I got started writing novels when I was in college. I could crank them out. A vague idea would blossom into my PC's word processor. Four hours a night would net me 12-15 pages, a proper chapter. That chapter got added to others and 20 of those is a proper full length novel. I wrote about riots, about libertarianism, about desert rats and mafia. I got a lot of things wrong. I didn't predict Google would make a functional search engine and change the world. I didn't predict Wikipedia. I didn't predict smartphones. This worries me that some of my books can't be fixed for publication. Now that self publishing is pretty easy, a real work from home project, I could make money doing it. No more wasting 2 years dealing with New York editors who do nothing but attack authors egos and delay publishing until the content is irrelevant, then brag about how the books they turned down became best sellers for someone else. Parasites. Another reason to hate New York. FOAD, New York.
My novels were mostly near-future scifi, and I went for realistic. No flying cars, no anti gravity. No space travel. Space is largely useless if you know anything about engineering, and I know enough. That movie Gravity is a pastiche of half a dozen different 1970's scifi stories about orbital dynamics which the greats, from Clarke and Asimov to Heinlein and Niven all wrote to prove they could do it. That's pretty dull to me, as well. I don't need space to tell a good story. I have the gritty reality and tons of research to make my settings plausible and immersive, and that's what makes a story really grab you. Immersive details and compelling characters.
It is in my best interest to fix up my older books with modern details, make them pretty for a Kindle reader, and put together a decent cover, and publish. One after another, the ones I can salvage. Some are just too old, with critical details based around technology that has moved on to the point that their ideas are irrelevant. So far its been a hard slog because I find it difficult to see much hope. Depression associated with searching for normal kinds of work, despite this lovely drought-caused sunny weather, makes me worry that the effort will result in no money, like everything I've tried in the past. Investing time in myself has been a waste. Investing time in educating myself to new skills has been a waste. Its distracting me from doing the work, worrying that my efforts won't sell.
The thing about writing is you have to believe in yourself utterly. You have to be an egomaniac to write fiction. To put the words down. The most successful writers are usually the least accurate and most biased. Many have clearly and easily identified mental illness. The most effective best selling authors wrote for the masses with a restricted thesaurus so readers wouldn't need a dictionary. There are a ton of writers going for the middle, for the supermarket checkout line, and few going for the educated crowd. That's a tough argument to make to yourself. Do you dumb it down? And keep in mind, a stupid author cannot write smart characters. You can only write as smart as yourself. Really. Not joking. I read a fair number of stupid villains in fiction that would really be improved by being smarter. A great villain sets up a scheme where he wins no matter what happens because the hero falls into a trap, usually moral and ethical but also the kind of thing where the battlefield is against them but doing nothing leaves them with regrets for the rest of their lives they can't live with. A proper villain does that. I have real world exposure to those. I'm lucky to be alive.
We live in a worst case scenario world, just barely short of apocalypse but awfully close to it every single day. My stories had the "unthinkable" in them. Stuff that eventually became regular daily news. I can't sell that because it isn't shocking anymore. Its daily life. I have to develop plausible characters in my settings instead, with great dialogue that can be read at several levels the way women do. Instead of big blaring violence, I want to have more subtle but emotionally devastating violence caused by cultural structures that punish people for having honor, ethics, morality, and freedom. Like the real world does. The real world consistently rewards evil that's barely smart enough to hide itself from most of its overt ills. Just enough to keep going in corrupt stability. That's our civilization. We're helping our enemies destroy us, and I want to write about that and what's left over when they're done.
If I can correct everything wrong with 3 of my novels, I can self publish and promote them online and hopefully make enough income to support myself. If I can write the 3 novels in my head, and come up with more plot, I will have something that's less shamefully broken and more the me of today. I can fix a lot of things writing new stories, including expressing my outrage and dismay at what my nation has become, and how I predict it to disintegrate in our near future. How it will treat its population, like we're all Indians on the reservation and the cavalry has carte blanche to slaughter us when our braves stray. I'll write it with those sort of smug administrator types who are so fat and frequent in the real world. Announcing our deaths in compliance with regulations. I've worked with those too. We live in a very grim place, and if you're happy today, there's something really wrong with you.
Modern America this century has a lot in common with Africa, and I predict things will mostly get worse. As a scifi writer that's my job. The real question is will people with pocket change pay for my efforts or not? I suppose I have little choice but to try and find out. Its not like I can get a non-slavery job up here.
No comments:
Post a Comment