Tut tut tut. I'm So Disappointed in You.

It's been a little while, hasn't it?  Not quite as long as before, but I've been quiet for the better part of a month.  Not that you'd notice.

Why?  Well because none of your fucking business, nosy bastard.

I've been waiting for something to strike me just the right way to say something about it.  I've also been holding back on something that will come in time.  Oh, my yes, I got me a big bag of bile right here on that score.

So, this little bit of fuckwaddery was brought to my attention.  Read it and let it sink in, right under your skin, that burning itch is normal.  One Direction fan fiction given a huge advance and now being adapted into a film.  This isn't a precedent, because a previous fan fiction bod got a book deal out of her work.  Loving the Band was rushed to e-book, without much said about the advance.  Actually I noticed the Independent was curiously reticent about giving any kind of details on the deal, kinda weird, doncha think?

The new one seems even worse, because there's this suggestion that there hasn't even been an editing process.  Ahem, what?  Are you fucking kididing me?  This blog led me to this blog.  Our erstwhile writer in the second blog is, understandably, bemused.  I'm fucking furious.

As she points out, we writers^* are told when we start out on the long, frustrating, painful road that we have to be at our fucking best.  Hone our shit to a razor-sharp edge and then, maybe, a publisher might arch an eyebrow in interest.  Once we've been allowed in by the erstwhile gatekeepers we are sent to editing boot camp.  I know a few professional writers who go through the wringer with edits to get their work in what is considered publishable shape.

Yet, we see this girl get her work fast-tracked by the publisher.  Not her fault.  I'm not angry at her, there's no point, she's probably delighted to have her work in print and getting a fat cheque for it and let her enjoy it.  As Jenny Trout points out, there's always a chance Anna Todd might mature into a good writer.  Although looking at Emily Baker, that might not hold.   The people my ire is aimed at are the publishers.

This will probably mean I'll never see my work in print, but, fuck it, the more people who point this shit out, the better.

This kind of thing is part of the same horrible decline that's happening with the film and music industries: risk-averse bullshit where the blandest shit is shoved at us in pretty packaging.  New things are to be shunned if they don't instantly have millions of people clamouring for it.  Anything that makes even a wee bit of money is jumped on and aped, without understanding why it's popular.  So publishing has followed suit, getting quick-fix crap on the shelves and paying the often vacuous cardboard cut-outs we call celebrities wads of money for ghost-written drivel.

It feels like the industry is kicking sand in the face of people like myself, hungry for a break, but told we're not quite good enough or what we're writing isn't quite right.  When poorly-written shit^** is packaged and thrown out for public consumption like it's the pinnacle of writing achievement, we the mass of writers, who feel like we are kept out by this shit, we have to look askance at the big publishers and ask if they know what the fuck they're doing^†.

I don't know where to go with this now.  My anger's played itself out.  Impotent, impotent anger.  I'm going to lie down.  Really we should expect better from the big publishers, shouldn't we?

^*  I'm a fucking writer.  I might not have success, wealth, fame or even earn a living, but I do the work.  That's how it works.

^** Let's not mention that fucking shit-monger E.L. James who hit on the genius idea of shittily re-writing shit fiction.  That's so fucking expired it might cause me a stroke.

^† Don't get me started on self-publishing, though.  The advice for that makes you like a needy arsehole.  Nope, not for me.


Will

I Return (Again!) and I'll Probably Vanish for Months (Again!).

Yeah, so been a while.  It's all part of my hobby of intermittently neglecting my blog^*.  Let's do a bit of a catch up, once again.

Okay so in the year or so since I last published a post, I've...not actually done much.  That's astonishingly embarrassing to be honest.

I'll start with an update on my last foray into self-publishing.  Fuckin' disaster.  Absolutely, shamingly, crushingly failed.  I think about eight of them sold, and those were to friends and family.  When Amazon started hassling me for tax information^** I decided to not bother and they took it off sale.  Kind of wish I hadn't bothered with it now.

Pfah to regrets, I say!  PFAH!!

Onto something a bit more positive: I started and finished another novel.  My first sojourn into the world of full-length crime fiction, hopefully with a twist only I could give it^†.  It's a story I've wanted to do for a long time and finally pinned down a plot I liked.  It sits, awaiting a final edit to be submitted to...er...somewhere.  I'm at a loss.  We'll see what happens once I've gone through it.  Suggestions would be gratefully accepted.

