Looking back on a decade of writing.

Yes, really. Plus a free story at the end.

I have been doing this for ten years. Not Substack, but the self-published author thing, sort of.

I published my first story in October 2020 (technically 47 stories), that being my 125,000 word Sci-Fi Comedy epic WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? which is still managing to get a few sales a month even if I turn the ads off (which I recommend doing if you write weird fiction, because they won’t get you anywhere). So technically I’ve only been self-pub since then, but the attitude started in June 2013, when I rocked up to this building to convince them to let me in. This building is called EDGE HILL UNIVERSITY, and it is very rarely illumed by daylight, as it’s in the UK. This photo is inaccurate.

You see, I didn’t have the grades to get into uni.

I could have been a physicist, or a marine biologist, or an archaeologist, but I very quickly began writing entire novels instead of sleeping, and playing poker in the lunch area instead of going to English class. Do I regret that? Sometimes, but not enough that it bothers me. I dropped performing arts because I found it creepy, I dropped geology because I felt I’d learned all I wanted to from it, and I dropped physics because it stopped being fun when I didn’t have my high school physics teacher, drawing stuff in the middle of experiments.

Under and over all of this, I was a writer. I already had been for a while.

I started writing when I was five years old. The first thing I wrote was a poem for my autistic brother, which I hoped might chill him out. It didn’t. I would then go on to design custom levels for Sonic The Hedgehog on various scraps of paper, until I discovered BIONICLE when I was 11 years old. Now, I could write an entire book about BIONICLE itself, and I am doing, so I won’t get into it here.

Basically, robots on an island fighting evil shadowy entities, big plot reveals, deep lore, multimedia campaigns including toys and books and movies and comics and clothing. The whole thing was magnificent, and it inspired me to write fan fiction. Then, when my worlds and characters didn’t fit the pre-existing Bionicle lore any more, I invented my own spaces for them.

The very first of these narrative spaces was my first novel. I wrote (and in fact printed) it when I was seventeen. This was back in 2009. I printed five copies in paperback form and gave two to friends. I still have the other three.

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A flash forward. I made some of my own BIONICLE sets in 2019, when the original creator of the Bionicle story, Chris Faber, followed me on my Lego instagram. And now, in 2023, I’m doing it again, and bringing out my own merch.

I designed this shirt. Not expecting anyone here to want one, but it’s part of the story I’m telling today.

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Anyway. I was asked by Edge Hill, upon seeing my dreadful UCAS score, to rock up and show them some writing I had done, to prove I wasn’t one of those many thousands of people who fancy themselves as a black and white poet in a black and white room clacking away at a typewriter as his waiflike waifu whittles away at her unfinished divorce application in the background, but who upon a small application of writerly pressure have a full on meltdown and get a bad haircut.

I took a paisley-print folder I got from a Wilko’s store (RIP) in Anglesey at some point in 2009, filled to the brim with concept art and deranged ramblings about alien religions, starship migration routes, time travel logic flowcharts, and that novel I mentioned, printed on A4 paper. The tutor who would assess this did not read any of it. Instead, they noted the size of the folder and my enthusiasm, evidenced by the fact I actually showed up. I had already written more than most.

I got in.

I would go on to become one of their more active students, founding and chairing the Writer’s and Poetics society (the uni’s only academic extracurricular society at the time), hosting workshops, visiting writers, and field trips. I doubled my poetry tutor’s audience once by bringing along my ‘ducklings’ (the students of the society) and I would become a short story judge in 2017 for the Edinburgh International Literature Festival, within which I would eat so much free food I am fairly confident the minibus taking us back to Liverpool drove there in increasingly smaller spirals.

I was also on Channel 4’s Lego Masters, but that’s a story for another time!

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But I didn’t enjoy writing all the time.

I started out enjoying it, and loved it. But going to uni had an odd effect on me. It wasn’t all late night Stephanie writing sessions to the tune of Gary Numan’s SPLINTER album (during which I wore a tophat, to summon the good thoughts), sometimes it was drudgery, and not the coursework. I enjoyed that part too.

It was an atmosphere… a miasma…

I learned a lot, and had a lot of fun, but parts of writing stopped appealing to me.

