More Stuff

 
Okay, cover and sample to go live midnight, tonight and tomorrow morning.

I am SO freaking happy with this right now. It's the first time in a really long time that I've finished a project and been happy with it.

I still feel like an ass for choosing to self publish. Today I feel like less of one. Why? Well, as I will touch on again later tonight (oh, about midnight) there are things that you just...can't do for a commercially published book if you are an unpublished writer looking to become a professionally published one. So there are ideas about technique I've completely ignored because they're not viable options in the publishing world.

The most depressing thing in the world, to me, was that Fight Club only got a $5,000 advance. Because it was just that weird. I mean, I totally understand why! How the hell do you summarize that book? I assumed it was a bromance about punching for years, until I watched the movie. And it was life-alteringly awesome. But nobody had any confidence in it, because it was weird.

I am not comparing myself to Fight Club. I do not have a Fight Club in me. I am not that kind of writer, and I never will be. I tell bizzare little stories that have no social value, at all, and I'm happy with that. And I don't think that I know better than the publishing industry at large. I think they made the right choice telling me to get lost. I'm not a great writer, I'm not destined to be a great writer, and I've made some pretty good progress accepting that. That has been my goal through all this, by the way: To accept that being a professional author is out of my reach, that I'm not going to make it, and that I just need to get the fuck over it already and move on to my real life, whatever that might be. I can't spend my whole life pounding on a door when there is no evidence whatsoever that door will ever open.

And it's not so bad, here. There's light here--a distant, impossible to get to light, but there is light--and because self-publishing is a career killing, selfish thing to do...well, I'm not leaving here, so I might as well adjust the window dressing and make myself at home.

And that means doing the things that I wouldn't do if I were trying to get published. Like rip apart other people's books (It is so. Freaking. Fun) and movies, and complain and bitch about my life, and write short little things I can only sell for a dollar.

That turn out to be (to me, at least) FREAKING. AWESOME. I really, really, REALLY wish somebody else had written this story. I wish I didn't know what it was about, where it was going (there's going to be more FYI) and I wish I hadn't read it EIGHT MILLION TIMES until my brains started dribbling out my ears.

Ah, well. Enough depressing shit. BOOK! SAMPLE! TONIGHT!