No Crow for Me, Thanks.

Holy crap. I can't wait to get all of my computer stuff set up in the new office space I have in Huntersville. Then I can get back to a regular writing schedule and return to posting on my blog.

I am hoping to have the new writing space set up and dedicated in a few days.

Until then, I just wanted to post some musings on writing.

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In the past--and for very good reasons--I have been extremely critical of the self-publishing game. I had sworn never to do it again after my brief flirtation with following along those lines. (I did self-publish one novel and quickly withdrew it until I could sell it legitimately.)

But then, over the past year or so, editorial doors have chambered closed to me, mainly over the fact that I am often politically vocal. And my politics are not popular, especially among the liberal self-described "Social Justice Warriors", among whom are many anthologists, editors, even some publishers who all refuse to consider my work out of hand. They won't even look at my manuscripts or respond to queries, not even from my agent.

Thus, I had begun to lean toward eating some crow and move into the self-publishing field.

However, after discussing the scene with some of my good friends who do self-publish, I decided against it. The market is just way too crowded. And not crowded with good writing, but with the inept and hollow shit that is indicative of the scene. Added to the task of producing work, you also have to commission cover art, format the manuscripts for publication, employ a professional editor/proofreader, and advertise. If you want to do it right you have to spend a fair amount of money. And then you have to struggle to try to get your work noticed over the vast flood of literary turds that dominate self-published novels.

Therefore, I opted not to self-publish. A couple of my friends who do publish their own books encouraged me, but the word I got from most of them is that it's almost a lost cause and that few of them can make any money at it. Yeah, your work is published...but alongside crappy tomes about woman-on-lizard bestiality and racist gun-porn parading as zombie fiction.

No, thanks.

I'll continue to try to find traditional publishers. It will be hard to do and I'll have to seek out some honest editors who aren't blinded by crazed politics.

Otherwise, I'll just write and be unpublished. And for now I won't be eating any crow.

"Git some! Git some!"

Types

I've been in the business of being (and trying to be) a professional writer for several decades. Since I was in my mid-20s. Learning how to write and going about the labor of submitting and selling fiction was a long, slow, painful process. In that time it was both my pleasure and my misfortune to encounter other professional writers. As with people in general, many of those encounters were unpleasant.

Why?

It took a long time for me to decipher, but mainly I discovered that most of the writers I met were selfish and mad for themselves.

The act of writing and submitting work is an exercise in egomania. I mean...to think that your work is worthy of entertaining and/or enlightening other people...that's a terribly self-centered thing to even contemplate. What are the odds of your being right? Of your work actually being worthy of having been seen, of amusing the reader in a positive way, or educating another person or sparking them to think about things with a new form of insight? To just think of putting your work out among the great readership is to be egotistical.

That said, admitting that writing is--at least in part--the voicing of ego, there are other extremes, and I face these extremes almost daily.

Most of the writers I have encountered online, through the mails, and in person--these folk have taken ego several levels beyond sanity. Forget about pleasant company, these cats are pure terror and unadulterated pain to be around.

One of my least favorites of this lot is a guy who, having experienced some mild success in writing, began to crow of himself as "a brand". He would constantly speak of himself in third-person terminology as "the SoandSo Brand" (I'm not giving him the satisfaction of mentioning his name. Advertising and all that sort of thing, you know.) Every time I heard him say this, or saw him write this, I wanted to either puke out my guts, or punch him in his sanctimonious face. He loved to announce in this way that he was no longer a person toiling at a job, but had transcended that existence and had entered a new level of being.

And even some of my close friends who are writers talk about how great they are and how wonderful their current project is...as if bragging about it and screaming it aloud will make it so.

My message to them is this:

Cut it the fuck out.

Really. Just stop it. The fact that you wrote something is enough admission of ego. The act of having shepherded that work into print is a further voicing of your mad self-centered existence. When you step beyond this and enter that next phase of assholiness you have become a slimy salesman, a seller of snake oil, a mover of sub-prime interest, a scumbag politician.

So just cut it the fuck out with the false bravado of how great you are and how perfectly sparkling your work. Because mainly it's all a lie, and truly--except for a few idiots--you're not impressing anyone and only making yourself look like a goddamned idiot.

You think you're Hemingway. But you're not. You're this guy.

Don't Forget the Fun Stuff!

Various stuff that has entertained and educated and amused me over the years. See if you can identify 'em all! No prizes for anyone, if you do!

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