What We Hold Onto is the title of my new novella; I have a good feeling about this one and hope to see it published in a year or so. It’s going through one more round of workshop edits.

I’ve received payment for my Asimov’s Novella Of All Possible Worlds from Allan Kastners Years Best Short SF Novels. and hope to hear that audiobook version in the next weeks or months. Yay!

Thanks to everyone who has read my work, commented on it, given me feedback, over the years. I’m 52, and closer now than I have ever been to actually doing what I want to do with my life. I’m a lucky man.

That said, the writing life is, ah, a challenge. Rejection, isolation, depression… I struggle with all these things. The good days are good. The good moments are fantastic. But there’s a lot of not knowing, too.

Should you be doing this?

I shudder, twitch, sometimes convinced that I have revealed myself as being a rotten person. If you have ever done workshops, for long periods of time, you know what I mean. In On Becoming a Novelist or The Art of Fiction John Gardner talks about one of the insoluble writing problems people sometimes encounter, of being so seriously flawed that they can’t create prose that connects with others. Their characters are all unbelievable, detestable, or both.

Your subconscious coughs up terrible things, and you are caught between second guessing your creative impulse, writing stuff more consciously, or including story elements that are, ah, unwelcome.

Eventually you start getting pissed at your subconscious.

Finally, there are things you can’t help but write, so you write them, and sometimes, they don’t work. You can’t sell them. And you’re left wondering; should I publish this myself, or should this remain unseen forever?

You might only sell a few copies; self-publishing short fiction in general isn’t about making money, it’s about the occasional fan getting to read the occasional story. But will you hurt yourself? Will you damage your brand? Is the story actually so bad that after reading it, someone won’t want to read you anymore?

This is where I am now, with a bunch of stuff that hasn’t worked lately, after my 10 pro story sale streak.

Really, it’s novel time. But I still am trying to figure myself out, as a writer, what i’m doing and why. What I’m good for.

I know I don’t have forever. I’m 52. If I’m lucky, I could write ten good books still, before my brain rots and I die of whatever horrible thing waits in store for me. Ten is enough for me. But I need to write my ten. Now. Starting now.

Dear God. Now.

 

(The photo above is an image of me deciding to blog instead of writing Facebook posts.)

My single professional writer friend, the one who went pro earning six figures year in the three years I wrote and sold ten short stories for 4k, says if you want to write fiction—write fiction.

Social media is a waste of time.  

At least, it can be, if you put the cart before the horse. It was for her. She was canny; savy; she did all those things that your pro heros tell you never to do; she studied the market, wrote to it, and made money while still finding the work compelling and fullfilling… she did as little social media as possible.

Social media, she would say, is writing for free.

Like I am here.

I spent an hour, and the 5-20 people who read this a day get something new to look at, and theoretically, someday, they might be more inclined to buy a book of mine and eventually, it all snowballs and I become rich and famous.

He says, voice expressionless, eyes flatly gazing into the middle distance.

Yeah. It’s unlikely. But at least, at your blog, you’re the brand; it’s an ad for you and your products and whatever else  you want to hawk; it’s your goddamn little lemonade stand.

Still, it’s hard not to just post to Facebook, where two to ten times more people will look at it.

But something about FB stinks. See the monkey above. The little monkey inside us, who doesn’t want to work for free for Mark Zuckerberg.

Or, if you’re an optimist, who doesn’t feel this monkey, you do want to take advantage of a global network, hundreds of millions of dollars of software development, for free, to promote your personal brands, and connect to friends, customers and colleagues…

Facebook, yay!

The reality is, we are doing both of those things at once. Well. A few build a commercially viable brand; the vast majority are just throwing money at Zuckerberg.

To generalize, between Youtube, Facebook, and blogging portals like HuffPo and Gawker, content creators have a vast array of new opportunities to work for nothing or almost nothing for millionaires and billionaires.

Err.

Rather, original content creators now are able to directly reach audiences without having to worry about breaking genre rules, about offending the gatekeeper sensibilities, waiting for years and years to be filtered, edited and packaged.

It’s both at once, you don’t get one without the other.

The problem is that monkey up there, making your peace with him.

Especially for those of us who grew up in a different world, the pre-digital world. We lived through a peculiar time, a time of a vast mass market, dominated by a handful of channels, controlled by gatekeepers of various sorts; if you made content, and got it past the gate, you got paid. Sometimes you got screwed, like the Beatles did on their first albums, when they were paid a flat salary and penicillin shots to cope with the STDs from groupies. Still. They were paid enough to live.

Basically, you made stuff, and somebody else sold it. You helped by talking to the media, who in turn, made something by talking to you, which they sold. (with ads.)

As we have entered the digital age, the file sharing age, the tech bubble billionaire age, the age of creative disruption, we’ve entered into the world of the free chicken nugget.  You can’t expect to sell your pile of chicken nuggets and sweet sauce  unless you give people a taste first. Not just chatter about nuggets. People want a free goddamn nugget.

Now, in a food court with ten vendors, we can all do this, and still, if you want a meal, you’re going to have to pay eight dollars. You can’t keep going back for free nuggets.

But the internet is  a food court that stretches a million miles long.

You can, and many–most?–simply can continue to walk down the row of desperate vendors to the vanishing point consuming free samples until they are full.

You could try to resist this. But once the culture gets going, you would simply be committing suicide. Chicken in sweet sauce with starch is now sold by giving away free nuggets.

