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Why I Don't Self Publish and Other Musings
I often have difficulty responding to comments on my posts, so I don’t. However, I appreciate the comments people have left, across multiple posts, regarding my decision to stop submitting my writing. My decision to stop is final, but some of the suggestions I received warrant further examination to understand why this is so.
Novelist John Scalzi has been asked why he doesn’t self publish, and he says that traditional publishers do a lot of things, such as marketing, sales and publicity, that he would otherwise have to do himself. He doesn’t have the expertise or desire to participate in the publishing world outside of writing. I am in the same boat, with the added burden of my temperament making it impossible for me to do most of the things a traditional publisher does on the author’s behalf. I know this because I spent my final seven months in the Navy working in a Legal Service Office. The job involved dealing with people non-stop. Those seven months were among the most miserable and longest of my life. (By the Navy’s own standards, I wasn’t qualified for training in that field and clerical work in general was my weakest area. Why I was assigned there is a mystery to me.) If I self-published, my work would continue to linger in obscurity, because I have neither the knowledge nor the ability to tell the world that my work exists.
Another suggestion, made in passing, was to explore writing groups. I have never worked with such groups. I did briefly work with a former English professor who was acting in a coach-like role. Those efforts came to nothing because he didn’t like my writing. Neil Gaiman says that if you seek help, seek it from someone who likes your writing and the kinds of things you write. My experience with the professor killed my interest in the endeavor. I could never see how his suggestions made my work better. It was evolving into something that isn’t me, and if I can’t be myself when I write, then writing has no value to me. I suspect that groups would destroy my interest in a similar way. I recently finished reading a novel, The Wizard of the Pigeons, by Megan Lindholm. The wizards in the story must abide by rules for their magic to remain. In a similar way, my writing demands my solitude, lest I lose my voice. If it suffers for that, then so be it. Better that it exist, flawed, than not exist at all.
The last point is a clarification; I have stopped submitting my work. By “submitting” I mean sending a manuscript to a publication that employs editors who decide whether to accept or reject the submission. Posting on a site like The Mighty isn’t the same thing. There seemed to be some notion that the right person could see one of my posts in some random place on the internet and that would constitute my big break. This thought amuses me, as I recall my childhood dream of being a cartoonist. I believed that comic strips started out in local papers, and were discovered by scouts from the syndicates who distribute comics nationwide. Turns out that nationally syndicated comics were submitted directly to the syndicates for the most part. Exceptions do exist, but the exceptions offer worse odds than submitting the old fashioned way. What book editor, after a full day of grinding through a slush pile, is going to spend their free time trawling the internet, looking for the next Harry Potter? I will continue to post here as long as I have something relevant to say. I average zero to four likes per post, and that is all that will ever come of it.
I found one of my favorite quotes in an abstract algebra textbook. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No sense being a damn fool about it.” It is difficult to know when persistence has become foolishness, but the state of my mental health tells me that I have crossed that line. The ship was sinking. Going down with it wouldn’t have accomplished anything.
#Depression #Trauma #Suicide #MentalHealth #PTSD #MightyPoets
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