"My Generation was Fooled to Pursue Our Dreams"
"... but it is not what it seems, you never need what you want and you rarely want what you need"
Sometimes I get myself into a funk. It’s difficult not to. You see, being a writer involves a lot of rejection. Not just rejection, but blind rejection that comes with no feedback and nothing really actionable. If you’re a writer at the moment, you’re tasked with a lot of decisions, one of which is to pursue traditional publishing or to go the indie route. I’ve been an indie since 2013, although that was never my desire. It was more about impatience.
Querying agents was an arduous, time-consuming process that came with delayed responses. When I was first querying, it was 2011, and in retrospect, the book I had at the time (the currently out of print Godslayer) wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. Little did I know that I’d get some of the only actual feedback on my writing career during that process and that with over an additional decade of experience honing my craft, building an audience and understanding publishing more, none of that really seems to matter. The feedback wasn’t even great! In fact, it was probably damaging in some cases (the feedback that men don’t read fiction, and if I want to write fiction, find a genre they do read as I’m a man writing fiction, that’s a lot to unpack). Since around January, I’ve been querying for a book I’ve been working on for years now. It’s been an on-and-off affair, considering how many indie books I’ve published, but I finally sat down and gave it the attention it deserved.
It’s good. There’s a lot to it and it doesn’t hold back in attacking the wealthy, racist, sexist, homophobic ruling class. The response has been… muted. The most helpful advice I’ve gotten was “it’s good! But I can’t sell this right now,” or that science fiction is in a slump and said agent will have to pass. I’m not… quiet sure what to do with that.
Science fiction still exists, there are still publishers, and while numbers may be down, there are new books being picked up by these publishers and released all the time. I still sell science fiction books every day. You may ask, why don’t I just indie publish this book, then? To put it bluntly, the indie publishing industry is not equipped to handle books like this. The indie SF market is for established authors to republish their back catalog, for dreamers to release to crickets, or for to-market science fiction adventures that read like old Heinlein books.
For someone like me right now, whose interests have heavily diverged enough from this “market” and into things I’m more interested in, I’m not sure what kind of forward path there is. Create art, toss it into the world and hope someone finds it? Publishing is, after all (as you’ll hear ad nauseam with giddy enthusiasm) a business. If what I’m making isn’t a part of some ritualistic tossing of deli meats against a wall to see what will stick, nobody will want to take a chance on it. It brings up a much deeper issue of how we interface with what we consume, including our expectations and susceptibility to marketing hype.
We’re living in Barbenheimer times. Where an acclaimed filmmaker was attached to a film with the most commercial of intents, she embodied that as best she could, while attempting to subvert all of those expectations and people seem to be into the Barbie movie. I haven’t seen it yet, although I’m sure I will at some point. Nor have I seen Oppenheimer, which I also want to see, especially considering one book I’ve been writing is about New Mexico’s history with the atomic bomb. Trying to see a three-hour long movie in the theater as a parent is almost impossible, though. Still, what does this mean? Have people gotten so irony-pilled that pairing up two diametrically different movies together because of a shared release date becomes an earnest expression of self, are people this tired of Disney’s hegemonic lording over the box office and are ready to move on from Star Wars and the MCU?
The suits don’t get it, by the way. There’s already talk of a “Mattel Cinematic Universe,” because that’s the moral of the story to these people. Their brains are broken in such a profound way that they can be presented with the same data the rest of us are, but come to conclusions that only people with money and no understanding or respect for the average person could come to. It’s the same reason these companies want to use AI to save money. They just think you’re not smart or attentive enough to notice or care if something is subpar.
Hell, one of the producers from Netflix’s Witcher outright said American audiences aren’t smart enough for them to do a faithful adaptation of the books. The thing is, he’s not entirely wrong, because the sorts of content being produced and fed to people right now is like that. It comes from an insecure, greed-ridden place, though. One that doesn’t respect people, and will use “data” to back up this claim. Data that when people are fed addictive content via addictive algorithms, they display addictive behavior… and that addictive behavior makes more money for these assholes.
Go figure.
Instead, the lesson here is that people like different things. They don’t need to be spoon-fed nothing but the same slop repeatedly. Why did people go wild for Everything Everywhere All at Once? There are plenty of reasons. It was different, though. That’s why. It was fun, had deep thematic content, was well made and tried to provide a more nuanced take on Asian families coping with life in an increasingly western world, or at least one that resonates better than other offerings have.
In this current funk, I went back to listening to one of my favorite bands, Pain of Salvation. Led by the ever-sensitive and thoughtful Daniel Gildenlow, it’s a band with a strange history and an uncertain trajectory. Back in college, I had my first real moment of understanding, or what I cared about and what I wanted to be, while I was taking my Lit Theory 201 class. It was a class focused on post-structuralist theory where we read a lot of postmodern fiction and studied the likes of Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, Foucault and others. For my paper in that class I chose to do a deconstruction of Pain of Salvation’s “BE,” a concept album about humanity willing “God” into existence, then through greed creates capitalism and destroys this world, and thus, God, although it sparks a rebirth of sorts.
I can’t say I’ve loved everything they’ve produced, but when I’m in a funk “In the Passing Light of Day” and more recently, “Panther,” have gotten a lot of play. Gildenlow became an internet legend of sorts for fans of prog rock because of the amount of time, thought and research he’d put into each concept album, including returning to college to study new topics to have a better understanding of what he was trying to write. Currently, he works as a children’s guitar teacher, and sometimes following his Facebook posts is fascinating. He swore off producing music for a while because he felt misunderstood, or that no one appreciated or cared about his work and god damn is that a kick in the teeth. When I think of someone who had a profound impact on my own maturation like that, who’s work I can still return to when I need inspiration, living within those same lows as myself, it’s both comforting and disquieting. It’s comforting to know I’m not alone in feeling that way, but upsetting to think someone like that is still struggling to navigate this world after contributing so much of value.
“Oh, my generation was told that we could be anything
But that’s a hope that deceives those who fail will feel flawed
But still fuller than those who succeed” - Daniel Gildenlow, “Species”
I can’t lie, though. Sometimes it feels lonely out there. It’s such a monumental uphill battle to just exist right now, never mind to create things and be able to make a healthy living off of that. The steady stream of impersonal rejections makes for a strange bedfellow, and while there is camaraderie down in the trenches, it can feel more like that of circumstance, everyone waiting to either washout or get plucked from obscurity.
I suppose I’m waiting for something to align with my tastes more than anything. That’s not always a great feeling and is no real comfort. Not after putting all that work in for years. What are we even doing anymore?
Change comes from all of us. For my part, I’m trying to be true to the things that matter to me, while also helping out indie authors I can along the way. I’m not sure how to fix any of this other than just by being kind to one another and trying to make the best art I can.
Daniel is back to recording music now and has been pretty quiet otherwise.
I’m still writing right now and have been pretty quiet.
“All that matters bleeds through, like plutonium glow.”
I released a new Patreon short story earlier this month, if you want to check that out.
If you don’t subscribe already, please uhh do that. You can also opt to give me money. That’s an option. You don’t get anything special outside of gratitude, but at least I’m not blowing smoke here and pretending like behind the curtain there’s a secret to success.
There isn’t a secret to success outside of already having money or means. So let’s all knock that off.
Kickstarter loves weird projects. Just saying.
I'm not familiar with the band, but listened to the YT you provided and I like them a lot. Definitely will be checking out more. It's unusual these days to find music where there's a lot behind it. Like everything, it seems like meaning is being chipped away, and you really have to go digging for it.