'Do you wait for your dancing lessons to be sent from God?'
Reflections on publishing, nonsense and a few short stories for you to read along the way.
My mood shifts have been notable of late, the ebbs and flows taking me from mellow to hollow and everything else in between. Pushing myself back into traditional publishing circles has been an interesting one and has made me introspective and uncomfortable in various ways.
It pushes me to reflect on my time in art school in New England, followed by my time in creative writing and literary theory classes. Both were punctuated with that deep sense of feeling like I didn’t belong where I was, somehow stuck in the liminal spaces that existed between the “high” and “low” of the arts. I wasn’t born with the money, means, or opportunities to fashion myself as a savant with immaculate taste, but my interests were always divided between the abstract and ridiculous. At the time, I got into trading art films via Usenet and IRC, both of which were antiquated forms of communication for the early 2000s, although they worked perfectly for those means. I was comfortable with that world, though, in part because I grew up trading wrestling tapes with weirdos online.
Through my time in indie publishing I’ve seen some of the large, sometimes violent shifts in publishing as they rumble through the undercurrents of forgotten genres. Science fiction moved “indie” in part because the publishing industry was shifting away from the basics, the steadfast and reliable sales that come from publishing space opera, military SF, and so on. SF authors embraced this unknown digital future and, in turn, cut out all the middle-folks entirely. Their readers came along for the ride.
The issue, at least in part, was that the folks consuming that kind of fiction skewed older, more conservative, and looking for their specific needs to be met on a 1:1 basis. Romance has also been shifting, where even the ever-popular Colleen Hoover was originally an indie before her explosion of popularity and offers she couldn’t refuse from big publishers. Romance, some YA, and some fantasy have more wiggle room than SF does with reader expectations, but they also… don’t.
As Amazon becomes more and more powerful, publishers scramble to make up lost territory and keep up with trends while never amending their glacial, bloated schedules, indies fill gaps and can transition on a dime. The problem, at least from my perspective, is something that looks a lot like the film industry right now. In the film industry, only a handful of companies and their sub-brands dominate theaters. The mid-budget films have essentially disappeared. Indie films have become mid-budget films just on a tighter leash, which has pushed the more experimental indie films even further into the margins.
So too, indie publishing has become the home for mid-list authors, and experimentation has fallen to the wayside.
I’m an asshole. I contain multitudes. While I enjoy writing commercial fiction sometimes, at other times I need to do something odd or abstract. As much as I enjoy the fact that Cormac McCarthy and Haruki Murakami can still ply their trades and come up with delightfully difficult, unique work, they’re a relic of a time that’s coming to an end, I fear. Instead, I get to see authors I’m eagerly following along their paths like Kay Chronister, the author of last year’s fantastic Desert Creatures (see my review here), fret about sales and what comes next.
This is all my roundabout way of saying I’m trying to consider my next move, although I have a few projects I’ve been working on, and looking out over the publishing world isn’t really imbuing me with much hope. I’ll never be a marketing machine, a grifter, or a productivity hub outputting the same basic stories in perpetuity without my mind melting into nothing.
I’ve got one book I’m querying for that’s “different,” but I felt wasn’t different enough to keep me satisfied. Another one I need to revisit and hammer into shape, a book I’d indie publish and would start a new series that I’m about 1/5th of a way through, and a weird one that melds together my aforementioned love for avant garde film and professional wrestling. That’s, perhaps, the way. Who knows.
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I’ve got some stuff for you to read in the meantime.
Every Day Fiction published “Bright Future” on Friday, a piece very much written about sending my kids back to school during the pandemic.
My Patreon shorts for this month are indeed two-fold, with two drabbles; one about lost love, the other about an oligarch facing his biggest fear.
SFWA has released a resource page regarding AI text/image generators featuring pieces written by members, with my recent one from here included.
I’ve been trying to blog more, which means short, regular updates that aren’t grand pieces. You can check that out here.