On why I'm doing what I'm doing

[avevale_intelligencer]

First of all, everyone who wants to be a proper published author should read this informative and helpful post from seanan_mcguire, in order to understand why I'm settling. (You should also read anything else she writes. She's good, and she's published, and she knows what she's talking about.)

I know print-on-demand isn't real publishing. It's only not vanity publishing because I haven't had to pay them for it. And I know, because many people tell me so, that the system for getting published is perfectly fair and reasonable and if I haven't got good enough to be accepted by an agent or a publisher then I just haven't got good enough, and if I don't have the gumption to keep trying and learn from multiple rejections then that's my own lookout.

Well, I've been writing since I was at least ten, and reading since I was three or four, and I'd say my comprehension is pretty good, though my problem with publishers' submission guidelines I've already documented. If there's any more to learn about how to write then I've probably missed out on it by now. I'm fifty-four now, depressed and exhausted. I don't have time to get good, and I don't have the gumption (and I know it's lazy of me) to start at the top of a very long list of agents, work through and build up a pile of letters saying "We are not taking on any new clients at the moment." No agent, no editor, has the time or the inclination to tell me what I'm doing wrong in my writing (apart from "I didn't love it"), and I shouldn't waste the poor overworked people's time by asking. They have real authors to take care of.

I need to face that this is the writer I am, this is the writer I'm going to be, and if my stuff pleases anyone at all then I should be grateful for that and not expect any more. I am not a special snowflake, or even a snowflake at all. (Check out the subtitle of the journal.) Hence Lulu.com.

(Of course, if Orion or Tor or Curtis Brown or somebody bursts through the door clutching a copy of Three Windows and crying "This is fantastic, what else have you got?" I'm not going to be cloddish about it. :) But that's a Lottery dream, and the thing about those is that real life is still there when you wake up.)

This has been to some extent a vent.

Comments

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Yes, I did.