that the grass grows like mad but you barely get the chance to mow it. Supposedly this should be prime writing time for me, but…

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I might as well come right out and say it. I’m caught in yet another writer’s block. I’m not sure what brought it on. I’d blame the tooth extraction, which restricted my diet to soft, mainly healthy foods for almost a week (and cost me almost $700 I don’t have), but this has been going on since before my dental work. Ditto for the eye exam and the new glasses—which are working fine, by the way, so I can’t blame that either. I’m also able to eat junk food again, which I proved by devouring an entire bag of potato chips (sour cream and onion ripple chips, yay!) in lieu of a regular meal. I’ve been moving around more and sleeping relatively well on a regular basis, so that can’t be it.

The last time I worked on the detective book was when I sent out the sub package. That was late April. Haven’t touched it since. I thought about going back to the romance but didn’t. I have a notebook of flash scenes to comb through in search of inspiration but haven’t looked at it. A couple of ideas surfaced briefly and then sank again. For nearly an entire month all I’ve written is nightly flash, and even that feels lifeless.

And then I gave up over the weekend and got back into the computer games. This time it was Sudoku. Spent an entire work day on that one. That’s what I did instead of wrapping up the paid assignment. It almost went to two days, except I got so furious at myself I shut down the computer, went outside and mowed a section of lawn I’d meant to tackle over the weekend. Then I went grocery shopping and bought that bag of chips I talked about. The adrenaline surge got me back on track and I easily finished the paid assignment before deadline. I’m feeling better now. But I still can’t write.

I think I’m having a crisis of self-confidence. It’s only recently that I’ve come to realize how derivative a lot of my ideas are. And that I may be neuro-divergent, so my characters don’t necessarily act like normal people. It doesn’t help that the publishing world has changed drastically since my childhood, when SF and comic books ignited a desire in me to tell stories for a living. Back in those simpler, non-corporate days, even mediocre writers could earn a living wage just by churning out books. It’s not that easy now. Not to mention you can find yourself abruptly cancelled by internet trolls for, well, pretty much anything, or nothing at all. This is why I’m not on social media.

Maybe I’m putting too much pressure on myself. There are a lot of writers worse than me out there who are selling well and making a living. Maybe that’s what I need—hit the libraries, find a really hideously-written best seller and boost my self-esteem by figuring out how I would have done it better. I’ve already got one in mind: a recent YA book by a former romance writer that, to judge by the reviews, borrows heavily from the work of one of my favorite SF authors. It even has a plucky girl protag who speaks in current American slang even though the story takes place on an alien world with no connection to Earth. Sounds like just the thing to make me feel like writing again. That’s how a lot of us got started: we read a bad book and threw it against the wall while yelling, “I could write better than that!” And proceeded to do so, either via fan fiction or diving straight into submitting to publishers. Because you don’t need to be a good writer to sell a book. You just need to tell a good story. If the reader’s entertained, they won’t care if the book is bad. The only time you fail is when you fail to be entertaining. Or fail to write anything at all.

You can’t give the people what they want. The people don’t know what they want until they see or read it. Or, as someone once responded on an internet discussion about what editors were looking for: “Nobody was looking for Harry Potter.”

I can write. I can sell what I’ve written. I’ve done both before. Just stop worrying about being perfect and sit down and tell the story. If people like it, they’ll let me know. If not…what the hell. I’ve got plenty of others waiting in line. I just have to get myself to write them.

But not today. Today I’m going to get out of the house and see if I can find a copy of that book so I can see how bad it really is. I also want to get a copy of Last Action Hero, another story about a fictional character finding himself in the real world, with the added bonus of starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’m going to need another bag of chips. See y’all next week.