FULL BLEED: THE ONLY FAILURE IS FAILURE TO LOVE THE ROPE

I find myself in a strange position when I’m out there observing the postings of other writers out there on Bluesky. I don’t do Threads or X or Facebook or trawl writer (aspiring or otherwise) forums. I don’t go to Reddit to look at the self-publishing talk. Or Kindlepages or whatever. I’m just on one place. That’s really more than enough. It is sufficient psychic noise. Perhaps too sufficient.

And it’s hard to say “fellow writers” or “my peers” or whatever, because my experience and career as I laughingly refer to it, is so much at a remove from everyone else’s that it makes no sense to pretend they’re the same thing. I understand to some degree their trials and travails. Their triumphs don’t make any sense to me because my last triumph as it were was to get signed to an indie, get a decent advance and then by choices of my own, end up paying nearly all of it back to them because I didn’t want to be the guy who went down as stabbing them when they were the ones to have screwed up. So yeah, triumph and me aren’t close buds.

The triumph in my case was keeping going, or at least trying to. And it’s been okay so far. Got one novel done, that probably being the best work I’ve done in my writing career. It’ll be read by a little over a hundred people, I figure. I mean, unless more people start buying it, it’s stuck there. This is a verifiable fact. I can do the math. That I’ve managed to get most of that number to sign on to my Kickstarter campaigns and back my books with no career, no representation, no publisher, no respect (tugs at collar, bugs out eyes) is pretty good, right?

I’ve managed a review in one (that's 1) outlet, being a podcast/interview that ran this week.

My work effectively doesn’t exist in the cloud of genres that I’ve chosen to work in. Now, part of that’s on me. Maybe all of it. Stemming from the fact that I’ve got limited time and resources and I have another goddamn book to really start writing. I got a first page done and realized it’s not the first page and the structure is undergoing surgery or autopsy pick your metaphor and suddenly this relatively direct work isn’t maybe going to be that anymore? Maybe it’s not ready. Maybe I’m tired of it already, which isn’t a great sign.

None of which changes the fact that I’m a non-entity in this field, whether it’s horror or fantasy or (ugh) slipstream or bizarro (note, I’m not either of those, but I see them thrown around when reaching for respectability or weird anti-respectability as in the case of bizarro (wearing its wackiness and fundamental self-mutability like a medal.) You know how many folks only want to review physical copies of books (which will never, ever be resold for credit, nope)? That’s six bucks production cost and another seven in postage for maybe a review, likely not. Stack that against the money that I should use to get an editor which would also cost most of if not more than what I actually net in a Kickstarter. Yeah, I don’t like those odds. I don’t like the odds of paying for ads that make ad platforms rich and don’t convert because whoops ads are so toxic that everyone runs adblockers and you goddamn bet I do, too.

So it’s always funny (pejorative) to me to see writers grouching about… well… much of anything. I see folks calling themselves failures when I would bet you a solid gold bar straight from Fort Knox that they’re seeing sales literally hundreds of times what I will ever sell. Grouching about missing the shortlist. Grouching about reviews. I can’t even get fucking reviews. Last book up for goddamn free on Netgalley. Any bites? Yeah, no. So, honestly, fuck your failure.

Yes. Writing is a fucked-up career. And unless you were riding the wave hard, it was a fucked up career forty or fifty years ago, only there were more opportunities for actual paying side hustles like being a culture writer for a free weekly local paper. Now it’s warm up that Substack, baybees! (I am not on Substack, though I’m considering Ghost, even though I have a perfectly good weblog and have had one here since, ah, 2017 or so.) I get views in the several of tens! It’s the best!

So what many folks are regarding as failure, I’m looking at and am like “Hey, y’all got any of that there failure you can pass around?” Because, brother (and sister and nonbinary kin and relationship to anyone who refuses any of these labels) that failure looks pretty good to me. You exist. You get considered for awards. Your work gets talked up. You get regular sales from your catalog (I sold three [that’s 3] books last month via Amazon.) You get a “Oh, a new story from so and so” from editors while, well, my rejection dysmorphia basically commanded me to stop doing blind submissions some time ago – you want me in an anthology, just ask and I’ll see what I can do, but none of this blind shit. Nope. No more. I refuse. I would rather not. Just call me Bartleby.

So who’s right? I get to write what I want on the schedule I can manage. I get to do what the work tells me to do and not worry about the potential audience (because maybe I’ve maxed that out already; that’s right, I’m audiencemaxxing). I get final veto power over the covers because I do them. I don’t have to put in more dashes because the copyeditor fucking loves them. The tradeoff here is that I make work that’s too fantastic for a lot of the horror folks out there. And work that’s too weird and literary for some fantasy folks. And work that’s definitely not cozy enough for the rest of them. Audiencemaxxing. The tradeoff is that, welp, my comfort is a blanket by the water heater and a bowl of kibble because no feral should be hungry and cold, right?

