A Tottering Pile

Well, look at that, another rejection.  It's the frustrating grind that every writer knows, when you feel like you're putting your best work out there and it's just bouncing off the impervious skins of cynical agents and editors.  I get it, not everything can appeal to everyone and so many people want to be writers, yada yada yada.  There's been screeds and screeds written on that subject and frankly it's mostly padded out with platitudes and helpless shrugs of the shoulders.  It's kind of inevitable, and when you find yourself doing it you feel like a helpless dick.  No one profits from it and everyone walks away in a deeper depression, their faith in writing and publishing bashed a little more.

I've come to the realisation that a couple of the novels I've been trying to get published for while are never going to see the light of day.  It's even more depressing than the tidal wave of rejections, when you realise the book you've written, read over, re-written, re-read again and re-written numerous times just isn't making an impact with anyone.  For me, that's no impact whatsoever.  There are people out there who get encouraging rejections.  Good for them.  I get the standard 'go away' or I get nothing.  I'm going to stop there, because that conversation's a route to fucking suicide.

So what becomes of these sad, unwanted pieces of literary detritus?  They sit and they moulder, in my experience.  All that work and effort only to be chucked in a metaphorical pile to gather dust and dusty cobwebs.  That pile of mine is getting big, padded out by the short stories and comic scripts that just can't find a home.  It's like an animal shelter where no one even looks at the animals, let alone gives any hope they'll be adopted.  I've been writing for a long time, churning out novels and short stories since I was sixteen.  The first few novels I wrote, I knew not long after they were finished wouldn't go anywhere (they were hand written, for a start) so they've made a cosy base for the growing pile of pages I'm building up that no one gives any indication they want to look at.

I understand why no one wants to touch at least one of the books: it's derivative and messy, so really why I tried so hard to get it out there is beyond me.  A whole lot of wasted effort right there.  Maybe it's because I get pulled into the trap of looking at the worst that's out there and thinking, "If that can get published..." before sending off the sample chapters.  This is, of course, tremendous folly and leads to disappointment and the writing of long-winded blog rambles.

The book that prompted this particular ramble is one I wrote a long time ago, and took quite some time to get from my brain and onto the page, thanks to life getting in the way in one way or another (although I did manage to write a Warhammer 40,000 novel in the middle, that will also never, ever be seen by anyone but me) and I feel quite bad that it won't get a chance.  Partly it's because I waited so long to get it out and partly because it's horror of a particular length the outlets for are almost nil.^*

I often think that I was born a decade too late.  If I'd been writing around the early to mid eighties, when horror novels were de rigueur, then I might have had more of a chance, but, since the early nineties, the kind of horror I like to write, and read, has tailed off to a great extent.  I know a lot of people who will tell you this kind of fiction is still going strong, but I don't really see it.  Then I have to wonder if I'm looking closely enough.

I'm thankful to the small group of people who've taken a chance on my writing and given it a wider audience. It's great to see something that was once a raw twitch in the middle of my brain offered the opportunity to fly.  I keep hoping that the accumulation of work will make people sit up and take notice of me and I might actually start to get some money for this crazy path I've put myself on.

So, here I sit, with a pile of unwanted manuscripts, like a terrible execution device of my own creation that's leaning over my head, always ready for that extra few pages that will finally make it topple and have done with me.  And I keep playing the crazy, obsessed hermit, feeding it and creating my own doom.

^* The first person to mention Lulu.com gets a punch in the throat while I fucking weep.


Will

Gaaaaasssssp!

And finally I re-emerge.  Criminy, that was some hard writing.  I've been crowing about this a bit elsewhere, but once more isn't going to hurt anyone:

250,000 words, motherfuckers!  Ha!

I don't even know who that's aimed at.  Maybe at the last person, other than me, who looks at this blog.^*

The novel version of Crown Wearer has had a long, tough journey.  It took me forever to get up off my arse to start the thing in the first place and then another aeon passed before I got organised enough to make a proper go of it.  And that only happened once I stopped being intimidated by the length I initially thought it was going to be – a length it exceeded by about 70,000 words.

Now, to some people, all this talk of word counts is meaningless.  I sympathise with you, I really do.  Actually, I envy you.  Not knowing the significance of word count would make my life a whole lot easier as a writer.  I imagine being able to sit down at the computer, grinning from ear to ear, with my mug with the rainbow on the side, filled with more rainbows and clack out a couple of thousand words, no worries.  There are some days like that, y'know, without that weird rainbow business, but a lot of days are wrangling and subduing words that end up not being right anyway.  And, yes, that does involve a lot of staring off into the middle distance, it's an intellectual pursuit.^**

So now I'm left with this manuscript, damp from brain juice and imagination placenta.  What am I going to do with it?  Who could possibly want this smelly, sticky brick of a manuscript from a writer who's never had a book published outside of a couple of disastrous Lulu attempts?  Not my priority at the moment, is the answer (I bet you thought I was going to go on a rant, faithless bastards).  For now what I'm going to do is follow the advice of every writer out there and leave it the fuck alone.  That's right, it's going to sit on my various storage devices for a couple of months while I do other things and get a little distance between myself and it.

Unlike a good cheese, when I cut through the rind of the novel I won't be rewarded with the sweet nutty taste of aged milk, I'll be confronted by the horror of what I've actually written.  Something riddled with spelling and grammar errors.  Something that doesn't make a lick of sense because of a network of glaringly embarrassing plot holes.  Hey, look at that, another cheese analogy.^†


And I'll be lost again.  Knee deep in the toxic porridge I've crusted the page with in hopes that some kind person will take pity on this mangled wretch and publish this monster of a book^‡


For now, I'm back, ready to spew my neurotic semi-psychotic ramblings at your brain craters.  We're going to have fun, dammit!


^* The person who came back and thought this time it would be different.  Sucker.


^** Only geniuses and idiots claim they can bang out stories without thinking about it.  If anyone you know says this and unless you know for certain otherwise slap that fucking idiot.


^† I really want some Norwegian brown cheese.  The stuff sounds amazing.


^‡ It's only a partial monster.  My research tells me it's at the lower end in length of one of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books.  And less than half the length of things like War and Peace, The Stand and Atlas Shrugged, so there you go.




Will