Tripping over the feet of my success

My brain is a tricksy place full of tar pits and slides

Reading time: approximately 13 minutes

Hello my darlings! 💖 I see we have a few new faces here…welcome!!! Help yourself to tea and scones over on the table.

I did it! It’s done! Clarion West’s Flash Fiction Writing Workshop (part of their fundraising Write-a-thon) ended on August 5th. It was an intensely crazy six weeks, and I had lots of fun with my writing group members, silver and gold.

My stats:

Stories written: 5

Critiques done: 25

I went in to the Workshop with a number of ideas. Mainly:

• To try to write all the 1500-word flash stories in the same setting, one I created just a week before the Workshop started;

• To try to write in my speaking voice

• To use moment & image moment concepts

The last two, as I have mentioned in previous posts, are from Jack Grapes’ Method Writing, and are the two concepts from the book that I have a good enough handle on to even try applying.

Um, short version? All these things worked well. REALLY REALLY REALLY WELL.

I did this Workshop last year, and managed to produce a story every week. They were not-bad stories. I found myself having to write and re-write, anywhere from 4-7 times before the deadline. I was starting the stories in the wrong place, and often lingering on details that didn’t really matter to the story as I tried to figure out new characters and setting and plot each week.

This year my process was very, very different. Instead of trying to figure out the beginning, middle, and end of the story using structure, I simply kept in mind: choice. What choice is my main character going to have to make, why are they going to have to make it, what will they chose, and what is the fallout from their decision?

This framework paired with the weekly prompts like sprinkles on ice cream. I had my setting, I had some characters that I kept coming back to, and one choice lead to another. The stories honestly were more like scenes, ending on cliffhangers right after one choice was made and leading into the next. I didn’t have to do huge re-writes, just some tightening up. I dug into character voice by writing like I talk, then tweaking that natural flow to represent different character voices. I told each story moment by moment, easily playing with psychological time and tension now that I get how to layer in detail and commentary between character action & dialogue. And somehow this magic produced more emotion in my writing then I’ve ever had before.

The good news / bad news is, this worked so well that I don’t know what this story even is. There is an over-arcing narrative that seems to be happening, and I have no idea where it’s going. Are these linked short stories? Are they scenes of something longer? Is this a serial?? At the moment, I can’t tell. And that’s freaking amazing, because I’ve never successfully written a story longer than a couple thousand words. And here I am, just paddling off into the deep end three minutes after I learned how to swim. 🙌

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I took last week off; it was necessary to breathe for a minute and to try to figure out what comes next. But that didn’t stop me from thinking. Unfortunately.

Panic #1

I suddenly and without knowing how am not only writing well, but I have a writing process that is working. But I’m signed up for a writing class in September. There is a chance the class will expand my current understanding and help deepen my process. There is an equal chance the class will force me to learn a new process that (probably) won’t work for me. And if history is any guide, I’ll take the class as gospel, forget I had a working process, and flounder along trying to make a new process work for me, setting my writerly growth back a couple years until I stumble my way back to my natural working process again.

So, 50/50 on great vs awful.

I’m tempted to cancel the class. Very, very, very tempted. I do have a record of this working process in both my handwritten journal and the pieces I did for the workshop (I tend to document my thought process as I’m forming a story idea). And a pinky swear from my husband to remind me that I did know what I was doing for five weeks if I forget and get frustrated.

Why is this so hard??

Panic #2

What do I do with this story? Do I just post it to Substack? Should I finish it first? Should I post what I have and how it’s developing and document the journey? What are my options, even?

Panic #2a

Wait, how do I finish it?

This one I managed to work out, actually. Writing 1500 word “flash stories” at a time with the help of a prompt once a week worked before, so why change now?

Eventually I’ll likely need to speed that pace up, but this is all new and tender and I don’t want to mess with it before I’ve gotten through an entire story. And hey, wasn’t this supposed to be my fun writing summer, not my neurotic writing summer….?

Panic #2.5

Most advice one receives from “industry professionals” is to not put the cart before the horse. Or, don’t worry about marketing or publishing a story until the story is completely written.

This advice feels like when your boss doesn’t get why you need a higher salary, because they bought their house 20 years ago when $250k was outrageous, and their car 7 years ago when money was free. Their cost of living hasn’t changed appreciably in decades. Even with the recent inflation. So why can’t you possibly get by? You must be budgeting wrong. 🙄

ANYWAY.

If I post the pieces of this yet-unfinished story here to Substack, what happens if I am not able to finish it? I doubt you would be pleased, dear readers. I sure wouldn’t be, were I you! And even if I do manage to finish…what then? I’d like to be a working writer again, which means, eventually, getting the moneys. Should I be trying to get more Substack subscriptions to build my audience? Do I hope that one day I could bundle together the story and sell you all a print version? (I’d make it super pretty! Definitely with at least one hologram.) Do I try the paid subscription thing? Do I try to sell the story as a reprint? At which point I’d need to take it down off my Substack while it’s published elsewhere, so new subscribers get…holes?

Do I hold on to it and try to trad publish? Send one story to 70 magazines hoping that an editor likes it and has room for it and it fits the theme of the issue well enough where I will get maybe if I am way lucky, $300, and the magazine gets ad revenue, subscription revenue, and more readers? And buys more rights then I want to sell them because they can? Or I can try to bundle the stories together into a book and pay to have it professionally edited and then spend years querying agents and editors. Maybe one day I get out of the slush pile just to have an editor tell me how I need to change my work to be profitable and sign a contract with a clause that the publisher can run the book through an AI language model to duplicate my style. I’ll make pennies on the dollar assuming I sell out my $5000 advance (that I spent on marketing the book to try to get enough copies sold), which if I don’t I’ll need to come up with a new pen name and start from the beginning.

