I was watching this movie yesterday thinking, “Wow this movie is so beautiful and perfect, they couldn’t make a sequel This Good even if they wanted to” and now i wake up to thissfgfff
It used to be very popular for authors who published original stories but who “started out” writing fanfiction to characterize the experience in terms like this: “My fanfiction is like babysitting someone else’s kids, but my original stuff is like MY children.” The implication seemed to be that you had a closer, more enduring, lifelong bond with your original stuff (never mind this flattening of people’s relationships with children not their own).
I have no idea if authors still talk that way, because frankly once I became a published author I stopped listening to what people had to say about it. Because my experience of publication was so very much not what I expected it to be.
I’ll tell you a secret, which I can probably say now that I’ve ditched my agent and have no idea what I’m going to do in the future: I don’t think my original stuff is nearly as good as my fic, and I have much more of an attachment to my fic than to my original stuff. If we’re going to compare things to children, my fic is definitely much more my children. My fic is much more *me.* Every word you get in a fic is exactly how I wanted it to be, exactly how I chose it, exactly the things I wanted the characters to say, the mood I wanted to convey.
In my experience of publication, it is not that way. Maybe it’s not like that for everyone. I mean, I’m sure once you are an established author, you can do that. But maybe there are debut authors out there who, when they get edits back, just reject all of them and insist on the novel being published as they wanted it to be published. Maybe I should have done that. But I didn’t. As someone who has an aversion to editing but is told that it’s supposed to be a good thing, I made myself edit and edit and edit again, following all of the suggestions I was given. And at the end of the day, frankly, I hated the book. I couldn’t wait to never look at it ever again. I’m sure it’s better than I think, but it’s still not the book it was, or the book I wanted to write. It is something else entirely, some watered-down version of something, something that was stripped of all of my me-ness to make it fit into a marketing formula. You know the Fall Out Boy lyric, “I became such a strange shape trying to fit in”? That.
I think maybe it’s possible that some writers just assume that’s what the experience of putting a story out into the world is like? Or maybe not, maybe other writers have a much better experience than I did. I mean, I have to assume they are having much better experiences, because they all seem to keep writing and publishing, and they seem kind of happy doing it? I mean, a lot of them also complain a whole lot about having to write, which…does seem kind of like they don’t really like it, so Idk. This is all to say:
I’d been writing my whole life, and I’d been publishing stories for years before I was published. And I loved all of them. I put them out into the world so excited to share them, so excited to see what people said about them, so excited that people might love my characters as much as I did and want to cuddle all of them close. To this very day, I love writing, I love what I have written, and I love putting it out there. And I love and treasure what all of you have to say, but I write for me first. And maybe that makes me narcissistic, but actually, I think that’s a form of narcissism I think we could all enjoy more of: loving the things we create, doing things just for us. I was re-reading “Saving Sherlock Holmes” the other night because, well, let’s face it, I, too, have written gay boy with dark curly hair falling for school rugby star, “Heartstopper.” And anyway, as I was reading it, I was like, “This story is great!” Yay! I hope all of you love what you do for fun that much!
This is a long introduction to say that I had set a deadline for this summer to think about whether I wanted to try to get published again. As I mentioned above, I parted ways with my agent a couple of years ago, because I felt that she just wasn’t a good fit for me. Maybe I’d always had the wrong agent. I’m not sure she was at all fannish, and that was probably a problem when it came to representing my very fannish writing. But at the time I got an agent, you really didn’t talk about having come from a fanfiction background. When I was done with my first book contract, my editor asked me for ideas for future books, and I pitched some stories that were kind of ficcy in tone and shape, and I was told, flat-out, very bluntly, “Fandom doesn’t sell. Only Rainbow Rowell can write that way.” …Wow. It actually took me years to write anything for publication ever again after that, because I was kind of like, Well, if the market doesn’t want what I write, then I’ll just write it *not* for the market.
But I look around the market now and I think, That can’t possibly be true anymore. It can’t possibly be the case that editors and agents would still tell me that fannish stuff doesn’t sell. And the truth is, I’m very happy with my life and my fic and the way my writing is, but I also think sometimes, like, would it be nice to have some extra cash to help my niblings with their educations and stuff? Well, of course! Who wouldn’t like that? Would it be nice to share my writing with a little bigger audience? Just because I would want as many people as possible to get to cuddle my characters lol. Would it be nice to be E.L. James? Well, that’s a complex question, but probably yes lol
But I’ve been having a huge debate about whether to try to go for it again. Like, I really didn’t enjoy it, as I’ve said. And it didn’t make me much money in the end, either. I shouldn’t say it’s not nice to have extra money come in, because it is! But it was kind of like “I can take a long weekend vacation on this money!” Not “I can travel the world on this money.” I heard someone say once it was “buy a designer handbag” money. And that’s about right. So it wasn’t a ton of money, and it didn’t really make me happy, and so why would I do it again? And at the same time, I can’t deny that I look at some of the things that are out there right now and I think, …I could have done that. I could have done that *better.* (Kinda looking at you a little bit, Sally Rooney lolololol)
So I felt like I had two choices: I could start over and try to find an agent who understood my writing a little better. Or I could self-publish. And then I was like, …why not both?
I mean, I have enough stuff written to absolutely cover querying to agents and also trying to self-publish. So. Why not do both? Because there’s some stuff I have written that I’m like, “Okay, this I could handle editing and handing over to someone else and having it become someone else’s thing.” But then I have other stuff, like “Swan Song,” that I decided I wanted no editor to come anywhere near. Are there parts of “Swan Song” that could be better? Undoubtedly. But I suspect what would really happen to “Swan Song” is it would be slashed of 100,000 character-development words and I would weep at what happened to Matt Usher.
So, I think I’ve made a decision to use this summer to try to give BOTH a try. I’ll draft up a new query letter and start over with the whole agent thing with one of my novels. And I’ll come up with a self-publishing scheme for another novel. And I’ll see!
Oh yeah I want my blorbos to be happy!! First thing’s first, though, *Puts them in horribly mentally damaging scenarios that they may never truly recover from*
I was on the path of finally being free from the Pedro pit (which is way I stopped using tumblr) when I randomly decided to check here and now I’m all the way at the bottom again
