FULL BLEED: NO MORE SORRY

Okay. Deep breaths. Last full day of the Fake Believe Kickstarter campaign, which as my math tells me, runs until about 8pm on Friday. Mostly because I accidentally launched it around 8pm some 26 days ago. That's what you get for trying to set up everything ahead of time and doing a little too good a job of it. Or just pulling together things as I think of them and not really planning much of anything. Whoops.

Right now as I write this (ahead of time) we're at two thousand in pledges. That's a little crazy. Five hundred more and it'd top the biggest advance I'd have ever earned from writing with my name on it. And, of course, the advance is all you get to see (so plan for it.) I highly doubt there'll be any last-minute pledging like that for Fake Believe. But who knows. We went quadruple the original ask. A bunch of people are rolling the dice on all the books, not just the newest one.

That said, I'll also need to attenuate the campaign based on this. Seems like the audience is pretty set. So I'll need to spend a chunk of the year before the next campaign (yeah, write it before you get ahead of yourself, I say). You can only sell folks on the previous books so many times, dig? That'll be fun, asking people to read my work and cover it and tell all the people who follow them about it. Like I said, attenuated expectations.

Speaking of expectations, I find myself in kind of a weird place. I didn't expect to be self-publishing when I started back into writing. Yes, I put some stuff out there, mostly because there's no market for non-fiction commentary from dudes who don't have a huge following. And I had some older works that never found a home, so sure, put those out too. Okay, I self-published comics, but those were comics. Not actual writing. (Save the hate, it's actual writing, just not writing writing like I set out to do back in the 90s.) But writing work to straight-up just put it out myself, totally bypassing traditional publication? Yeah, didn't see that coming. I worked pretty hard (and half-stumbled into) to get an indie deal.

No agent. No publisher. No editor, other than the kind folks who are doing advance reading. I'm not worrying about conforming to a publisher's expectations or genre expectations, just writing the book how I think it oughta be done.

Most importantly, no auditions. No more open calls. No pitching books at agents who are unreceptive or editors who simply don't know what to do with them. But yeah, no more auditions. No more second-guessing the worth of the work itself and hoping that it'd be blessed by acceptance. That really eats at you. Or not, but it certainly ate at me. Just reminds me of the short time when I was hardcore job hunting right out of school. Every turned in resume was an opportunity to be judged. Every phone call. And every day that I simply wasn't worthy, y'know? That got carried into all the queries and open calls and writing books only to have them not be good enough to get a reply, much less get accepted. Fuck it and fuck that. Time to leave that behind. Yes, a healthy amount of skepticism about one's own work is good. Note the modifier "healthy" there. Where I was with it was simply not healthy. It was, in fact, holding me back. I know. I'm in good company with that.

All the same, it's time to set that aside. My work is good. Maybe even better than good. There's a whole field of better than good and even better than great writers out there. And lots of slop that gets to the top of the charts because like Bud Light, it's easy going down. I don't have to be that. I can do the work that I think is valuable in ways that are not commercially accepted (and those will simply drift anyways, oftentimes at the brush of a butterfly wings -- things become hot and not and it all ends up in the remainder pile anyways.) But those machines keep rolling even as that rolling has been obsoleted by changes in the marketplace. Yeah, those changes can be put off for years and years, but they're still coming.

The best time to set this doubt aside was years ago. The second best was today. I know. But even old dudes can learn new stuff. And learn to avoid the distractions of other stuff. I'll end up talking about some of these things later on. If you've followed me on Bluesky, you probably have some idea of what they are. If not, you're in for a treat (questionable).

In the meantime, I'll be heading down to Wonder-Con, maybe even as you read this. I'll be at the show on Friday. If you see me, say "Hello" or not. I can't tell you a darn thing. Then I'll be trying to figure out who I should even talk to about my work so that they might tell other nice folks about it.

And if it doesn't happen, it doesn't. Then I'll hang with the readers I have. I'm aware of how things work and how little attention self-published authors get. Simply because they don't have big publicity budgets and aren't prestigious subjects to cover and talk up. Maybe not everyone gets famous. Maybe that's okay. Maybe okay is something worth shooting for.

I mean, shoot for higher in your work. But only being happy with a certain level of audience reaction or acceptance? Well, you don't get to control that. You can drive yourself nuts doing that. I'm trying to move past that.

So let's see what tomorrow (which'll be today for you) looks like.