I got lost this year. Like, really lost. Existential unsettlement on an entirely new plane sort of thing. This didn’t feel like one of my run-of-the-mill, every other Tuesday crises (which do, unfortunately, exist). This was something else.
And I think, actually, that in retrospect I came closer to actually giving up on writing than I’d ever come in my life, which was a strange and unmooring place to be. I’ve pinned my life on this thing, on the love of it. Without it, who am I? What do I even… do?
It looks like I might not have to answer that question because I’m finding my way back, little by little, but in the rearview, maybe I can take a look at the things that brought me here.
- I learned a lot about marketing this year.
- I found some very helpful author mentors.
- Both of these things, in aggregate, kind of completely shattered my confidence in my own writing.
I learned about The Market. I learned that my writing is emphatically not to-market. My sales grew as a result of my efforts to clean up my passive marketing—my blurbs and covers and newsletter.
And all the time, I felt increasingly far away from my work. I felt more and more alienated. I started to wonder what the point was, on a wholly new and crushing level. Will no one buy my books? Am I, really, actually, doing it all wrong?
Here’s the thing: I’ve always known that the things I write aren’t, like… A+ super universally palatable. I draw a lot of inspiration from danmei and Asian BL. I’m fascinated by unusual POV and deconstructed language. I am, on some level, always here to break your heart and mine. On some level, my goal with every book is to slightly confuse people and show them a bad time (cathartic). That’s… not exactly bestseller material.
And yet I think I always hoped, or dreamed, or believed, that if I stayed the course, that maybe I’d Make It someday. And for the first time, I found myself surrounded by authors who had been doing it for far less time than I had, with much more success than I had, and they were writing to market, and I wasn’t.
Was I doomed to sit in the Amazon doldrums forever? Would I really never achieve success if I didn’t cut out the artsy crap and start writing what people* really wanted to read?
And like… maybe. Maybe all that is true! Maybe this venture really is, on some level, doomed to perpetual failure. But! We are the artists we are, and I actually cannot make any art other than the art I can make, and not for lack of trying. I can only tell the stories I can tell. I’m fundamentally uninterested in sanding off the rough and sore and painful edges in favor of something slightly more marketable; I’m not sure I’d be very good at it anyway.
Someone told me the other day that I write about loss and grief, and I think that’s true. I don’t know if anyone wants to read about loss, about the fragile things we hold in our hands. But, hey, if you do, then I’m here, and I’ve got some stories for you.
