publishing ramble

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a rock star. I’d fallen deeply in love with music, and by the time my sixth grade year rolled around I was obsessed with rock music. I’d dream up band names and draw album covers. I’d write song lyrics. But I knew the big obstacle was that I didn’t know how to play a musical instrument. Fortunately, sixth grade was the first year band was offered and I was excited at the prospect of learning to play music. Except, as it turned out, my parents would not allow me to take band.

I never really got a clear answer as to why I could not do this thing I so badly wanted to do. Maybe they were concerned about how much I’d gotten into rock, maybe it was a religious thing, maybe they were afraid it would cost money they didn’t have. I don’t know. All I know is that when band time came once a week on Thursday afternoons, only myself and about five other kids were left in class, unable to join everyone else in the band room. Those five other kids consisted of Jehovah’s Witnesses and one sweet, developmentally disabled girl.

The rest of my school career ended up a mess, and I never had a chance to learn an instrument, though I did end up screaming into a microphone a few times after a few beers. I don’t think that counts. I was—and am--of the belief that I needed to learn music young, because I have no natural talent and no sense of rhythm. Ask my wife, who doubles over laughing every time I try to tap along to a drum beat. She’s right to do so. It’s bad. When I was 20, I had a potential chance to learn to play the guitar, but I let it go because at that stage I knew I’d never be in a band and that I had already committed to a different path as an adult. I was always interested in using the guitar like a paint brush, and to be good enough to do that you couldn’t learn just enough to bust out a few cover songs. Oddly enough, many of the people in my life are involved in music on some level. But my involvement now is the same as it was in sixth grade: I listen. I don’t play.

While I wanted to be a rock star, I always felt I was a writer. It wasn’t that I thought I was a good writer or had talent; writing was simply an act as natural and vital as breathing. Writing came into my life about the same time as music, but it was an instant vehicle of self-expression. Pick up a pen and go. And I didn’t think about it, the way I did music. I just did it. Pages piled up. Pages still pile up. The more things change…

I’ve always thought it would be neat to get published, and I had a couple of poems published when I was young. But I never made the connection with other writers or a writing community, and I did not devote time into cracking the publishing code. I wasted my free time as a young adult and then the family came and all such thoughts left my mind. In fact I completely stopped writing for a time, but when I picked it up again I was more committed than I’d been since my troubled youth. I didn’t even think of publishing, though, for a while after I started back up.

I have thought of it some over the last 5-6 years. But I don’t even know what that means anymore. The publishing industry is such a mess, print magazines are nearly dead, online magazines come and go so quick and you never have any idea what might be legit and what isn’t because it changes hourly. I have submitted a few stories here and there, though the last one was three years ago. The amount of time to even explore potential locations for my fiction seems completely out of reach. I mean, as a reader it’s extremely hard to find new voices in my favorite genre—horror—because I don’t even know where to look. I have a number of great anthologies from the last decade, but they publish many of the same authors and rarely any original work. And that ain’t their fault; that’s the market. I’m amazed anyone even gets a novel or an anthology published these days. As a reader, I can’t shake this feeling that there is a lot of great stuff I’ll never find. That makes me sad. 

My in-laws, who are sweet people and have no idea what kind of stuff I write (they might not be so sweet to me if they did) like to bring up the idea of self-publishing as something I might be interested in. Self-publishing has always seemed like narcissism to me though, unless you were then going to go out and try to sell it. I barely have time to write, much less become my own distributor in a chaotic ocean of self-publishers. My in-laws mean well but that’s not my route.

I write, first and foremost, for me. I do it because I have to, I can’t not do it as I found out all those years ago. I have a family and a job and I actually have very little time to write as is, so I’ve been unwilling to stop creating to try and figure out the whole story market thing. Every once in a while—when I have writer’s block, usually—I’ll start poking around, seeing if I can take a crack at that nut. And I just get utterly lost. I’d probably have better luck trying to put a band together.

When I started writing this post in my head yesterday while working out, it made a lot more sense. I was going somewhere with it, but now I’ve no idea where that was. In any case, this isn’t meant to be a “woe is me” or a rant about the publishing biz, of which I know absolutely nothing. I’m still writing, and will continue to write, even if my audience is the three people who read this blog and the two friends who get copies of my stories. (They are always so nice about it. Aren’t friends great?) It would be easy to look back and wish I’d made a few different choices, but life would be boring if we could go back and change things. I mean, between this post and a story I’ve written 2000 words today, so clearly there are no roadblocks to creation. And I don’t think the world is missing anything by not being exposed to my muddled, boring stories. To those of you who do read (either by choice or because you’re a kind friend too polite to say no)—thank you. It is appreciated.