Okay. We’re back.
Sorry for the interruption in service on the website. Something got all shittered up on the server end, and the webmaster (aka my dad) had to fix everything on his end, which ended up taking a whole lot longer than anyone expected. At least all the data was saved, even the pictures. My dad wasn’t sure that they could be saved, so now I don’t have to spend hours reuploading all my concert photos and dumb cartoon scribblings.
But even before the server outage, I’ll admit, there’s been a long gap between posts. The last update, the Acid Bath one, was in August, and it’s October now. Sorry for not writing anything, but to be honest, for about a month and a half, I just wasn’t writing. Anything: novels, short stories, obscene limericks, anything. There are times when you need to recharge your batteries, but to be honest, there was a lot more going on in my brain than just a recharge.
Basically, I had an agent reading a YA novel of mine, who ended up passing on it. That happens – I’ve had agents pass on novels before – but in the last three years, only two agents have even requested anything more from me. Before 2023 or so, I had agents request partial or full manuscripts every few months or so. Now, with so many missed opportunities, I guess the failure just piled up like snow on the roof, and finally the roof caved in. I had a crisis of confidence that, mixed with an issue with my brain medicine, led me into a depressive spiral. I was sleeping more than twelve hours a night, I wasn’t really eating all that much, and even dragging my feet to the Safeway by my apartment seemed like an impossible journey.
There’s no need to worry about me. I’m feeling better now. For the moment, I’m in California, not because I’m in some kind of crisis mode, but because of reasons I’ll tell you about in a little bit. Besides, I’ve survived way worse mental health episodes. In fact, after I graduated college, I was in such a bad place that, if it weren’t for the ACA allowing me to use my parents’ insurance to get brain medication until the age of 26, I probably wouldn’t even be here today. Thanks, Obama.
I’ve talked to a few people who are in the know, and they say that it’s not just my perception that agents are a lot more gun shy these days when it comes to new authors. Sales are down across the whole industry, and margins are thinner than ever. I get that. What pisses me off is that it seems agents and publishers want contradictory things. They want something that’s guaranteed to sell and make them a ton of money on commission, but they also want something distinct and unique like nothing else in the marketplace. You can’t square that circle. No one can predict what’s going to be successful in the market (remember Fifty Shades of Grey?), so you may as well publish good books and hope they find their place.
So recently, I’ve been changing tack. I’m sending novels to indie publishers. Since they operate outside the corporate structure of the Big Five, they might be willing to take more of a risk on unknown authors. Besides, “indie” doesn’t necessarily mean “small”. Scholastic is technically an indie publisher, as is Harlequin, and they both have massive market shares.
To my surprise, the first indie publisher to which I sent a novel manuscript offered me a contract, completely out of the blue! Unfortunately, after reading their offer, I noticed a bunch of red flags. Serious red flags, like soaked-in-the-blood-of-my-enemies red. This publisher was asking for me to “help financially with some of the production costs”, and after doing some research, I found that this meant that if I signed this deal, I would be on the hook for £3500 or so (it was a UK publisher), and once I’d paid up, the publisher wouldn’t really care about marketing the book or anything, since they would have gotten their money out of me already. So it was a scam. Somebody tried to scam me.
Whatever. I’m too smart to fall for that trap. Besides, I don’t have £3500 to spare. I can only dream of one day becoming a multi-thousandaire, but if I had a spare three thousand quid, I’d just blow it on open world video games and chaste, slow-burn yuri manga.
I don’t know why I’m so desperate to get validation from complete strangers about my writing, or why I value their opinion over my friends’ and family’s, or my own. I think it has to do with the emotional abuse I got when I was a kid. I wanted so badly to feel I had value, value that only existed in the eyes of others. Because that’s the lesson autistic kids get taught: hide your true self, pretend to be just like everyone else, or EVERYONE WILL LAUGH AT YOU AND HATE YOU. I liked writing. I thought I was good at it. Maybe if I published a book, I thought, at a younger age than Christopher Paolini did with Eragon, people would treat me as though I had value, that I wasn’t just some weirdo playing imagination games in the bushes.
But what does “value” mean? When you’re trying to publish, you’re turning yourself into a commodity. You become something that can be bought and sold, that can be assigned a monetary value and marketed like a new flavor of soda. Because in many ways, my stories are me, or at least a part of me. How are you supposed to reconcile that? When you see your worth as a person as a commodity to be monetized in an impersonal capitalistic system, you’re going to end up being crushed, again and again and again.
This is why I go to therapy.
This is getting to be a bit of a jumbled-up ramble, eh? Sorry about that. I’ll just close by letting you know a couple of things:
Thing the First: I just got back to Santa Cruz from a camping trip through the Nevada desert with my dad! We had a great time. I spent a lot of the trip rereading The Book of the New Sun and burning through Margaret Atwood’s new memoir. I’ll have a dump of photos in a few days, once I’ve got a chance to do so. Because like I’ve said, this blog is sort of like an Instagram, at times.
Thing the Second: I’m going to see Acid Bath again at the Quarry Amphitheater in a few days! It’s my third time seeing Acid Bath, and my second time this year (as you remember from my most recent post, waaaay back in August). I knew I’d be swinging by California after the road trip, so I got tickets to the show, mostly because one of the opening bands is the Melvins, and the Melvins are some of my biggest musical heroes. Photos will be coming!
Thing the Third: Literally as I was writing this blog post, I got a response from an agent requesting a full manuscript. It came out of the blue, since I expected to go months or years without getting another submission request, as elucidated in the previous paragraphs of this blog. I don’t want to get my hopes up, of course, but it’s a chance. A small chance, but “small” doesn’t mean “zero”.
Anyway. That’s all the fit that’s pit to shoast, at least for the time being. I’ll check in soon, I promise. Keep your appendages crossed for me.
~ Ian (listening to Death Knocks by Hoaxed)
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