Getting back on the horse, I’m plugging away at edits for Drawful the Awful and am targeting two weeks for mark ups and first round edits/rewrites to be done. In the meantime, I did have a conversation with a friend about whether I’d be putting the rest of the story, in some form, up on the blog.
Short answer is no. I’ll leave up what’s up already as a “sample,” but interested readers who want to continue will be able to buy it (eventually), complete with gorgeous artwork, sometime down the line. As with all my work, I’ll be querying agents and publishers and doing my best to get “picked up.”
Even if I don’t, I’ll self-publish my work (As I already have Five Talents, and Beneath the Wood). Truth is, I have to be at peace with the absolutely astronomical odds of getting one’s work picked out by an agent or publisher when you’re an “unknown” without connections. My hope is that the work ethic and steady discipline is the best argument that I’ll continue making. This blog has been around only a year, but I’ve been doing this since high school.
But when stories like these hit the web, and show how everything has taken on kind of a “clickbait” style of business, the odds that I stated before seemed astronomical begin to feel outright impossible:
What’s my point in all this? Simple: I’m not going to worry about it. I’m not doing this for the industry, or for money. This is passion, pure and simple. I’m proud of my work, and I believe in its value. If none of it ever breaches that wall, I’ll be satisfied in the work and the product.
I really believe there’s something special in Drawful (just as I did with Five Talents and Beneath the Wood before it), and I’m going to work over the coming months to make it worthy of that esteem. I’ll do it with a red pen and my keyboard, and let the results the speak for themselves.
I shared Drawful in full on here for a while as a testament to how much writing I actually get done day by day behind these posts- more than just the snippets of Five Talents. So, as far as that game is concerned- that noise chamber of hashtags, following tens of thousands so you can get tens of thousands followers that ignore you as much as you ignore them? I’ll pass from here on. I’ve got writing to do.
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