I recall reading a short story collection for class in late 2015, and it being so painful in its execution that I voluntarily stopped writing short stories myself, for fear that my readers might one day associate me with the type of writing in the book. One story ended with a character shapeshifting, and this was heavily foreshadowed on the first page, to the point where I don’t think calling it foreshadowing is appropriate. It was more like having the plot twist written on the side of a fish and having someone slap you with that fish as soon as you open the book. We were essentially told how the story would end at the start, which can work, but the other thirty-five pages of the story were too boring to trudge through for the inevitable reveal. I guessed the ending correctly and had to sit through the next half hour knowing it was coming.

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On top of this, there was at the time a heavy emphasis in the writing world on traditional publishing being the only way to show yourself as a legitimate writer. That is to say that Andy Weir’s success was not seen as a sign of quality, but of luck. Being picked up by a small press whose head office was the backseat of someone’s rust-holed Vauxhall Astra, on the other hand, was a sign of profound intellectual acheivement, a badge of honour that said MY ART IS GOOD. I AM GOOD AT THE ART, provided the guy driving the car had an Arts degree or went on holiday to France one time and went in a museum with a hangover.

This wasn’t a voice that originated in uni, but it was a voice that permeated a lot of extracurricular discussion, and that bled into the classroom. And it got to me. I decided to do one of my bigger presentations on the differences between trad-pub and self-pub, citing the good and bad from both. There was a lack of representation of self-pub work on campus in general, something which foreshadowed my later battles to get WBTH in bookstores, and I wondered why.

What made self-pub so controversial?

Why did people turn their nose up at it?

Why did bookstores reject self-pub authors?

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We don’t like to admit it, but there is some self-published work that was rushed onto shelves, and the rest of us (who put months or years into preparing something) have to suffer for that bad reputation. I recently had a conversation with a loan company that basically ended with them telling me self-pub authors are too high risk. We have a weird reputation.

The decision that defined my career

So yeah, some self-pub books aren’t good, but the same is true for trad-pub. I am sure many of you have read a novel that some newspaper or coffee chain described as;

“A BRAVE EXPLORATION OF POSTMODERN ATTITUDES TO PEELING AN ORANGE FOR EIGHT PAGES AND EATING A YOGHURT SLOWLY WHILST TALKING ABOUT GEOPOLITICS FOR A FURTHER FOURTEEN PAGES THEN ALLUDING TO THE WRITER’S RATHER LACKLUSTRE SEX LIFE THROUGH A COMPLEX METAPHOR IN AN ART GALLERY SCENE INVOLVING A STOLEN SAUSAGE WHICH INVOKES COLOURFUL IMAGERY ABOUT EVEN MORE FRUITS BEING PEELED AND DESCRIBED IN GRATUITOUS DETAIL OR SOMETHING.”

- Basil Horsestroke, The Weekly Headache

And you might, despite this write-up, pick up the book and read it. Perhaps you had a free hand that was getting a bit grabby, and you were at a train station and it was 50% off in the train station shop, and someone offered to buy it for you.

I’m not one to judge (I am, it’s my job).

And you read the thing and you thought ‘A whole team of people worked on this, why is it so riddled with errors and cardboard characters?’

So good and bad can be found in both. The question then becomes

Which works best for me?

And for many it is framed as an existential question. It is seen as a choice that, like eating the forbidden candy floss in your loft space, will affect the rest of your life. For me it was much more granular, which made it more simple.

Delicious lung-destroying glassflakes, now only £5.99.99.99

I would trad-pub Stephanie.

I would self-pub my dark comedy.

I would trad-pub poetry.

I would self-pub some other poetry.

I didn’t have to be all one or the other. It all worked out pretty simply. I kept writing, sent some things to TOR, Baen, and other sci-fi big boys. Didn’t hear anything back apart from one rejection from Clarkesworld for a poetry collection about an AI that fell in love with its creator.

Perhaps I was ahead of the curve. I submitted that one in 2017.

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I decided to be myself.

Self-pub was the only way I could do that truthfully.

It is the only place where, as a comedian, Lego artist, science fiction author, and poet, I can be me without having to sand my edges off. I have been told by several agents, from 2015 all the way up to 2023, that the industry is ‘risk-averse’, meaning they do not take kindly to interdisciplinary, weird, hybrid, experimental, or original storyelling. So it turns out…

The industry is boring on purpose

So I’ll make my own.

