Writing

Here's what I think I'll do.

I've been wondering about this for a long time, prompted in part by Marie's blog, and in part by my own career as a failed writer.

In the beginning, I did my own thing. It was frequently derivative in style as I was finding my voice, but it was often original, and there was plenty of it. But of course, in this world being original isn't always a route to success. For example, over the past 18 months, you stood a fairly good chance of getting a book published if it included a secret religious order, the holy grail, a code, or a renaissance character. Sort of like Alias, but without Jennifer Garner, and nowhere near as exciting.

I have no idea why that might be, fnar.

It's a killing irony that - until I realised that a certain top seller existed - I was working on my own thing that included a religious cult, holy relics, and all that guff. Not the grail, but the bones of a saint, and close enough. Fucking hell! As soon as I realised I was right in the middle of a trend, I stopped work immediately.

The tide went out on that one and didn't come back in.

Yesterday's Guardian had an article about self-publishing. This used to be called "Vanity Publishing", and it was something no serious writer ever considered. But we live in a different climate now. Everyone's a critic, and everyone's a journalist, and everyone's a novelist. Clearly, the publishing industry can't keep up with this.

We also live in a different economy. Vanity publishing was bad, because you paid x-amount of money and had x-number of books printed, all to satisfy your ego. But they never sold, and would end up being pulped or stored in your attic. It's the same thing with music: I made an EP, and the smallest quantity you could have pressed was 500. So we did 500, but we only really needed, say, 150.

These days, you can print on demand, so you can have 1 copy, or 100, or 1000, whatever. And if you sell a few thousand, then you might get some interest from commercial publishers, who have only ever been interested in the sure thing.

But then I thought: for years, I've been trying to please other people, to tone myself down, if you like, in my attempts to get my work acknowledged by the mainstream. But, duh, I don't need to do that. I can please myself, be myself, publish and be damned, but possibly reach like-minded individuals.

I once had a novel assessed by a reader at a regional arts council. The resulting report didn't exactly hammer the book, but mentioned that the lead character wasn't very sympathetic. And it shocked me, in a way, because I thought, oh, I'm supposed to have a sympathetic lead character, am I? I can't have an unreliable narrator, or a bit of a shit? Has this person read The Rachel Papers, even?

In my dreams, I'd be able to write genre fiction, one a year, bosh bosh, but I've always had a kind of quirkiness about me, and a lack of discipline when it comes to sticking to the programme. And - crucially - I'd feel like everything I wrote was copying something else I'd read.

(I'm being driven crazy by a bit of a Larry Niven rip-off [unacknowledged] in Peter F. Hamilton's Judas Unchained, but that's another story.)

In summary: we live in an era of please-yourself publishing, so I'm going to sit myself down and write something for myself, and maybe self-publish at some point.