During my recent layoff from writing, I had time to take a good hard look at my writing career and make some key assessments. And one thing quickly became clear.
I’m full of shit.
In particular, as it pertains to “reinventing” publishing. Yes, the publishing industry has some pretty severe problems. As pointed out in Book Business by longtime publishing insider Jason Epstein, running publishing the same as any other business doesn’t really work. I was right about that part.
I was wrong in thinking I could change it.
And here’s why. Because I was afraid. The reason I was so intent on reinventing publishing was that I was afraid to really try to get my own stuff published in that system. When I finished what in retrospect was really a first draft of Between Heaven and Hell in 1997, I halfheartedly sent it out to I think three different publishers, none of which were particularly interested in unrepresented submissions (the infamous “slush pile”). When it didn’t sell immediately, I began looking for other options, and ran across a nascent Peanut Press looking for content, and I was “published”.
Since then I’ve come up with several publishing schemes: fiction as buskering, fiction as serials. None have worked. And in the back of my mind, a tiny voice. “You still don’t know,” it says. “You still haven’t really tried. You don’t know if you’re really good enough.”
That voice is right, of course. I owe it to myself to find out if I can make it just like any other writer. To run the same gauntlet and win.
But to really do this, I have to bring my A game, my best work. And Homeworld, my NaNo 06 project, wasn’t my best work. Even given the standard of “shitty first drafts”, it’s at best a work in progress. It will be a good book someday, when I decide what to do with it. Right now it’s a poor imitation of the contemporary SF thriller genre whose books by James Rollins, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child I enjoy so much.
No, I think it’s time to go back to the beginning. To take the 30,000 word treatments that make up each third of Between Heaven and Hell, apply what I’ve learned about writing in the past ten years, and turn them into real novels.
Which means the first up, my “breaking back into writing” project, is Revelation. I’ve gone over Daniel Cho’s discovery that immortals calling themselves angels and demons really do walk among us, and I’ve found ways to add more adventure, more action, more ancient conspiracy, more emotion, more depth and even a few new characters to a book that won’t let me go until I do right by it.
And no, it hasn’t escaped my notice that this book has everything that’s “hot” in publishing right now, and could make me the next Dan Brown if I pull it off (the key difference being that I can actually write). I also realize the publishing business is fickle and swift, meaning there’s a pretty serious deadline pressure. If I take too long, my window of opportunity might close.
I’m not as freaked out about that as you might think, though. While books aren’t as popular now as when I was growing up in the 1970s, facing competition from not only movies and TV, but gaming, the web, social networking and all the other myriad distractions we have available to day, authors like Brown and JK Rowling have brought enough people back to the written word to make it worthwhile. And pressure from all those other media have made publishers desperate to find that next “hot” writer.
If I approach this with the requisite honesty and dedication, work hard and keep at it, I know I can produce a work good enough to attract an agent, find a publisher and just maybe become a bestseller.
And now it’s time to get to work.