By Well I have some damn exciting news.
Are you ready?
I’m almost done with my book!
I mean, this would all be more exciting if I said I was actually done with the book but I’m struggling with the last chapter that needs to be written and I’m surprised there’s any hair left on my head. The worst part is I’ve written the final chapter but I’m struggling with the second to last chapter. I mean, I know what I want to accomplish with it but I’m having a hard time getting there.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time just staring at Microsoft Word yesterday. I actually did a really fantastic job at forgetting to eat. I had my first solid food at around 9 o clock last night. And then continued to stare at Microsoft Word. I spent 14 hours staring at a near-empty word document, you know, like you do.
I’m doing great, I swear.
Anyway.
I have released some sample chapters if you’d like to catch up or you happen to be a publisher or literary agent looking to pick up a rambling psychopath. The first chapter I released was a little over a year ago and it was “Bad Luck and Hard Love” which was chosen by my instagram followers as the first chapter to release. Because we all know when it comes to making important life decisions, you have your instagram followers make it for you.
Apparently my instagram followers were horribly wrong according to this one guy.
I posted in a forum that I had released a sample chapter on my blog and some wonderful stranger decided to share the following with me, “As someone who has worked in publishing for a number of years, I feel inclined to tell you that no one will want to pick up this book. It started off assuming the reader knows anything about anything you are writing about and leaves off with more questions than answers.”
I was both baffled and annoyed by this “feedback” since this was a sample chapter. Go ahead and click on the link to the original post. I mention that this is a lead-in chapter to more information that was to come. Now it’s on me for thinking that it’s obvious that this isn’t the very first chapter in the book. I’m not the smartest person in the world but I know that this does not make for a fantastic opening chapter to a book.
But thanks random stranger. I hate you.
I guess the sample chapter makes more sense if you know me and follow my blog…
ANYWAY.
Two days later I handed the first half of the book to my friend Kevin to read and help edit. I honestly didn’t realize that it was that long ago until I looked at the date of the post where I wrote about handing it off to him. His snapchat to me a couple months ago about my book collecting dust in his house makes so much more sense now.
I’ve been slacking.
Writing a book is hard. I discovered this for myself in April of 2017. I took a week off of work and social media and everything else in life to do nothing but write. I worked hard and ended up revising a bunch of chapters I had already written and I’m fairly certain nothing new was accomplished aside from not actually be able to stay off social media and of course writing this blog post: What No One Tells You About Writing A Book.
What’s funny is how optimistic I am each and every time I talk about working on this book. I originally wanted to have it ready to print by my 30th birthday… that was in 2015. 2016 apparently doesn’t exist at all in my mind. Then I had a dream I’d be done by my birthday in 2017. That didn’t happen. When I handed the book off to Kevin in December of last year, I had hoped it would inspire me to finish it by my birthday in 2018.
I’ve lost track of where I was going with ANY of this so here’s the link to the second sample chapter I posted earlier this year. This one, entitled Hands, was newer and not polished at all when I posted it. I was going on vacation and wanted something for my blog so I figured I’d share this. Response was better mostly because I didn’t post it to any forums and let it speak for itself with my followers.
I felt better about it. So there’s that.
I did spend some time last year trying to shop my partial manuscript to potential agents and was met with a lot of frustrating direct “no” responses and the even more frustrating silent no’s- when you just never hear back from them at all. My primary frustration really came from the lack of any sort of personalization to the “no”. Maybe because it sucks so bad that it didn’t warrant anything other than a “no” but it would have been nice to have some sort of feedback.
Oh well.
The point of all of this?
As I near the end of almost a decade of writing, I’m back to wondering what to do with this thing. After a resounding series of “that’s a no from us” and basically being ghosted by agents I feel like self-publishing is going to be the way to go. It’s what I did with my first book and it has done quite well despite me putting absolutely no real effort into marketing it beyond a few mentions on my website and occasionally remembering to mention it when I’m speaking on the road.
Who knows.
So. Will this thing be released by my birthday in May?
Probably not, because I’m still working on that damn chapter.
Might take me another year to figure out.
Maybe I’ll have an agent by then.
Someone buy my book.
Avoiding Neverland 