This brings me onto something even cooler – I was almost published.  My ridiculous action novel got a bit of interest from a digital-only publisher, and received some good feedback, but they passed.  At least I think they did^‡.  Anyway this feedback was the best and most detailed I've ever had in tightening up a manuscript.  I still don't have a fucking clue what I'm doing when I'm 'editing', but I feel like I have I'm not an inept macaque with broken fingers.  I was working on that manuscript...

...Until the most shameful thing happened.  I got distracted.  Irrevocably so – okay, not irrevocably, that's an exaggeration, fiiiiiiine.  Bloody addictive computer games^§.  So yeah, from about July onwards is a bit neglected.

But now I'm back, for a wee while at least, and I'll have something to say about that in my next post.  Isn't that exciting?

Ah fuck you, blank-eyed shits^§§.

^* One thing I'm clearly very good at.

^** Really should have read the terms and conditions.  Lesson for you there, kids.

^† Or even if it doesn't make you fall asleep and vomit at the same time, would be good.

^‡ Last year, as you might have noticed, was a year of uncertainty in a few key areas.

^§ I'm looking at you, Borderlands 2, you time-sucking bastard.

^§§ Unless, y'know you offer some advice in the comments.  G'wan!  My gratitude is more valuable than...whatever.


Will

Publishing note.

Once again I've taken matters into my own hands and gone via Kindle Direct Publishing to publish my horror novel Dark Eve.  It's £2.17 in the UK and $3.50 in the US.  You can find it here: Dark Eve

After my disastrous foray into Lulu, I'm hoping that the more reasonable price-point for this novel will encourage more people to buy it.


Will

Process tardiness

And I'm back from my huff.  Wasn't all that depression fun?  It certainly gets things done.

A couple of the above sentences are false in some way.  I bet you can't tell which ones.

The last week I've been busy doing things.  Quite a bit of it is an attempt to fill my sad, echoing coffers with some money.  I don't know if I want to go into that, though, as it's something that could be seen as cripplingly embarrassing – the way of making money, not being skint.  Maybe one day I'll enlighten those who don't read my Twitter about that.^*

In between the task of trying to scrape money from an unexpected source, I've been writing.  At the moment I'm not writing full stories.  I have a few ideas for novels and I want to hash out the plots first, kind of like thinking out loud, only on paper.  I've also been pinning down ideas for a short story and a short comic script, at least one of which I hope will be allowed out into the world, as long as it's muzzled and neutered.

The rant from last week did have a result, though (thanks to everyone who showed some support, it was much appreciated).  Someone mentioned that I should try to self e-publish at least one of the novels.  Self-publishing is something I've done before and what I said about Lulu.com being a fucking disaster still stands, but e-publishing might be a little less painful.^**

So, I looked through a couple of e-publishers and after a bit of deliberation, and a false start, I chose to try Kindle Direct Publishing.

Now, now, quiet down, your abuse is making my monitor vibrate.  Let me explain.

It's all a matter of practicality.  I dismissed Lulu out of hand because they are a bit shitty.  I looked at Smash Words, and would have gone with them, but there was a major problem: fucking around with U.S. tax laws. I'd had similar problems when I attempted to publish the Crown Wearer novella through CreateSpace.  You need to send forms to the IRS in order to get any money from U.S. companies and this seems to involve sending away a passport for ID.

Now, I'm dubious about this when it's my own country, but sending this stuff away, across the Atlantic, to vanish into foreign monolithic bureaucracy is even riskier in my mind^†.  Just thinking about it now makes my bowels quake.  There's also the rather more practical problem that my passport's run out this year.  So, while Smash Words was ideal for me in every other way, that knocked it out of contention, leaving me with Kindle Direct Publishing.

And this is going slowly.  My money woes make it difficult for me to get front cover art, since (rightly), the artists I know who are willing to help me out are going to do their paying gigs before getting round to me.  Which means waiting.  I'm going to make myself wait anyway, because once it's all ready I'm going hold off and unleash it on a Monday.  I don't know if that will help my chances, but it's got to be better than going, "Ah-ha!  I've finished, now let's get it out into the world at three on a Sunday morning!"

All this is a really long way of saying, I'm going to publish a novel, as an experiment, through Kindle and if I get any success with that I'll put another novel that's failed to hook agents and publishers.

^* Comment if you read my Twitter, go on, I fucking dare you.

^** Or it could deepen my mortification and cement me as that writer you know who just can't quite make it. Either way you'll get a laugh, and that's really what's important, right, you sadist?

^† If anyone knows of a an easier way to do it, I'd love to hear it.


Will

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