Do I self publish on Amazon? Somehow hope the AI-overloaded algorithm helps readers find me? How about Wattpad? Can I possibly engage with the community enough to get my work noticed? Make a zine? Do I go to every SFF-related conference on the planet and try to sell them one by one?

You know, I don’t read enough short stories myself, and the short story markets are hanging on by a thread.

The closing of a popular and professional SFF magazine is always a bummer. And it has a lot of people in the SFF world talking about the dire state of magazines and short stories. Literary magazines are always in a precarious state, and SFF mags in particularly are hurt by the new Kindle Periodical decision. How did we get to this state, when a magazine surviving a few years is a miracle and even the top ones can’t fund themselves?

On the State of Literary Magazines

Maybe I need to start a YouTube channel where I review short stories to get more people interested in them and build my own platform that way. So then I just need to write stories and document my process on Substack and create a YouTube channel and probably market on social media and I totally have time to do all that, I can figure that out with my chronic illness and not knowing how to do at least half of it.

Complete Meltdown

Why am I even writing stories at all?

And how unfair is it that I’ve spent nearly 30 years figuring out how to write stories good and now I need to figure out how to market them. I seriously do not have another 30 years to figure that shit out and then maybe finally have a career?

I wonder if this is at least half of why (pre-successful) writers don’t like sitting down to write. Because who knows where this story is going to end up? If only 5 people read it ever, what the hell am I doing with my life, exactly?

Why is this so hard?

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Did you know that Tori Amos wrote the forward to Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel Death: The High Cost of Living?

She wrote:

We almost lost a master take and the band leaves tomorrow and we can’t do anymore music until we resolve this. We’re in the middle of nowhere in the desert and my being wants to go crawl under a cactus and wish it away. Instead, I dyed my hair and [Death] visited me and I started to accept the mess I’m in. I know that mess spelled backward is ssem and I felt much better armed with that information. Over the last few hours I’ve allowed myself to feel defeated, and just like she said, if you allow yourself to feel the way you really feel, maybe you won’t be afraid of that feeling anymore.

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Have you ever thought about the narrative of publishing?

• Everyone knows that of the thousands and thousands of manuscripts sent to editors, only a tiny handful get published.

• Everyone knows that of the books that get published, only a tiny fraction of those sell more than a thousand copies.

• Everyone knows that you can’t make a living as a published author. Well, a few very lucky people can. But not you.

• Everyone knows that indie publishing is a crapshoot. The algorithm changes, Amazon is capricious and cruel, the genres are all too flooded.

• Everyone knows that only a handful of people are successful indie publishing. And you aren’t one of them.

And I know there are real statistics to back up these things that everyone knows. I’m not saying this narrative is false. I’m just saying….this narrative is very convenient for everyone who isn’t a writer.

There are more authorial successes than lottery winners or people struck by lightning. It’s not completely impossible. But the narrative sure makes it sound like becoming a full-time (fiction) author is slightly less easy than capturing a unicorn.

All I’m saying is, could there possibly be a reason that the companies and corporations that stand between a reader and an author would want us to buy into the narrative that only a few writers can make it?

Did you know that writers hate marketing? That’s what I’m told. I mean, writers just spent years of backbreaking work pouring their blood, sweat, tears, heart, and soul into their very best work, and spent more years trying to get it published. They don’t want to spend even more time marketing. Writers write. Others should sully their hands in the dross of sales, not the Creators with a Vision making ART.

We are also told that writing is a meritocracy, and that only the very very best writers make it. How do you know if your writing is any good? Well, put it in front of an editor at a magazine or book publisher, of course! If they do not accept it immediately, you have to get better. You aren’t good enough (yet). Try again. Try harder.

Oh wait, did you say 10,000 people bought the self-published version of your book? Congratulations! You’re good enough for us.

I know I tend to forget that the publishing industry is only tangentially about publishing amazing work. The “industry” is a business that needs to publish things that make them profitable. Publishers want to sell to their audiences more than they want to find the right audience for your work. Amazon gets a cut of all the books sold on their platform, so as long as people keep buying they couldn’t care less if your Omegaverse book gets in front of Omegaverse readers.

If I keep profit motives in the front of my mind, then everything we are told is suspect. Why are only a handful of writers wildly successful, and why does there only seem to be “wildly successful” or “unable to make a living” as author categories? What is it about the publishing industry that it only has room for a few stars to shine? I bet it’s money!

Why do I hate the idea of marketing? I’m fully convinced that I do, but I’ve never tried it. Maybe I’d be great at it? I mean, isn’t my audience people interested in at least some of the same things I am? So….couldn’t finding them and meeting them be….fun?

What if the big difference between a successful author and an unsuccessful one isn’t always talent or luck. What if it’s sometimes a willingness to go out and find the awesome people who will love your story? Because that doesn’t sound completely impossible. Right?

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Maybe it is impossible. Maybe this entire line of thought is childishly optimistic. But it has me wondering. There exist in the world people who get their stories in front of the right readers. How? I’m going to be researching that to figure it out. I’m going to find all the publishing and marketing options available to writers today and try to find out how successful they are. I also want to find the success stories, and see what sets them apart for real.

I guess what I’m saying is, if I’m going to fail, at least I’m going to try my best to not fail first.

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This has gone on way too long, and if you have reached the end, my deepest gratitude. I hope you all are doing well, and I’ll be back in your inbox again soon!!

💖 💖 💖,

Elnora