The older generation doesn’t get it, and never will, ensconsed in the  previous, but still brutal system, which they mastered. Ursula LeGuin can bad mouth indy publishing at Amazon. She doesn’t need it. Harlan Ellison, when confronted with the nugget analogy to explain why a magazine I work for was giving away an issue with one of his stories snarled.

‘People are getting too many of my free nuggets.’

Coming home from a week long media detox (I read a newspaper at one point and felt like one of those re-enactors at Colonial Williamsburg.) I find myself re-examing how I use my time; where I run my eyeballs; what I am getting out of what I’m doing; what make sense; what is joyless compulsion.

No easy answers. The monkey in me is not happy about any of this. My monkey isn’t sure that the current generation of robber barons are necessarily building a more sustainable future than the past they are gleefully destroying.

But the content creator in me has to be hopeful.

It has to play the game.

Which I guess is along winded way of saying, enjoy this nugget!

Would you like a short story or two, to go along with that?

If you click in the sidebar, you can get some more.

You know when you buy junk food; a bag of fluorescent orange Cheetos or a can of pringles or a tub of Trader Joes peanut butter cups or whatever. And you think, it’s ok, if you don’t eat too much at once, it’s not that bad for you.

Then you eat the whole fucking thing.

The fleeting pleasure wiping out the sure knowledge of just how bad an idea this is. The moment collaborating in this nihilistic twinkling of fulfillment. Afterwards you feel stupid and degraded. Your finger tips are bright orange.

Oh, and you’re still hungry.

Well, social media is my bag of Cheetos. Probably not that bad for you, if you don’t eat like a huge bag a day. Or two.

I’m a triple bagger.

I have a few hundred readers on FB, or it seems like I do, versus the few dozen of my blog, so I tend to write over there, making Mark Zuckerberg some tiny fraction of a cent richer with every unpaid word.

Facebook’s business model, in which everyone is simultaneously a customer and a supplier and an employee, is perhaps one of the most horrific ideas to emerge from internet culture. FB makes up about half of all web traffic at this point. It is an entirely voluntary horror, of course; you don’t have to be there. You don’t have to have electricity, running water, or pants either, of course. There reality is if you want to be in business you’re on FB one way or another.

So. I’ve been pretending I have a busines being there.

I wrote a post recently, about how there’s this way now as a writer to check on your progress, or lack thereof, on a minute by minute basis, and experience a sense of failure and paralysis continually, shocking yourself, over and over again.

Watching books not sell; watching stories sit in queues, the days tick by, and then not sell, watching the awards spin by, checking absently for your name on various reading lists, etc. Googling reviews. Being careful not to replay to any.

It’s one of those things you have to learn to stop doing. Like eating the whole fucking bag of Cheetos.

I’ve been angry since the AME shooting. Politics consumes me.

I’ve had no good news on the writing front for what feels like a good long time. I’m finishing up the latest in a series of what feels like utterly doomed efforts. In retrospect, I know why I wrote them, but for God’s sake, I know, I shouldn’t have. Or rather, I know nobody wants to buy them.

Sure feels like my fifteen minutes are over.

One thing that social media, and email before it, has been able to do for me, though is to capture the sense of my personality over time. I can go back and read myself, over the last 20 years, in various ways. And find out that I’ve always been like this. Always hanging on by my proverbial finger nails. Since I was sixteen years old, or so, post-puberty, anyway.

For whatever reason, I’m happiest in made up worlds. Mine or those created by others. The worst imaginary dystopia is somehow less painful than our world, which I feel could be a utopia, if we weren’t so fucking idiotic a species. I’ve loved stories and shows and movies and games and writers and writing, and been barely able to stand anything else, for a long long time.

My few decades, moving in and out of various business-esque jobs and roles, inform me, but represent nothing I want to return to.

I struggle now with the political dimension of my very existence.

My participation in progressive politics triggers an intense self loathing; it is the feeling I had when I learned about the Holocaust, about the genocide of the native americans, the My Lai massacre, about Jim Crow and Slavery. The feeling I got when my wife explained that she would never dream of walking to the convenience store at night for fear of being raped.

The solid cores of my identity exist as a kind of shorthand for oppression, murder, and rape. European ancestry. White. Male. Het. Cis.

Add to that now, middle-aged. Boomer. The generation that ate the world, and gave us… all this.

I feel stuck.

If there is anything to gained by my fifteen minutes, my ten pro stories of my Second Try at writing, it has been an effort to bend my thinking in more positive directions through the sheer application of will.

Medication never worked. Mediation sort of worked. But writing, storytelling, works, when I let myself do it, because in story telling, you’re there, and your’e not there, you disappear and reappear moment by moment. Existence is less painful when it is periodic.

Fictively, I conspire, cajole, lie, if necessary, to create some sort of positive direction for my characters and plots. It’s like I’m trying to dream my way out of myself. Escape from the hideous legacy of my own identity.

For me, the lie is often what tells the truth; because my mind lies to me a lot. In this I think I am far from alone, of course. Sanity is really just a kind of useful delusion.

I model it, to the degree I’m able. I’m pretty good at it really.

I’ve lived now among the humans for half a century, and they think of me as one of their own.

I had a dream last night, it was so good, so pure, that it made my whole life feel like an ill fitting suit. It’s a feeling I’ve been struggling to hold onto, even though it is painful, so I can put it into something.

A few more hours left in the day. Let’s see what I do.