Divine Intervention

In late 2021, the world was desperately trying to put COVID behind them. My wife was back at work, my daughter in school. With the house to myself again, all calm and quiet, it was time to start a new project.

With every first draft since The Road Cain Walks, by the time I’ve finished one story, the next is waiting fully formed in the lobby of my brain. Unlike Shadow on the Sun, I’m not exactly sure how the next idea came to me, but I remember the persistent mental nagging that made it clear it was time to write it.

It’s an insanely marketable story that I’m not going to say much about, other than you won’t see it anytime soon (depending on when you’re reading this). I put a lot of good writing into the first section of it, a full third of it done before I set it on the shelf and told it “see you later.”

Why would I do that?

The Masochism of Querying

As I wrote Shadow on the Sun, I had that familiar feeling. I was a good writer about to hit a sure homerun. There isn’t another book like it, as far as I know, and I don’t mean that as a flex. In fact, I can’t say for certain whether or not that’s the problem. Sometimes different falls flat. The stars don’t align. You find the path closed in front of you and realize you’re lost in the woods.

I felt great writing that first section of the novel I set aside, but the process of finding an agent for Shadow on the Sun wasn’t going nearly as well. Granted, I didn’t go in blind. I knew there would be rejections—stacks of them, if they still came on actual paper. I was less prepared for the form letters.

Granted, I was aware of their existence. I just didn’t expect that to be the default…for me. I’ll never call myself or even believe I’m one of the best writers around. Now more than ever, I know the weak spots I need to work on. But I did believe I was good enough to warrant more personal responses. “Solid writing, but it’s not for me.” “Work on A and B, then resubmit.” “You should try [other agent’s name]. They would love this.”

There were dream agents I fantasized would reply within minutes, hungry to start reading. Others I’d settle for if I didn’t have another choice. I carpet-bombed everyone I found through QueryTracker. Nothing. Some never responded. Others sent form rejections that didn’t pretend to be anything more than a big red button labeled “NO!”

A handful tried to be helpful. The more personalized rejections said the query letter itself was great but that the sample chapter(s) progressed too slowly. As another writer on a critique-trading website once told me, “You write like Faulkner, but no one wants to read Faulkner anymore.”

I’d made a point in writing Shadow on the Sun to keep the word count as low as possible; after all, that was the prevailing issue with The Road Cain Walks. I aimed for 50,000 words and did it and then added an entire section of new chapters to the end when I received feedback that it was too short. Still, I got the same results from agents—generic responses or none at all.

Another familiar feeling started to creep in, fueled by exasperation and exhaustion. Whether or not anyone else believed in the book, I did. Maybe it was time to self-publish another one. I leaned closer and closer to the decision until something happened.

A Tap on the Shoulder

I’m going to preface the rest of this by saying that I am a Christian. Though my beliefs don’t exactly align with what that sterotypically means, I do believe in God and Jesus and all their angels. That makes me a writer who is Christian, but I’m not a Christian writer. My worldview is my worldview, which of course defines all artists’ work, but I’m not writing with an agenda other than to tell a compelling story.

Given that, I have my personal beliefs about what got me out of my rut. I’m sure you’ll have your own. If those don’t align, I’m cool with that and hope you are too.

A friend of mine invited me to church over the years, but I had given up on the organized aspects of my religion. To be specific, my exact condition for returning to church was that they shouldn’t have a building at all but met in a public park and any offering collected was delivered directly into the hands of someone who needed it. I’ve since come to the sad realization those don’t exist, but one invitation coincided with my daughter being friends with kids who also went to his church, so I finally said yes.

The sermon was about patience. If you’ve read this blog from the beginning, you may have already figured out my problem. Kudos if you did, but an outside view has the benefit of perspective. In the middle of it, I was floundering and about to shrug my shoulders and toss another book into the world, but the message I got was “wait.”

By the time the church service ended, I knew exactly what I needed to do. What I always needed to do. What I’d done once and somehow missed why. I blame part of that on how strenuous rewriting is, a reason most author’s get the drop sweats at the word. It took 11 years to rewrite The Road Cain Walks, and it drained me emotionally. I was on edge and moody all the time. Then there was the fact that the only reason I rewrote was to build a bridge to the planned fantasy novel. But the nail in the coffin was my 1.5 draft system, which created first drafts that felt polished and unique, right at the time the next idea gnawed at my skull.

A perfect storm, but then—Wait.

Maybe it was because I was finally still and quiet enough for my subconsious to work out the problem. Maybe the light bulb just went on at a convenient moment. Whatever you want to believe, the fact of it is that I walked out of that room with a blueprint for my writing process: a trinity of its own. Write, rewrite, revise. Plot level, scene level, sentence level. Get it down, get it right, get on with it.

I Want It All, and I Want It Now

Self-publishing itself isn’t always a result of impatience and desperation, though it does cater to it. Why take the time to make a story into its best self when you might be making money off of it right now? The market is flooded with examples, giving the option a stigma of bad writing when it used to be how all books came to market before capitalism invented publishing corporations. A complaint for another time.

For now, self-publishing is very much on the table for all of my work. Unless some publisher magically finds The Road Cain Walks or any of its eventual sequels, I’ll be publishing the series myself. I teeter back and forth on whether Shadow on the Sun will get another limited run through the gauntlet of literary agents and small publishing houses. The option I’m currently leaning toward is to commit to doing them all myself.

Yeah, I know.

Impatience isn’t the easiest bad habit to break, but I’m also getting older and have a lot of stories I want to tell before I’m done. Trimming the list down to the core novels still puts the number at 15. But I have a workflow and production queue. Marketing ideas and sales strategy. More important than any of that, I now have a process. For now, that’s enough.