Of fun and flying

 I’ve reached the place where my thoughts about the publishing industry and the odds of getting published  by it are totally negative.  Day after day I’m seeing announcements for dark and violent books which I have no desire to read being launched.  Even in the middle of one of the grimmest and darkest years I’ve lived through, publishers are still celebrating grimdark.

On top of this, I’ve been seeing a lot of tweets from writers complaining that agents never respond to their submissions.  That’s certainly been my experience. Of the last 25 agent submissions I did, only two or three bothered to write back and reject. The rest I followed-up after three months, and only one of those has had the courtesy to respond to that follow-up.

So when it came to deciding what to work on next, I’d reached the stage of ‘fuck the publishing industry’.  For years I’ve been trying to pick projects to work on that I thought might just become that breakthrough book.  That’s not to say I haven’t loved and believed in the projects I’ve been working on.  I have, but I’ve also written them with one eye on the market.

But as it seems that the market doesn’t give a damn about anything I write, I’m obviously wasting my time worrying about what it wants.  So I’m not going to take any notice of what the industry wants in future.  This mood has been somewhat strengthened by my buying Pushcart Press’s classic book Rotten Reviews and Rejections.  This amusing book lists hundreds of savage rejections for books which then went on to become multi-million bestsellers.  Reading that, it’s hard to believe that the publishing industry really knows what readers want.

One of the things which surprised me most about the book were the interspersed ‘memos’ from writers.  Reading them, it became clear how many writers have really hated the publishing industry.  The comments of some of these mega-bestselling authors are very scathing indeed.

So that too fed into my mood about my next project.  I’ve decided that this time I’m writing purely for me.  I’ve decided to re-write a 25+ years old novel which had been superseded by real life, and update it for today.  The story is set on an orbital shipyard, with lots of sentient AIs, and independent women refusing the control of their families.  It’s fun to write, and has starships flying around everywhere.

In a time when all my writers’ support groups are still shut down by this dammed pandemic I have to support myself.  And one of the best ways to do that is to write for me, and purely for fun.