Putting one word in front of the other

Like many writers, I have a love/hate relationship with social media.  I use it to keep connected to other writers, and to research and keep up to date on what's going on in the publishing industry.  We're always told as writers that we must study the market, but nobody mentions the downside of doing that.

A few days ago I came across a post by Jonny Geller, the joint CEO of Cutis Brown, one of the UK's biggest and most respected literary agencies, on www.bookmachine.org.  I'd urge you to read it for yourself, but be prepared to be upset.  "...literary agents are in danger of becoming risk averse", he says, and "the funnel to publication seems to be getting ever narrower."  And "sometimes, books come to the reader directly from self-publishing because we in publishing do not think they work to our criteria." He quotes Andy Weir's The Martian as an example.

Depressing stuff, huh?  But wait!  Women writers carried off most of the awards at this year's Hugos, so isn't there hope for me?  Well, at the risk of being controversial, I have some worries about the "diversity" push in SF.  Because that looks to me like a focus on the exotic, on anything that doesn't come from a white English-speaking background.

Yes, the push for diversity is needed, but I sometimes feel that I'm the forgotten people squeezed in the middle.    A white English woman writing in England is a hard sell for a publisher's diversity ticket.  And don't tell me that I have all the advantages.  I don't.  I'm a woman writing in the SF genre.

Sometimes this depressing stuff on social media makes me wonder why I send work out, why I even try to get published.  What's the point?  But the point is that writing is in my blood.  I have things to say, things that matter to me.  A writer is who I am, and writing is what I do, nowadays full-time.

The only way to deal with the doom and gloom machine is to get off social media for a while.  It's to go back to the writing, to lose myself in whatever story I'm currently crafting.

The cure is to carry on putting one word in front of another, keep on writing what I love.  And continue to keep the dream of success alive somehow.  But until that success comes along, putting one word in front of the other is how I survive.