So. I have a blog.
Technically, I've had a blog for several months now. I co-write Unspooling Fiction with my best friend from college, and that's been wildly successful beyond our imaginings. But since I'm attempting to be a real live grown-up author (two of those adjectives are questionable) with a web page and published works and everything, a blog for my own writerly purposes seemed like the thing to do. Required by unspoken contract, if you are an author with an online presence, you must have a blog. Besides, I can hold forth at apparently astounding length, so there you go.
It's a bit strange, this self-publishing and attempting to get published by submission thing. Like almost everyone, it seems, I started writing young and early, and continued through college and into adulthood and being a college graduate and an idiot, I decided I would try to make a career doing what I loved. Because that's what you're supposed to do, right? It didn't help that my first submission to a contest, I think when I was still in college, was accepted. Nothing worse than success straight off the bat, I thought for sure that I could do this, that I was in fact as brilliant as I felt while half stoned out of my mind on research paper deadlines and too much cafeteria food. I moved down to live with friends and my then-boyfriend, I looked for temp work to pay the bills between submitting things and getting paid for it. Ah, naivete.
Fast forward to almost eleven years later. The closest I've come to success in publishing via traditional routes is a few short stories in anthologies I can almost guarantee you've never heard of (and not under this name, anyway), and a kudos from a Putnam editor who said he'd love to see my manuscript... if I could find an agent. I tried about forty agencies before I gave up on that one, and packed in the dream a year later. Not the writing part of it, that I kept up because as we all know, once you start, you don't stop. But the submitting I cut out entirely, because I had a day job first with a soul-sucking call-center and then an actually pleasant day job at the family store, which I did enjoy. So I had day job work I enjoyed, I could still write, I loved where I moved to and now live, I might as well just write for myself and be satisfied with my mediocrity. I made noises in the direction of self-publishing, but something always seemed to come up. After I bought a house, though, and it became more certain that I really was settling in my lovely mountains for good, the noises became a bit more coherent. Traditional route publishing be damned, but I needed to prove to myself that I could write, revise, and complete a freaking book because I had been trying and failing and failing better for so many years.
Somewhere in there, within the last several months, my friend and I committed an act of bloggery. How this happened was how most things seem to happen with me and writing, she and I blather at each other about television shows and the nuances of their acting and filming choices, color, script, etc., out of habit. At some point someone said something that made me write out a diatribe on the subject of a character, which was well received. Upon learning that people liked this sort of thing, first we blathered on more in public on Tumblr, then we perpetrated the blog, because Tumblr just wasn't suited to inviting discussion and having a good dialogue. We started it off with one show, one show became two, and at first we publicized it only on Twitter and Tumblr. We had no idea and no real inclination to explore making this a Thing On The Internet. Which is of course when Murphy stepped in and decreed that writers and in-character twitters from both shows would pick it up and disseminate it far and wide. Suddenly we had that most elusive of creatures, A Readership. And people liked what we wrote. To this day we look at each other and wonder how the hell this happened. We'll probably still be wondering that in a year from now.
I have no idea what's going to happen with this blog. Or with my website or my writing career, if career is even the proper term for it. I write! I will continue to write, and I will continue to try and navigate this self-publishing thing because it is a thing I want to do for myself. The rest is up to the whimsy of the universe. Hopefully, it will be kind.
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