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I am a failed writer in the sense that I have never had my fiction professionally published. I did have two pieces from my previous blog reprinted in Untidy: The Blogs on Rumsfeld, but I have never been paid to write fiction. These posts, which will run on most Fridays, are an attempt to keep myself creatively motivated and just generally discuss the creative process from someone trying to figure it out. I genuinely love the process of making things — any things, from writing to drawing to music to woodworking to baking. Maybe my own failures can be a source of amusement or interest to others.
So let me establish my credentials: I am complete and utter failure at getting published. I have queried over a hundred agents across three novels and gotten only one request for a full manuscript and maybe two other pieces of semi-helpful if impersonal advice about why the work failed. My writing is, objectively, shit as far as the publishing world is concerned. But I love writing stories, so much that I am inflicting stories about writing stories on you here. You should expect to see pieces about works in progress, the querying process, random irritations, and craft discussions of the curmudgeonly sort — I am not a fan of most craft books or advice. We will discuss why as this goes along.
Again, though, I am a failure at getting published, so take all of this with a grain of salt. Or two. Or ten thousand. But maybe we can find amusement and/or some creative sparks as we watch me fail to get published. Onto the first issue.
Works in Progress and The Non-Existent Brand
I’ll start with talking about the two pieces I am currently working on and why. The first is a fantasy based on early modern Germany and Sir Goetz of the Iron hand (go read up on this dude. The iron hand is the least nuts thing about him.) called the Clockmaker’s Wife. It is not the story of the knight with the iron hand. It is the story about a woman who is trying to keep her father’s clock making business in her hands after his death and who uses the chance to improve the iron hand as a way to deal with an unwanted fiancé and the powers that be. It was supposed to be an historical fiction but, dear lord, is it hard to find details about the lives of tradespeople in early modern Nuremberg in English sources.
I like this story because it is about what people do to survive unfair situations. For most people, history has been terrible. It always amused me that people who claim to have recovered past lives were always Cleopatra or Lincoln or Qin Shi Huang. In reality, the majority of human beings throughout history have been shoveling shit, not living in palaces. Help is often not coming, and so people need to find ways to survive terrible, unfair situations. The calvary is not riding over the hill. Even when it does, it’s generally coming to run you over at the behest of some rich bugger, not help you. More fiction, I think, could do with examining that aspect of life, rather than focus on the big revolutionary changes.
The second piece is what I am calling the Fsck English Magic book. (Fsck is an old sysadmin joke. “fsck” is a command used to check on the file system of Unix flavored computers, and it often shows you things that are not good. Hence its use in place of a similarly spelled vulgarity. Because us computer dorks have a sophisticated, refined sense of humor. Obviously). This is a historical fantasy centered around a girl who worked in the new English mills in the early 1800s and was pulled into a machine but lived. In my head, she lives because of magic, which leads to her being apprenticed, etc. etc. etc. She ends up in the center of the military response to the Luddite uprising against people she grew up and worked with. It is a cross between Blood in the Machine and Johnathn Strange and Mr. Norell. Norell is a modern classic, but it never focuses on the Luddite situation, despite being set in that time period and the Crown sending more troops to put the Luddites down than went with Wellington to the Peninsula Campaign.
Writing this feels pretty arrogant. As I said, the book it is in direct conversation with is a modern classic and Susanna Clarke is one of the best pure writers of our time. I don’t have a plot, per se, as I am still doing some basic timeline research, and only three characters shaped in my head. But I cannot stop thinking about this work, as the Luddites were as important or more important than even the Napoleonic Wars and Norell barely mentions them. It is a failing of fantasy that it focuses on the powerful at the expense of the lives and potential power of the average person.
You may have detected a theme in the stories, and it is one that I am well aware of. Even the book I have out on query is focused on the same kinds of people and issues (from the query: Taste of Magic is Money Heist meets Blacktongue Thief. Complete at 84 thousand words, it should appeal to fans of magic, technology, and politics. [OR INSERT PERSONALIZATION FROM MSWL HERE IF APPROPRIATE] The story is a DaVinci era inspired fantasy set in a magical Hanseatic League/ Republic of Venice, where a revolution is brewing against the controlling wealthy guild masters who rule with an iron fist.) Some people might call this a brand. I have on more than one occasion myself joked that I write sarcastic little stories about killing monsters and fighting capitalists (no actual capitalists were harmed in the making of this post.) But I don’t think of it as writing to a brand.
These stories come out of what I am interested in and my own life experiences. I write them because the themes and characters interest me, and while there is consistency in them, I am not trying to brand what I write. I think this is a subtle but important difference. The books are not in all the same genre (broadly they are all fantasy, but none of the fit in the same sub-genres) and they do not copy themes, environments, or plots. I write them because they appeal to me, not because I am trying to appeal to others.
Two things. Yes, I understand that the above sentence could be read as arrogant or condescending in an art house kind of way. It is not meant that way at all — see the comment about me writing “sarcastic little stories about killing monsters and fighting capitalists”. I am firmly in the commercial arena — I want people to read my stuff and enjoy it, as well as pick up on the themes I am trying to discuss.
Yes, I also understand that sentence might be seen as a reason why I am not able to get an agent. I should try and write to the market, or at least write to what I think people are going to like. Putting the aside the notion that you can write to a market given the timeframes in traditional publishing, I don’t think I can do that. If I wrote a story that didn’t interest me, I think that would degrade my writing. And we have already established that my writing is, objectively, shit.
I understand that branding works for some people, and I understand that a lot of self-published authors need that branding to stay on the Amazon treadmill. And a lot of them are good at it. But I would not be. Writing what I am interested in is the only way, I think, that I could hope to have enough quality in the work to have a prayer of having it published. If it doesn’t excite me, why would it excite a reader?
Weekly Word Count
600. Yeah, long week at work and more snow that was predicted, hence more shoveling than was predicted. Here’s to a better next week.