Some of you know the story: I wrote my first “novel” when I was 15. 118,000 words, most of it just a jumble of Star Wars and Final Fantasy 7.
When I think about why I did it, I can never come up with a conclusive answer. I think saying “I was compelled” or “I had to do it” feels a little disingenuous, since it makes it sound like a mystical calling. But the reality is, I didn’t have a reason to do it other than I wanted to. Took me about 9 months.
I started writing in earnest in 2007. I had some query interests in 2009 and 2010. In 2011 I was fired from my publishing job and ended up going back to school for teaching. I didn’t do a lot of writing post 2012, which was my first (and most difficult) year of working in education and the year my son was born.
I stopped writing for a while, figuring I didn’t have the time or energy anymore. I started the podcast in 2014…or 2015, I can never remember (and the date on the podcasts are wrong because it changed when we moved servers.) In 2018, a student of mine read my novel and was angry at me that I had stopped writing and demanded i resume. I wrote what would be the first draft of Heart and Soul Fist in March of 2018 in about 30 days flat, though it would take much longer to rewrite and revise it to where it is today.
In 2020, I published Heart and Soul Fist, I wrote I Summoned a Ghost to be My Girlfriend. I wrote Spirits of Summer after that and published it in 2021.
I’ve joined classes, read newsletters, subscribed to communities. I’ve paid a lot of money to people to get my writing analyzed, critiqued, and improved.
I’ve written millions of words.
I obviously like doing it.
So why does the idea of “being an author” make me uncomfortable?
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Earlier this year, I read a book about Self-Publishing for Money. I’ve read like three of them, so I can’t remember which one I’m thinking of right now. It honestly doesn’t matter, the content of all these books is basically the same.
In order to be commercially successful, you have to write what sells, not necessarily write what you want.
Of course, there’s a compromise in there. You can write things you want to write in an area that sells and have the best of both worlds. Then, the advice goes, you can write that weird thing you wanted to write once your audience is established.
This advice always gets me tied up because while I love Heart and Soul Fist and the characters and world and the stories, I know it’s “too weird” to ever hit commercial success in a way that I would want to. It no longer fits in the current YA mold, and honestly I think post-COVID the story feels…disconnected. Like the story is out of time and old. Irrelevant.
So maybe I should drop it. Or at least, postpone it.
This then rubs against the advice that you should finish a series. But do you finish a series that isn’t commercially viable? Isn’t that just sunken time when I could be writing something else that would bring me closer to the dream of “professional creative”?
Maybe all of this is just fear. Fear that if I try to write something that fits more clearly into genre conventions that it’ll fail, and then I won’t have an excuse as to why I couldn’t make a career. I would just be a bad writer who has spent 23 years thinking he was better than he was.
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I’m working on something more genre-convention. It’s very Mandalorian-inspired, with a touch of Elden Ring. it’s basically the story of a Knight slaying dragons - both literal and figurative. I’m currently using EVERY SINGLE TOOL I know to prep it.
I think I just have to do it. I have to try and write it and see what happens when I do.
What do you think?