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So from 2013 to 2023 I’ve been writing around 500 words per day. Some of them got deleted, some of them got edited over, but I kept to it by having frequent breaks and dragging the average up by writing posts like this or pummeling through 4000 words in one manic evening.

I went self-pub with everything in the end because I wanted something that traditional publishing can never offer me.

Full creative freedom

I wrote, edited, formatted, designed the cover for, and marketed WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? all on my own. That means I made mistakes in the marketing, sure, but I learned from them. Halfplanet Press is stronger because I did not pay for a course to tell me how to publish a book, I went out and did it.

That was what I loved about Edge Hill, I could experiment and be myself.

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But it wasn’t all good.

One of my experiments happened in the middle of a lot of chaos.

For real-life reasons I won’t get into, I had a hard time in 2018 to 2020. I moved out of our family home overnight, fleeing a situation I thought might kill me if I stayed. I wrote all of WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? without a chair or desk, slept on a sofa at my mum’s place, and played the part of a bodyguard. I had a bed upstairs, but I placed myself close to the front door just in case.

I got a few venues lined up for a WBTH launch, who all backed out during Covid and who, upon reopening, didn’t want to speak to me.

I overbought paperbacks at ComicCon, leaving me with about 40 left over despite an amazing weekend of sales in July 2022.

I blew over $500 on Amazon ads, making $20 back.

I published WBTH through one platform, then moved to another, leaving behind a trail of SEO chaos and broken links that knackered my sales for about six months. Goodreads still refuses to update my cover even though the old one has been off the shelves for over a year… it’s a pain.

On top of that, I found out I might have PTSD and was told to take six months off from work. But my work is the writing, and I don’t know how to stop.

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Then the good stuff happened.

I discovered Substack and Bookfunnel. I stopped caring about how I looked on social media and focused on just practicing my comedy. I performed time travel stand-up at Bright Club and The Manchester Fringe. I became friends with some really good people in both the writing and comedy industries, and got invited to so many podcasts one month I had to say no to half of them because I was too busy.

And last week, on Saturday, I was interviewed for a big Lego related job.

Life is good again, and I am still self-pub. Because as hard as it is sometimes, the freedom is unmatched.

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And it gets weirder

Self-publishing is a lot of fun, but it is high risk. You don’t know if you’ll make any money from something, and often the public perception of money made is not accurate to the reality of things.

WBTH1 only happened because I raised $700 for it through Etsy, most of which immediately went on printing and posting the thing. I actually made a loss on individual units sold outside the UK because the postage costs were extreme.

But it wasn’t about turning a profit for me. The donations to it, the purchases of each and every signed copy, were a symbol. It showed me that people were out there who wanted to read my weird fiction.

Because it is weird, and that makes it harder to market.

It’s also what makes it fun to read.

I launched this on my 31st birthday. I’m planning to release it in 2024. I’m already 50,000 words through it so far. This, beside Stephanie and Earthloop, is my next big thing. I’ll do a longer post about it soon, but if you want to check it out and support it, I will be very grateful. It’s going to be hilarious, mind-bending, and somehow more genre-defining and weirder than the last.

I know some of you will leave if I ask for money, but unfortunately money is the energy I must exchange with the supermarket in order to buy food. I don’t have paid subscriptions here at the moment and food keeps me alive, and I can assure you I am a much better writer when I am alive.

I remember the last time I was dead. I got nothing done. Just floated there in the gunmetal room, circling, waiting for a body to inhabit, dancing around the whirring mechanisms and orange spheres that passed through from one cosmos to the next. I had no pen and no laptop and all my ideas were falling loose from my head, imprinting themselves into this reality, becoming this reality.

And I could write more weird stuff like that if people supported me to do so.

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The free story.

The free story today is THE CERTAIN UNIVERSE, by Phillip Carter.

If you’ve paid close attention, you might recognise that author’s name.

And you might recognise the story if you have WBTH.

This is a standalone story from the collection, one which I felt deserved its own life outside the book, just so more people can see it.

So please get it, rate it on Amazon, and review it if you have the time. It’s totally free, and it will train Amazon to show my books to more people!

And if the Amazon page isn’t free in the future (they control the pricing) then it will remain free everywhere else.

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This was a massive post

I want to thank you for supporting me. Some of you have only been here a few weeks, a handful of you have known me since 2020, and fewer still knew me at uni. I stayed weird, I refined it, and I’m still writing thanks to the support I get.

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