I can’t tell you who’s right anymore. I can tell you that clinging to the old model of write a novel a year and you play your cards right, you can pay your bills from it is gone. Unless you got your nut squirrelled away some time ago (or are very very very very twenty more verys lucky). I had the experience (corrosive) of growing up in a family where this was the case. I won’t burden you with details, but both my parents were successful, in one case, very successful writers. And this was in another world before ebooks or the internet or any of the waves of Chicxulub meteors that hit the business. Sorry, reshaped the business so that anyone could become a successful writer, by golly. It only takes hard work and a willingness to ride that long tail. Maybe work on your brand on social media. Game the system so that you rule your particularly imaginative category on Amazon. You too could get a Netflix series made from your work. It only takes a thousand true fans. And all the other assorted lies that were told about the Brave New World that became the Howling Pit, endlessly broad and shallow (and that was before the slop merchants started publishing eight books a day).

I can’t tell you who’s right. Or who’s insane for continuing.

I can tell you that the only thing that’s let me keep going is to not make this my career. And yes, this is a symptom of the industry as a whole. And yes, it also means that the people who continue writing and getting contracts are likely to be wealthier and less dependent on writing income (or able to plow their own money into marketing, and you goddamn better believe that’s a thing that’s real). Yes, it means that voices will change and be diluted or concentrated, depending on which end of the political prism you’re peering through. I can’t say it’s a good thing. But the behemoths of publishing have to keep their real estate values up somehow, right? No, the industry isn’t healthy. That’s why I’m not in it.

And yeah, I’d like a hit of that prestige (which is what folks are really looking for.) I’d like to be seen and noticed as worthy of joining the chorus or reshaping the genre or attacking elevated horror or secretly cozifying it. The horror being perceived. Yeah, maybe I want some of that. But not enough to do anything about it other than keep writing. All the other stuff I’m just not wired for. Videos for books? Nah. They’re videos to sell the concept of selling through videos. They don’t sell books. And Twitter doesn’t either, unless you’re bloviating about effective altruism or how AI is really Skynet and take me away Terminator Daddy, fill the holes in my personality and plug me into the machine! Just make me rich beyond belief at the same time! That’s all I want!

Sorry, channeling some bad thought there.

The odd thing about writing now, or most any creative endeavor, is that there’s very little respect in it anymore. I’m not sure how much there actually was, aside envy. This is not to say that other creators aren’t supportive. That’s not it. That’s the only place you are likely to find respect these days. When someone else who does the same thing notices that you’re doing good work as well. The audience? Yeah, go check out Goodreads for what the audience thinks. I’m… not so interested in that. The sad thing is that it can actually impact your career in actual publishing (or even self-publishing.) So yeah, that’s great. A nobody can torpedo you, or so could a coordinated bunch of bored nobodys. Nevermind the fact that they can’t make you a unique identifier to separate your name from the other names just like yours that publish children’s books or whatever slop-merchant has decided to hijack your identity. Yeah, greeeeeeat system there, system run by one of the largest de-facto publishers on the planet. Tiny indie company. Mistakes will be made.

All those old structures are… not what they used to be. The façade’s sloughed off in places, plaster of Paris all gooped like skin off a corpse in a swamp. The bones are there, but they were meant to support different weights, and the folks in charge aren’t able to adapt.

The only failure now is not yielding to your small mammal nature and eating the eggs of the dinosaurs as they stumble around. The only failure is giving up. And even that isn’t really a failure. I can’t blame anyone for walking away from this whole business, particularly if they had a working career and can’t now. I honestly can’t. If you’re writing to be read, you can still manage that, but it might be with audiences much, much smaller than were around before. Note that it isn’t just you. It’s everyone. But again, should that be enough to make you say Vaya con Dios and ride off into the sunset, I won’t begrudge you that. All that said, there’s people making do with thinner gruel than that. Some of them will be around for whatever comes next.

If they’re lucky.

I originally wanted to drop in some nods to ai slop (I’m not the fondest of the term, but it’s not going away) and how it’s not instant talent, as some people have suggested. In fact, it’s instant prestige. You get the title of artist or musician or god help you, writer. You get inducted into the secret house of kinhood. You get that creative-shaped hole in your soul filled by Skynet Daddy (and sadly, it’s not even as cool as that.) When the fact is, you’re trying to fill a different hole and one likely to be left as an abscess, one that’ll keep eating. Every one of the press-button prompt-lords are looking for something that can’t be found. They’re showing the rotten fruits of their labors to everyone in the car that’s on fire, the one with no driver at the wheel. They’d be better off with a mirror and staring into it lovingly. What reason do they have to deceive themselves, right?

It all boils down to that line from Rolling Thunder (and I don’t know if it was Schrader or Gould who wrote it) about learning to love the rope and that’s how you break out of your bonds. That’s a survival mechanism, you understand. Sometimes you gotta survive for a very long time.